Author: Alex Usher

Chile: A Decade of Gratuidad

Hi. I’m Alex Usher and the is the World of Higher Education podcast. One of the biggest events of the last two decades in global higher education was the wave of student protests that hit Chile in 2011 and lasted for well over a year. They were not the most coherent of protests: the range of issues being discussed included financing of higher education, its quality, its governance, its admissions systems: and of course mass protests inevitably brought out others with unrelated

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The Math at McGill

I’ve been asked a few times for more details on the funding effects of the CAQ’s policies on Quebec Anglo institutions.  Unfortunately, it’s a bit difficult to do because neither Bishop’s nor Concordia publish quite enough data to make it possible to do most of the relevant calculations.  As a result, what I will be doing today is to flesh out how I see all this playing out for McGill.  Some of it will apply at a high level to

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Reconstruction?

Something on a lot of people’s minds in higher education– at least, among the more internationally-minded types – is how higher education institutions in North America and Europe can contribute to the rebuilding of Ukrainian higher education.  North American responses to the Ukraine crisis have mostly about sheltering individuals and – in the short-term – providing access to higher education at concessionary rates.  But over in Europe, more attention is being paid to helping institutions survive and rebuild.  The European

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Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) — Selecting a Rector

Hi. I’m Alex Usher and this is the World of Higher Education podcast. Around the world, there are lots of different names of the people who run universities: Presidents, principals, vice-chancellors, rectors, etc. And there are also various ways of deciding who should get those jobs. Broadly speaking, there are two ways this gets done. In the first, either governments or lay Boards select people, hopefully based on merit. In the second, chief executive officers are elected by some kind

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Crowding Out

In previous blogs, I discussed how Canadian colleges and universities are generating bad vibes by exacerbating various housing crises.  This has been bad for pretty much the entire sector.  These strategies have contributed to the impression that the leaders of our post-secondary sector are putting their own institutional interests ahead of the communities they inhabit.  It’s not a good look, but for the moment, I think it is survivable from a credibility/responsible neighbour point of view, if only because federal

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