Category: Podcast

Selective Schools and Holistic Admissions

Hi Everyone. I’m Alex Usher and welcome to the World of Higher Education podcast. This is our first pod back from summer break. And although it’s back to school time for the entering class of 2023, it’s also when final year secondary school students in North America have to start thinking about the process of applying for fall 2024. Even though the next class is a year away, the recruitment, application and admissions cycle is already in high gear. In most of the

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Admissions, Affirmative Action, and SCOTUS

Later this month, the Supreme Court of the United States of America will be rendering a judgement that could upend the system of admissions at flagship and elite private universities. Back in January, the court heard arguments about cases involving Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, where race is used as one among many criteria for judging prospective students. Admissions has long been a faultline for racial politics in the United States. As Jerome Karabel noted in his

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Higher Education in Saudi Arabia

In most of the world, you can count on certain features being present in higher education systems: co-education by gender, educating your best students at home, institutions complaining about funding, students complaining about funding, but one country defies most of these expectations. In Saudi Arabia, students are still, for the most part, taught in gender segregated classes. Nearly all students receive free tuition and generous maintenance grants, and tens of thousands of top students leave the country every year at

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University Governance in Canada: Navigating Complexity

As the title of this podcast implies, this show is meant to cover as broad a swathe of higher education across the Globe. To make room for all that, we mostly stay away from Canadian topics (you get enough of that on the blog anyway). But today we’re going to change things up a bit in order to talk about one of my favorite books of 2022. Last fall, a quartet of Canadian higher education scholars – Julia Eastman, Olivier

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Performance-Based Funding in Europe

If you’re in North America, you know that one of the perennial debates in higher education finance is about the efficacy of performance-based funding, or PBF, with the bulk of the academic evidence suggesting in one way or another that such schemes do not achieve their purported aims. On this week’s episode of The World of Higher Education Podcast, Dr. Ben Jongbloed from the Centre for Higher Education Policy Studies – that’s CHEPS – at the University of Twente in

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