The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Author: Alex Usher

Study Gods and Losers

This week’s guest on the World of Higher Education Podcast is Yi-Lin Chiang, author of Study Gods: How the New Chinese Elite Prepare for Global Competition which was published in 2022 by Princeton University Press. It’s a really extraordinary work of ethnography, following a group of students from a pair of elite Beijing secondary schools as they make their way towards China’s extremely challenging Gaokao system and on to university in China and beyond.  I reviewed it a few months ago and I was

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March 23, 2023 1 Comment

House-Buying Power of Academic Salaries (2023 Edition)

About seven years ago, I wrote a blog looking at the house-buying power of academics in different parts of the country.   I thought maybe it was time to do this again. First, an overview of the methodology used six years ago.  I took median academic salaries for major universities in Canada for the most recent year available, which at the time was 2010-1. Then I gathered salary data for all ranked academics, including those who hold senior academic positions such

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March 21, 2023 No Comments

Letter from Japan

Morning all.  I’m in the midst of a couple of weeks in Japan (the sumo was fun, thanks, though the overall quality of the field is pretty weak since Hakuho retired and Terunofuji’s knees gave out) and though this trip has absolutely nothing to do with work, I have nevertheless had thoughts about the country and its higher education system. Here’s the thing about Japan: it used to be the future.  It’s not anymore.  Go back to the early 1990s

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March 20, 2023 No Comments

Changes to Canada’s Innovation Landscape

Yesterday, I described a variety of different type of innovation organizations around the world and suggested that part of the problem in Canada is that the federal government has difficulty understanding any kind of innovation agency whose mission is not “give out more gobs of cash”, because in today’s Ottawa it is expenditure which indicates virtue, not the outcomes of those expenditures. So, given that, how do we evaluate two significant recent changes to the innovation ecosystem in Canada? The

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March 15, 2023 No Comments

Can Canada Out-think the Underpants Gnomes?

I recently read a fascinating book called “How to Make an Entrepreneurial State: Why Innovation  Needs Bureaucracy “ by Rainer Kattel, Wolfgang Drechsler and Erkki Karo, all of whom are influenced by Marianna Mazucatto, whose work I have discussed here and here.  It’s fascinating for two reasons: first, that the book says next to nothing about how making the state more entrepreneurial or why innovation needs bureaucracy, but it is a very inclusive history of the types innovation policy structures

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March 14, 2023 No Comments

One Thought to Start Your Day

One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.

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