The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Now Reading

How to Write a Campus History

Among the many, many things I never thought I would do before getting into this line of work is reading a whole ton of campus histories.  Seriously, I will read almost anything like this.  It’s about the first thing I do when I get to a campus: head to the bookstore and try to find an institutional history.   And having thus become something of a connoisseur, I can give you an overview about the state of the art. Basically, there is a

Read More »
May 6, 2021 2 Comments

Amateur Hour

This week, in between negotiating computer crashes, dealing with angry university finance people and the usual grind, I managed to read a new book on the history of university teaching in the United States called The Amateur Hour by Jonathan Zimmerman.  It is pretty innovative in its way: there are histories of higher education in abundance, but most of them end up being histories of institutions (or institutional types), or sociological histories of the student body, or whatever: focussing on what was

Read More »
February 11, 2021 No Comments

Best Higher Ed Books of 2020

Around this time of year, I always do a “Higher Ed Books of the Year” (usual caveat: these are books I happened to read in a year, not books which appeared in a year, though obviously there is some overlap).  This year, I did a mid-year “Best Books” in June, so today’s post will focus on my reading over the last six months but end with a books of the year countdown including all twelve months.  (If you’re interested, I have my

Read More »
December 9, 2020 1 Comment

Studying Higher Education Decision-Making

One of the things that I find most interesting about higher education studies is how there are all these completely different regional/national literatures that pay almost no attention to one another.  For instance, in North America, higher education studies mostly come out of sociology and mostly deal with how institutions and institutional policies affect students.  In Latin America, there is a quite immense literature on things like pedagogy (seriously – go into any decent bookshop and there will be an

Read More »
November 26, 2020 1 Comment

Two Great Books on Admissions

An important shift during the last half-decade or so in US higher education is the serious consideration that increased selectivity at the top 5-10% of institutions may be doing real damage to the goal of social mobility.  It’s not just data nerds like Raj Chetty doing big data projects on outcomes: it’s becoming a topic of national conversation.  If you want to learn more about it in detail, you couldn’t do better than two new books: Jeff Selingo’s Who Gets in and

Read More »
September 17, 2020 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.

Subscribe

Search Posts

Search Publications

Social Media

Linkedin Youtube Spotify

Recent Posts

More thoughts on...