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Category: Funding and Finances

Follies of the Rich and Philanthropic

One of the irritating things about modern capitalism is the way media and the establishment see the need to treat rich people’s ideas seriously, even if the subject at hand is something they know literally nothing about. Take, for instance, a recent story in Businessweek about Chamath Palihapitiya. A former Facebook insider, he’s now a venture capitalist with an eye for social entrepreneurship. The story has him creating a company called Brilliant, a “global online talent registry” that plans to identify

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August 27, 2012 No Comments

Basic Research Turns 67

Here’s an interesting little nugget: “basic research,” like the atomic bomb, was born in July 1945. The term did not exist until coined by Vannevar Bush for his work Science: the Endless Frontier, a roadmap for post-war American science policy commissioned by President Roosevelt. Prior to WWII, no distinction was made between “basic” and “applied” science; although some sciences were obviously more theoretical than others, it was widely recognized that science was always “applied,” at least to some degree. After

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August 13, 2012 2 Comments

Europe’s Latent Strengths

I spent part of last week at the European University Association’s Funding Forum in Salzburg. Though it’s getting harder to see how you keep a European-wide conversation going when different countries are heading off in such different directions (small increases in funding in Germany and some Nordic countries, versus cuts of 35-45% in Ukraine and Greece), it was nevertheless a pleasant and productive event. My job there was to give delegates a bit of a pep talk about European higher

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June 19, 2012 3 Comments

Support Arts Faculties: Embrace Academic Profit Centres

Whenever someone at a university argues for the need to concentrate on boosting net revenues, you can pretty much count on large numbers of academic staff getting together to decry the move. They’ll brandish various Newman-esque (the Cardinal, not the Seinfeld character) arguments about how money corrupts the academy, how it betrays scholarship, etc., etc. And more often than not, the people brandishing these arguments will be from the Arts faculties. Outside observers usually assume that the Arts professors are

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June 5, 2012 No Comments

The Shape of Things to Come

Sit down before you look at this graph, which shows new investment in higher education in 2011. The data comes from our annual survey of 40 countries around the world which make up over 90% of all enrolments and scientific production. Change in Public Expenditures on Higher Education, 2011 The basic story here is this: in the OECD, we’ve finally hit what I call “Peak Higher Education”; the point beyond which we can no longer expect any increase in public

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May 8, 2012 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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