Category: Podcast

The Lost Potential of Institutional Research: Insights from ‘Outsourcing Student Success’

Inside every higher education institution lies a secret cabal of people — gurus really — who know everything about the institution and how it works. They’re called institutional researchers. And yet, despite all this specialized knowledge, the field (it’s not really a profession) is not usually at the heart of university decision making. Why is that exactly?  Today, my guest is Joseph Wycoff. He’s the author of ‘Outsourcing Student Success, the History of Institutional Research, and the Future of Higher

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The University Advisory Group: Reimagining New Zealand’s Higher Ed Future with Chris Whelan

We live in a time when governments seem to have few ideas about how to manage massified higher education systems. One playbook in this situation, often used in the UK and Australia, is to punt the question to a group of experts in hope that they might find some policies to make higher education more useful, productive, and, let’s face it, cheaper. Today we’re going to take you to Wellington, New Zealand, where the new government, led by the National

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Utopian Universities: A Global History of the New Campuses of the 1960 with Dr. Miles Taylor

There’s something distinctive about universities that were founded in the 1960s. Maybe it’s the brutalist architecture. Maybe it’s the wild, naive but hopeful sounding principles on which they were formed, but they seem very different. And even though decades later, their distinctiveness may have been worn down by the winds of isomorphism, there’s still something that  lingers and distinguishes them from both their older and younger neighbors. The phenomenon is perhaps most pronounced in England, where these universities were at

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Global Mega-Science: Universities, Research Collaboration, and Knowledge Production with David Baker

Science makes the world go around.  Even if the political world we inhabit is increasingly vibes-based rather than evidence-based, the physical world around us is becoming more driven by technology and science every day. Nowadays, science and universities are seen almost as two sides of the same coin. But it wasn’t always that way and there have been alternatives. Go back 250 years and it wasn’t at all clear that science and universities were meant for each other for laboratories were often

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Dutch Higher Education at a Crossroads: Coalition Politics and University Futures with Marijk van der Wende

A few months ago, there was an election in the Netherlands, one in which the most seats went to was the anti-immigration Party for Freedom, or PVV led by Geert Wilders.  After a few months of coalition negotiations between parties (something that is largely unknown in the anglosphere but is pretty common in Europe), a new governing majority was created that collectively agreed to a new set of priorities.  One of those priorities?  Cutting the living daylights out of funding

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