The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Podcast

Inside Italian Higher Education: Excellence, Affordability and Change

This podcast basically comes in three flavours. In one, we interview authors of new and interesting books. In the second, we talk about current events in one country or another. And in the third, we talk about specific countries’ higher education systems and what makes them interesting and/or distinctive. In the early days of the podcast, we used to do a lot more of number three, but we haven’t lately because, well, we managed to cover most of the world

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October 22, 2026 No Comments

New Zealand’s Higher Education Crossroads

As I think I’ve mentioned before, New Zealand has one of the most fascinating higher education policy scenes anywhere in the world. Hardly a year goes by where they aren’t making huge changes to research policy, tuition fees, student aid, or international student rules. Must be exhausting to live there. In any event, all this policy hyperactivity means this podcast often returns to New Zealand to see exactly what’s going on. And with the election coming up next month, we

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October 15, 2026 No Comments

The AfD and German Higher Education

In many ways, Germany seems like a higher education paradise. Sure, the funding might not be as generous as elsewhere and career progression can be problematic—but basically, academic freedom is highly prized, as are continental connections across Europe, and policymaking within the system is highly consensual. You can’t have everything, but that’s quite a lot. But as Germans are discovering, consensual decision-making only works if everyone agrees to the ground rules. And in recent years, a new political force has

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October 8, 2026 No Comments

Lords of Serendipity

As you might imagine, I am pretty fond of campus novels. A frequent weakness, however, is that the idealize the idea of a campus, or at least the of a particular type of campus, or at least of a particular types of program (English professors are hugely over-represented in campus novels and indeed among campus novel-ists). What you don’t often see is a campus novel that actually exhibits genuine skepticism about the enterprise itself. That’s not the case with Randy Boyagoda’s new

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October 1, 2026 No Comments

Responding to Online Entrance Exam Cheating at UNAM

Higher education dominated the front pages of Mexico’s media for most of this past summer. The reason? Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, the country’s largest, most prestigious, and selective institution, better known as UNAM, put its entrance exam online for the first time. 158,000 students took the exam, and the results, well, they weren’t good. As the exams were marked, it became evident that there were an unusual number of extremely high, near-perfect scores. Suspicions of cheating were naturally aroused.

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September 24, 2026 No Comments
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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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