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Category: Now Reading

Those Big, Bad, “American-style” Program Reviews

Hi everyone, and welcome back. The best education story of the winter break was almost certainly the Globe piece on program reviews at Canadian universities.  Despite an inane headline (when it comes to a policy’s unsuitability, nothing unites Canadian bien-pensants more than claims to an American origin), it’s an important piece about a useful process occurring at universities across Canada. HESA has directly contributed to two of these exercises (you can see some of our work, here), and with that experience I think

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January 7, 2013 No Comments

Baumol vs. Bowen

A fascinating paper came out recently on SSRN, which should be of interest to anyone concerned with the economics of higher education.  Its purpose was to answer a most interesting question: is cost-inflation in higher education driven by internal factors, or external ones? There are two leading theories about cost-inflation in higher education.  The first, proposed by William Baumol (whose new book I mentioned last week), argues that external factors are to blame.  Education, as a labour-intensive good, says Baumol, will always see

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December 18, 2012 No Comments

Christmas Books

Holiday time means that you’re probably looking for gifts.  If you’re in the market for books related to higher education, I’ve got two recommendations for you. The first is, The University: An Illustrated History.   It’s a coffee-table book, too unwieldy even for reading in bed, let alone on an airplane.  But who cares?  It’s as good a single-volume history of higher learning as has ever been written; it’s admirably global in scope, and it does a very nice job of balancing the institution’s

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December 14, 2012 No Comments

The Reading List: Three Thumbs Up and a Meh

It’s been awhile since I updated the reading list, so, without further ado: Science in the 20th Century and Beyond by Jon Agar. Less a history of scientific discovery as it is a history of contexts and manners in which science was practiced over the past century. In this interpretation, what gave American science the edge in the 20th century was less the massive inflow of talent from Europe than it was (a) the closer integration of scientists and engineers (the

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September 27, 2012 No Comments

Friday Round-up

Frequently, I’m asked how I manage to write these blog posts every day. Well, a lot of it is planning – if you use the summer months to build up a stock of articles, the day-to-day is less onerous. And then there are days like today, when I blatantly cheat on the format by ditching reasoned argument and just belch up of a bevy of hotlinks accompanied by vaguely pithy commentary. Reason Number One Why Universities Aren’t Rushing To Online. www.wetakeyourclass.com.

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September 21, 2012 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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