The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Podcast

Inside the Global Private Higher Education Sector with Dan Levy

If you spend any time around higher education in multiple countries, you’ll know two things. The first is that public higher education tends to look pretty similar from one country to another. And second, the status of private higher education varies enormously. How big the sector is, the ownership forms, the missions, the delivery modes, can all vary quite significantly. Private higher education occupies both the top and the bottom of the global prestige hierarchy. At the one end, you’ve

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November 13, 2025 No Comments

Does England’s Newest Higher Education White Paper Actually Change Anything?

Last year, the Labour Party in the United Kingdom faced a dilemma. They needed to get elected, and to do that, they needed people to vote for them. Nothing wrong with that, except in higher education the UK faces a dilemma. Everyone knows the system’s in shambles. Everyone knows it will require painful choices to fix. But nobody wants to pay for it. It’s hard to cut that kind of Gordian knot without annoying people, and that interfered with the

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November 6, 2025 No Comments

Inside the Gaokao: China’s Defining Test with Ruixue Jia

Every year, over 13 million students in China spend two full days taking the country’s university entrance exam, the Gaokao. It’s an event that most take years preparing for, starting in primary school, and the results determine not only where students will end up spending their university years, to a large extent it determines their entire life course. Today my guest is Dr. Ruixue Jia, a professor of economics at UC San Diego, whose co-author of a new book called The

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October 30, 2025 No Comments

Access and Aftermath: What Racial Quotas Changed in Brazil’s Universities with Luiz Augusto Campos

Brazil exited the age of slavery 135 years ago. It remains a multi-racial society today. But for much of the twentieth century, Brazil suffered an enormous bout of amnesia. From being one of the last societies on earth to give up slavery, it immediately began touting itself as a place where colour did not matter, that it was a post-racial society. But then about 30 years ago, things changed. Race — or more accurately race and inequality — became a much more prominent subject

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October 16, 2025 No Comments

Capitalizing on College: Mission, Money, and Survival in Higher Ed with Joshua Travis Brown

The economics of higher education are tricky.  It’s a labour-intensive industry, and generally speaking the cost of producing labour-intensive goods will always increase faster than the price of producing capital intensive goods, because the latter have more scope for increasing productivity. That’s not a problem if you are a public institution in a country with bottomless pockets, or if you are a prestigious private institution with almost unlimited ability to raise prices. If you’re among the other 99 percent of the

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October 9, 2025 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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