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Category: Institutions

Better Know a Higher Ed System – Malaysia

If you pay attention to internationalization in higher education, you’ve probably come across laudatory stuff about Malaysia, either as a source country for international students, or as a higher education hub.  But what you may not know is the extent to which Malaysian internationalization is a result of the country’s deep-seated racial divisions. Malays are the majority in the country, but there is a very large Chinese minority, and a smaller Tamil one.  Since independence, Malays have kept control of

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September 27, 2013 No Comments

Revisiting BS

Seems I hit a nerve last week when I wrote about Teaching v. Research. Between the emails and the twitter chat afterwards, I can safely say I’ve never received as much feedback on a piece as I did on that one.  As a result, I thought I should respond to a few of the key lines of discussion. Interestingly, few critics seemed to have picked up on the fact that I was attacking the hypocrisy and sanctimony around the teaching/research

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September 23, 2013 No Comments

Better Know a Higher Ed System: United Arab Emirates

SERIES INTRODUCTION: We too easily tend to think of other people’s education systems as being like our own, when often they are anything but.  Higher Ed is actually a big and pretty strange world and, starting today, I’ll be doing some thumbnails of some of the systems I know best.  First up, the UAE, where I’ve recently been doing some work on the funding formula for their universities. According to the UAE constitution, education is exclusively a federal responsibility.  There are

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September 20, 2013 No Comments

Cutting the BS on Teaching and Research

Sometimes people ask me: “what would I change in higher education, if I could”? My answer varies, but right now my fondest wish is for everyone to just cut the BS around the teaching/research balance. Whenever a debate on teaching and research starts, there’s always people who either intimate how “unfortunate” it is that we have to talk about trade-offs, or people who claim that any deviation from the current trade-off means the death of the academic.  But this is

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September 18, 2013 6 Comments

Why Public Higher Education Should be Free…

… is the unfortunate title of a new book by Robert Samuels, a professor at the University of California, and president of the University Council – American Federation of Teachers.  The title is unfortunate because the book’s not really about free tuition; the subject doesn’t really get a look-in until about three-quarters of the way through.  Rather, Samuels’ book is mostly about (as he puts it in the title of his first chapter) why tuition goes up and quality goes down. 

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September 17, 2013 No 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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