The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Universities

The Return of Bad Arguments for the Humanities

I see we’re back into tiresome public debates about the value of “Liberal Arts” and the “Humanities” (not synonyms, even though most people use the terms interchangeably).  The most recent example is this past weekend’s piece in the New York Times by historian Bret C. Devereaux entitled “Colleges Should be More than Just Vocational Schools” (where “college” is being used in the American sense of “undergraduate education”). Let’s ignore the headline, which the author doesn’t necessarily choose, and get to

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April 5, 2023 4 Comments

Micro-credentials: The Path of Least Resistance

Last month, Andreas Schleicher, the head of the OECD’s Education Directorate, gave a lecture to the Higher Education Policy Institute in London  and made a series of statements around micro-credentials which were both accurate and at the same time seriously naïve.  Basically, he accused universities of stifling microcredentials because for them, life was “actually very comfortable. You bundle content, delivery, accreditation – you can get a quite nice monopoly rent.” There was, he continued, little incentive for universities to change because

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April 4, 2023 3 Comments

Study Gods and Losers

This week’s guest on the World of Higher Education Podcast is Yi-Lin Chiang, author of Study Gods: How the New Chinese Elite Prepare for Global Competition which was published in 2022 by Princeton University Press. It’s a really extraordinary work of ethnography, following a group of students from a pair of elite Beijing secondary schools as they make their way towards China’s extremely challenging Gaokao system and on to university in China and beyond.  I reviewed it a few months ago and I was

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March 23, 2023 1 Comment

House-Buying Power of Academic Salaries (2023 Edition)

About seven years ago, I wrote a blog looking at the house-buying power of academics in different parts of the country.   I thought maybe it was time to do this again. First, an overview of the methodology used six years ago.  I took median academic salaries for major universities in Canada for the most recent year available, which at the time was 2010-1. Then I gathered salary data for all ranked academics, including those who hold senior academic positions such

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March 21, 2023 No Comments

Letter from Japan

Morning all.  I’m in the midst of a couple of weeks in Japan (the sumo was fun, thanks, though the overall quality of the field is pretty weak since Hakuho retired and Terunofuji’s knees gave out) and though this trip has absolutely nothing to do with work, I have nevertheless had thoughts about the country and its higher education system. Here’s the thing about Japan: it used to be the future.  It’s not anymore.  Go back to the early 1990s

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March 20, 2023 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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