Category: Now Reading

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

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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

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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

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The Good, the Bad, and the Meh

Among the many articles related to education which have appeared over the past few weeks are three which I think deserve highlighting:  Mike Moffat & John McNally’s very good Making a Green Recovery Inclusive for All Canadians, Irvin Studin’s unfathomably terrible Canada Needs a Temporary Minister of Education and the needs-some-work “Leveraging the value of Canadian universities is key to our economic rebuild” by John Stackhouse and Andrew Schrumm. Let’s start with the Moffatt/McNally piece, which in truth is only tangentially related to post-secondary education.

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The Winter/Spring 2020 Reading List

All right, it’s nearly summer and even if going to the beach seems like a forlorn hope this year, I know you are all desperate for my higher education book picks.  So, here goes. Among the 35 higher education books I have read so far this year, there are a lot to forget.  I bought a ton of higher education books from Palgrave in December when they were running a ludicrous 90% off sale, and…let’s just say that a lot

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