Category: Blogs

Illiberal Universities

One of the most interesting stories in global higher education over the past couple of years has been the creeping government takeover of higher education in Hungary. The most famous example of this was the government expelling the George Soros-funded Central European University, which subsequently took up residence in Austria. Less well-known perhaps is the process of severing public universities from the state and creating Foundation universities. For the most part this meant giving institutions North American-style managerial and financial

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2 Topics, 1 Episode: Germany Higher Education and U-Multirank

A bit of a change this week. Our scheduled episode with Dr. Andrea Peto and Dr. Jo-Anne Dillabough about illiberal universities has been moved to next week. This week, instead, we’re trying a little experiment: talking to my colleague, Dr. Gero Federkeil, who is head of international projects at the Centrum für Hochschulentwicklung, or Center for Higher Education, in Gütersloh, Germany, about two totally unrelated topics. The first has to do with the changing profile of university enrolments in Germany,

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Korean Higher Education

When it comes to higher education systems, few countries can match South Korea for its sheer dynamism. From its explosive growth to meet “Education Fever” in the 1980s and 1990s, to its astonishing run-up in research output in the 90s and 2000s, to its policy innovations like the self-study degree and the Academic Credit Bank, it’s always been a system to watch. However, as Korea got rich, it also began to shrink. The birthrate fell precipitously to the point where

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European Universities Association

When you think about big, visionary ideas in higher education, an abnormal number of them over the past few decades have comes from Europe. The Erasmus Program. The Bologna Process. Diploma Supplements. An effort-based credit system. Tuning. Challenge-based research competitions. European University Alliances. European Degrees. And while these ideas have many sources, an abnormally high proportion of them comes from one place: the City of Brussels and the supra-national European Commission which resides there.  At a certain level, this is

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Higher Education in China

One of the things we try to do on this show is introduce people to various higher education systems around the world and the various histories that shaped those systems. In doing so we have had some marvellous discussions: with Dr. Pushkar on India, Andrée Sursock on France, Marcelo Knobel in Brazil and Maria Yudkevich in Russia. But one major system we haven’t done yet is China. China is a hard country to a handle on. It’s massive, obviously. And its post-secondary education system

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