The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Author: Alex Usher

Access Gaps in Low- and Middle-Income Countries

Morning all. Today is Thursday and hence podcast day. Today’s guest is my friend Jamil Salmi, former tertiary education co-ordinator with the World Bank, Global higher education consultant and all-around mensch. Back in the mid-to-late 2000s, Jamil was perhaps the world-expert on the phenomenon of World-Class universities and his recipe for creating them — money plus talent plus good governance, and let stir for a few decades — has certainly stood the test of time. But lately, Jamil’s work has taken a different

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February 23, 2023 1 Comment

The Brampton Charter

I sometimes get accused of being more pre-occupied with the faults in higher education than the successes.  And that’s natural, I suppose: while HESA (it’s not just me folks, there’s fifteen of us here) tends to position itself as a “critical friend” to higher education, writing a blog about the subject sometimes ends up looking like a journalistic approach to the subject, i.e. going from one disaster to another.  So instead, let me tell you about an interesting experiment happening

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February 22, 2023 No Comments

Plus ça change

I was recently reading this great book of essays edited by Philip Altbach (if you are studying higher education and have never read Altbach, you are should immediately read everything by Altbach) entitled University Reform.  It’s a great read, in particular the introduction, which lists the nine challenges facing higher education systems around the world.  They are: Some of these nine challenges overlap a bit (for instance, “relevance” and “the changing role”) and others are linked closely (growing enrolments, financial

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February 21, 2023 No Comments

American Higher Education in 2023

This week my guest on the podcast is Chris Marsicano, a professor of Educational Studies at Davidson College in North Carolina. We discuss what’s ahead for higher education in the United States in 2023. It’s easy enough to shrug in despair at the United States and higher education these days.  The country barely got out of the Trump years with democracy intact, and since then higher education – which for decades mostly maintained strong bipartisan support – has become a

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February 16, 2023 No Comments

Improving Quality Without Increasing Professional Workloads

Yesterday, I spoke about the desirability of changing the nature of academic work – specifically, dividing the assessment part of the job from the instructional part by creating a group of employees that focus on assessment – to use resources more efficiently.  Today, I want to talk about how to further tweak the academic job description and deploy academic resources to significantly improve the student learning environment, without (hopefully) increasing the burden on professors. The over-riding goal is to make

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February 15, 2023 3 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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