Author: Alex Usher

The World’s Rising Scientific Research Nations

I was sitting at home this weekend, reading the UNESCO World Science Report (2021), as one does, when I started poking around with the actual bibliometric numbers.  And damned if there weren’t some big surprises in there.  First: what is the UNESCO World Science Report?  Well, it’s a pretty interesting document which has appeared periodically since 1993.  Over time, the document has become longer and more complicated.  And for the last few editions, it has produced some statistical annexes examining

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Ontario Colleges. Again.

Hi all.  Just a short note before getting into this blog post that we at HESA Towers are trying something a bit new.  On Thursday, we are hosting an online meeting for everyone across the country who is interested in institutional policies on teaching and learning with respect to AI programs based on Large Language Models.  Want to know how many institutions are seeing the issue mainly as a plagiarism problem and how many are seeing it as an opportunity

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Nigerian Higher Education

On today’s episode of the World of Higher Education podcast, we’re talking about Nigerian higher education. Economically and politically, Nigeria is one of Africa’s powerhouses. Yet, when it comes to higher education, it trails significantly. To help us understand why that’s the case, Dr. Olabisi Deji-Folutile joins us. Dr. Deji-Folutile is editor-in-chief of Frank Talk Now and chief operating officer of AF24 News, who writes frequently on higher education matters from Lagos. Many of the Nigerian system woes are economic

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The Political Argument for Higher Education

Let me start with three comments/conversations I’ve seen and had in the past little while. Those are all interesting observations on their own but let’s think about the implications of the three comments together.  In other words, institutions have two choices.  First, they can wait for brief moments when the political system allows politicians to ignore the short-term interests of donors and hit them hard.  Or, second, they can exert themselves to try to make institutions like universities and colleges

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The Bill is Coming Due

Though there are ups and downs and local variations, over the past decade, three factors characterize the finances of the Canadian higher education sector. That’s it, that’s the whole story.    It’s a classic triangle: if one side increases in length and another one does not move, the entirety of the accommodation lies on the third side of the triangle. Now, to be fair, at the system-level this dynamic seems to work.  On average, the system is chugging along reasonably, with

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