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Category: Now Reading

The End of College? (Part 1)

Over the next couple of days, I want to talk a bit about a new book called The End of College, written by the New America Foundation’s Kevin Carey.  It’s an important book not just because it’s been excerpted repeatedly in some major publications, or because the conclusions are correct (in my view: they’re not), but because it has an unerringly precise diagnosis of how higher education came to its present malaise, and the nature of the economic and institutional reasons that

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March 11, 2015 1 Comment

Summer Reading

Hi all.  Enjoying summer yet? Three recent works that I think are worth a peak at over the summer: 1.       George Fallis’ Rethinking Higher Education: Participation, Research and Differentiation.  The thing you need to know about George Fallis is that the size of the books he writes are all out of proportion to the point he is trying to make.  They’re good books, substantial books, useful books, but the actual point he makes could probably be made in an article of 15

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June 16, 2014 No Comments

Institutional Strategies: Simulacra or Reinvention?

I recently had the chance to read a re-issue of Simon Marginson and Mark Considine’s, The Enterprise University: Power Governance and Reinvention in Australia.  It’s a heck of a good read; among those currently writing about higher education, Marginson’s probably got the best turn of phrase around.  Some of it – around managerialism and the role of research expenditure in cementing it – seems a bit dated now, in the sense that no one would any longer find it surprising.  And the

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June 4, 2014 6 Comments

STEM, Shortages, and the Truth About Doctoral Education

Harvard’s Michael S. Teitelbaum came out with an interesting new book last month called, Falling Behind? Boom, Bust and the Global Race for Scientific Talent.  Though it’s a very US- focused book, it’s worth a read as a corrective to the occasional hysterics that people have in Canada about our alleged STEM crisis. The book starts with a wonderful chapter called “No Shortage of Shortages”, which suggests that the current STEM-shortage panic is the sixth in the US since Sputnik.  He

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June 3, 2014 1 Comment

Valuing Foreign Degrees

There was an interesting Statscan paper out yesterday that made some fascinating observations about education, immigration, and human capital.  With the totally hip title, The Human Capital Model of Selection and the Economic Outcomes of Immigrants (authors: Picot, Hou and Qiu), it’s a good example both of what Statscan-type analyses do well, and do poorly. At one level, it’s a very good study.  It uses the Longitudinal Administrative Databank (Statscan’s coolest database – it’s a longitudinal 20% sample of all of the

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May 30, 2014 3 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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