Category: Blogs

Hi everyone. I’m Alex Usher and this is The World of Higher Education Podcast When we started this podcast about thirteen months ago, our very first episode was about Australia and what was known as the “Universities Accord”. The Accord wasn’t actually a deal as the name implies: it was essentially a kind of expert-led panel designed to consult widely and deliver a blueprint for Australian higher education for the next quarter-century. It was meant to cover everything: access and attainment,

Higher education systems around the world usually share one thing in common: path-dependency. Once a country’s higher education system finds a groove, it tends to stay there barring any major cataclysm. There’s one exception, though, and it’s a pretty big one: Russia. Over the past century and a bit, Russian universities have gone through a series of convulsions. Starting out as a network of mainly German-style elite universities prior to the first world war, the system was Sovietized and massified