Category: Blogs

Hello. I’m Alex Usher and this is the World of Higher Education podcast. Brazil’s higher education system is a lot like the country itself. Big. Complicated. Riddled with inequality. And above all – still growing fast. In some ways it’s a fun-house mirror of the American system. It’s highly stratified, but the prestigious institutions for the most part are public and free rather than private and expensive. There’s a huge chunk of the system which is access-driven, but it is

Hi everyone. I’m Alex Usher and this is The World of Higher Education podcast. It’s something of a cliché to think of India as a “sleeping giant” when it comes to higher education. But in some ways the term fits. India is capable of truly impressive feats of applied science and Engineering – last month’s Chandrayaan-3 moon landing, put together by the Indian Space Research Organization on an absolute pittance is perhaps the example that comes to mind most readily.

Hello everyone. I’m Alex Usher and this is the World of Higher Education Podcast. One of the hardest things in comparative international higher education studies is getting a sense of how other countries’ systems actually work. If you look at statistical compendiums – say, OECD’s Education at a Glance – there is a tendency to imagine all systems as identical because they all in one way or another push out a similar palette of outputs: bachelor’s degrees, master’s degrees, doctorates,