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Category: Funding and Finances

Last Orders on Neoliberalism in Universities (Neoliberalism Part 5)

To sum up the week’s arguments: Neoliberalism is about markets.  There are actually very few genuine markets in higher education and where there are they can be quite beneficial especially with respect to access. Neoliberalism is about competition.  There is competition in higher education, especially status competition but it mostly predates actual neoliberalism. Some people claim neoliberalism is about managerialism and performance metrics but this is a genuinely terrible and ahistorical argument. However, I think there are two additional arguments

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November 24, 2017 No Comments

Universities and the Market (Neoliberalism Part 2)

Yesterday I talked about how the notion of neo-liberal universities was based on four concepts: greater use of market mechanisms, increased use of competitions, the role of performance data and, more broadly, the question of institutional management.  Today I’m going to look at the first and maybe more important of those issues: are universities subject to greater market mechanisms now than they were before?  Are there universities in other parts of the world which are not subject to the same

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November 21, 2017 3 Comments

The Talent Angle

The post-Naylor Report effort to get big new investments in fundamental science is in trouble.  Bluntly, the Finance Department appears not to be buying the argument that fundamental research is, in fact, a good investment.  I’m not 100% surprised: the Naylor mostly tended to assume the wider benefits of research to economic growth rather than demonstrate or prove it, and the big U-15 institutions have banked everything on a rhetorical strategy of: money for research –> a miracle occurs –>

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November 14, 2017 5 Comments

The Finances of World Class Universities (Part 4)

Over the past few days, I’ve been providing a lot of data on how well global “world-class universities” are faring (briefly: most of them are doing pretty well, the ones in Canada much less so).  But to some degree the real question is: does any of this matter?  Do higher expenditures per student actually result in greater academic output?  And if not, why not? To answer this question requires a quick detour into the issue of bibliometrics.  If you try

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November 10, 2017 No Comments

The Finances of World Class Universities (part 3)

One of the knocks against the whole idea of “world-class universities” is that it tends to reinforce institutional privilege; that it’s mostly about big universities with big reputations aiming to expand their financial advantage over everyone else.  Without speaking to motive, it is possible to use the financial data I’ve been writing about these last couple of days to examine empirically whether it is true the top dogs are gaining on everyone else or not.  And what the data tell us

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November 9, 2017 3 Comments

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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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