The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Podcast

Inside the Gaokao: China’s Defining Test with Ruixue Jia

Every year, over 13 million students in China spend two full days taking the country’s university entrance exam, the Gaokao. It’s an event that most take years preparing for, starting in primary school, and the results determine not only where students will end up spending their university years, to a large extent it determines their entire life course. Today my guest is Dr. Ruixue Jia, a professor of economics at UC San Diego, whose co-author of a new book called The

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October 30, 2025 No Comments

Access and Aftermath: What Racial Quotas Changed in Brazil’s Universities with Luiz Augusto Campos

Brazil exited the age of slavery 135 years ago. It remains a multi-racial society today. But for much of the twentieth century, Brazil suffered an enormous bout of amnesia. From being one of the last societies on earth to give up slavery, it immediately began touting itself as a place where colour did not matter, that it was a post-racial society. But then about 30 years ago, things changed. Race — or more accurately race and inequality — became a much more prominent subject

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October 16, 2025 No Comments

Capitalizing on College: Mission, Money, and Survival in Higher Ed with Joshua Travis Brown

The economics of higher education are tricky.  It’s a labour-intensive industry, and generally speaking the cost of producing labour-intensive goods will always increase faster than the price of producing capital intensive goods, because the latter have more scope for increasing productivity. That’s not a problem if you are a public institution in a country with bottomless pockets, or if you are a prestigious private institution with almost unlimited ability to raise prices. If you’re among the other 99 percent of the

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October 9, 2025 No Comments

Undoing Bologna: Russia’s Conservative Turn in Higher Education with Dmitry Dubrovsky

One of the consequences of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has been a vast reconfiguring of Russia’s academic and intellectual life. Universities, thought of as a potential hotbed of opposition since the White Ribbon movement of 2011, came under intense control and its personnel placed under even greater scrutiny. Many faculty fled. Connections with international partners in the West were severed. And then to top it off, the Russian government announced that it would abandon the three degree bachelor’s, master’s

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October 2, 2025 No Comments

The Widening Gap: Income, College, and Opportunity with Zachary Bleemer

One of the great promises of higher education is that it acts as a social ladder—one that allows students from low-income backgrounds to climb up and reach a higher social and economic status. No one, I think, ever believed it was a guaranteed social leveler, or that children from wealthier families didn’t have an easier time succeeding after college because of their own, and their family’s, social and cultural capital. But most people, in America at least, believed that on

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September 25, 2025 No Comments

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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