Category: Podcast

Hello everyone. I’m Alex Usher and this is the World of Higher Education Podcast. One of the hardest things in comparative international higher education studies is getting a sense of how other countries’ systems actually work. If you look at statistical compendiums – say, OECD’s Education at a Glance – there is a tendency to imagine all systems as identical because they all in one way or another push out a similar palette of outputs: bachelor’s degrees, master’s degrees, doctorates,

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

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