Category: Podcast

Where Canada lies in Global Trends with Alex Usher

Happy New Year and Welcome back to the World of Higher Education Podcast! I’m Tiffany MacLennan, your host for the day which means our guest is the one and only, Alex Usher. In this episode, we’ll explore key global trends in higher education and then dive into how Canada fits—or doesn’t—within them. From widespread funding challenges to the politicization of universities and the evolving focus on vocational education, we’ll unpack how these issues play out on a global scale and what

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Top 10 U.S. Higher Ed Stories of 2024 with Robert Kelchen

Robert Kelchen is a prolific higher education researcher and also the head of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville’s Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies. He is also a pretty steady blogger on higher education, but he doesn’t have the time to post quite as much as he did before he took on all those extra admin duties. One of the casualties of his reduced blogging schedule is that he no longer posts his regular “top ten” stories of the year in US

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Skilled for the Future: How China is Transforming Vocational Education with Gerard Postiglione

If there’s one thing we know for sure about Confucian societies, it’s the value they place on scholarship.  Being a student doesn’t just connote future financial success; the very act of studying itself carries an important element of moral virtue.  It’s one of the things that has driven university participation rates to extraordinarily high levels in East Asia, and also among diaspora populations in countries around the world.  Here in Canada, 25 years ago, Statistics Canada polled parents across Canada

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From 36,000 to 12,000: Tracking the Decline in EU Students Post-Brexit with Paul Wakeling

Eight and a half years ago, the people of the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union.  Among many, many other consequences, that meant the UK voted to change the status of tens of thousands of European students from “domestic” to “international” students, with all the financial disadvantages that entailed. You see, within the European Union all students, regardless of where they are from are considered “domestic”, and must be treated no differently that students from the country.  In

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Unrest and Reform: Bangladesh’s Youth Movement and Higher Education with Sharowat Shamin

In our terminally postmodern world, it’s easy to discount student political movements. It has after all been decades since they were a major political factor in most Western countries. To the extent that we’ve seen them provoke major disruptions in recent decades, it’s tended to be in the service of rather narrow and self interested issues like tuition fees, as in South Africa in 2015 and 2016 and Quebec in 2011 and 2012. And yet we do know that in

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