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Merit

Universities are among the most elitist institutions in society.  I won’t say they are unabashed by this role: in fact, I’d say they are plenty bashful.  Certainly, there are many people who wish to be as democratic as possible about letting people enter higher education (though this commitment often drops as the institution becomes more elite and prestigious) but a major part of higher education’s purpose is to winnow; to separate the brightest from the merely bright and shuffle them

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March 25, 2020 3 Comments

Silliness About Asian Higher Education

For the last decade or so, “the rise of Asia” has been a common refrain.  It alludes to the region’s economic rise (which is undeniable) but then goes on to equate the region’s higher education offerings with this economic rise, usually in a way that poses a threat to “western” higher education.  The most recent example came in this week’s edition of University World News and an op-ed entitled Will the 2020s See Asia Pull Ahead in Higher Education? As these

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January 21, 2020 3 Comments

The Higher Ed Reading List

It’s the next-to-last blog of the year, and so as usual it’s time to review the various higher ed-related books I have read over the course of 2019, just in case some of you are dying to spend the holidays boning up on higher ed history/policy.  I will spare you a potted description of all the 40-odd books, and just stick to the highlights. (For all you weirdos who for some strange reason prefer to read something other than higher education stuff over the

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December 12, 2019 1 Comment

The Making of the Modern University

I have spent a godawful amount of time on planes this week, going to Malawi and back for a meeting concerning the African Centres of Excellence project.  It’s given me a lot of time to catch up on reading (two recommendations for African fiction: The Grub Hunter by Amir Tag Elser is good, but Woman of the Ashes by Mia Couto is great).  But one book in particular I thought I should mention to y’all is The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the

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November 22, 2019 1 Comment

The Canadian Intangibles Agenda

A few months ago, the Public Policy Forum released an intriguing paper by Robert Asselin and Sean Speer called A New North Star: Canadian Competitiveness in an Intangibles Economy.  For various reasons, I never quite got round to reviewing it at the time, but it’s worth examining because once we get over superclusters (please, let’s all get over superclusters), the country is going to be looking for some new organizing framework for innovation and growth policy. I suspect that this “intangibles”

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November 12, 2019 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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