Category: Data

How Europe Measures Equity in Admissions

When doing international comparative work in higher education, you’ll realise that the difficulty in comparing systems goes far beyond differences in system architecture and inconsistencies in data.  It’s more that there are genuine differences in how some issues are framed.  Take for instance, the issue of equity in admissions.  In North America, great positivists that we are, we would measure equity in admissions.  Report on them.  Try to improve on them.  We can see this in the United States all

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World Higher Education: Institutions, Students and Funding

Good morning, all.  Today – FINALLY – marks the release of World Higher Education: Institutions, Students, Funding, which I have been co-authoring with HESA’s Jonathan Williams for the better part of three years now (Jonathan did most of the heavy lifting).  You can find the full report, as well as national profiles for each of the 56 countries included in the analysis, right here.  If you are a regular reader, you know a lot of the narratives.  In previous blog

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Higher Education Institutions Worldwide

By Alex Usher and Jonathan Williams There are lots of estimates of higher education students around the world, which vary based on whether they include students in more vocational programs (the global total is somewhere in the high 200 millions if you do, and low 200 millions if you don’t).  But one thing you won’t see very often is an estimate of the number of higher education institutions.  And the reason for that is that pretty simple: big international data

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The Rise – and dilemma – of the Global South.

You may all have seen the recent University World News article about HESA’s big new publication, World Higher Education: Institutions, Students, and Funding (written by Jonathan Williams and myself), which is actually going live on March 31st.  For the next few weeks, you’ll be getting some deep dives into the biggest stories that our data has thrown up.  And today I want to talk about the biggest story of them all: the rise of the Global South. (Small methodological note:

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The Twelve Student Aid Programs That Matter

One of the challenges of trying to do large-scale global comparative higher education work is focusing.  It’s a big world out there – and there are so many interesting variations and models that you just want to get your hands on everything.  But at some point, you must choose a few things in order to make sense of the bigger patterns. So it is with student financial assistance.  There are aid programs in a lot of countries, many with some

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