The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Institutions

The Decline of the Master’s Degree

The Master’s degree has a long and complicated history – one that looks very different depending on the part of the world you are from. Briefly: it is either a traditional first degree (e.g. central Europe), a traditional second degree (e.g. here in Canada), a traditional booby-prize for not getting a doctorate (still in some places in the US) or, weirdly, something after a BA, a waiting period of a few years, and the payment of a small fee.  It is

Read More »
January 11, 2021 2 Comments

What’s in a Name?

When he was about ten, Cost Centre #1 (the boy, not the girl) started getting interested in US college football.  It occurred to him that maybe he and I had some “common ground”, since I was working a fair bit on rankings at the time.  Every Saturday morning, whenever the chyron threw up a new matchup, he’d yell “hey dad: Mississippi State, is that a good school?”  “hey, dad, what about Auburn?”, etc.  He had little interest in my explanations

Read More »
January 7, 2021 3 Comments

The Future of Internationalization

Last week, I was part of a very interesting webinar put on by ICEF involving myself, Allan Goodman of the Institute of International Education (IIE), and the ex-head of Universities UK, Vivienne Stern. The webinar covered the future of higher education internationalization.  I am not quite sure when it will be posted, but prepping for it made me think about a few of the big new directions in which internationalization is heading. I spoke to three specific trends that may dominate

Read More »
December 7, 2020 No Comments

2018/19 Enrolment Data

Last Thursday was that frabjous day which every higher education nerd has pencilled into their calendar: where Statscan publishes post-secondary enrolment data and for one brief moment we go from having enrolment data which is 37 months out of date to a mere 25 months out of date.  Now, the big picture will be familiar to everyone who read The State of Post-Secondary Education in Canada, because I already went and got most of this data from institutional websites, but the

Read More »
December 1, 2020 1 Comment

Assessment and Accountability in the Network Era

Just a brief thought today on how the increasing interconnectedness of research efforts is making evaluation of institutional outputs harder. One of the things about academia that governments have a hard time conceptualizing is that “universities,” as a singular entity, are to some extent a fiction.  Governments treat them as discrete entities that have some agency of their own.  What is never very well understood is the extent to which university agency is restricted by the professional norms of its

Read More »
November 25, 2020 1 Comment

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.

Subscribe

Search Posts

Search Publications

Social Media

Linkedin Youtube Spotify

Recent Posts

More thoughts on...