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Category: Worldwide PSE

An Update on England’s Teaching Excellence Framework

Last week, the UK Minister for Business Innovation and Skills (which is responsible for higher education) released a green paper on higher ed.  It covered a lot of ground, most of which need not detain us here; I think I have a reasonable grasp of my readers’ interests, and my guess is that the number of you who have serious views about whether the Office For Fair Access should be merged into a new Office for Students, along with the

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November 10, 2015 2 Comments

World-Class Universities in the Great Recession: Who’s Winning the Funding Game?

Governments always face a choice between access and excellence: does it make more sense to focus resources on a few institutions in order to make them more “world-class”, or does it make sense to build capacity more widely and increase access?  During hard times, these choices become more acute.  In the US, for instance, the 1970s were a time when persistent federal budget deficits as a result of the Vietnam War, combined with a period of slow growth, caused higher

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November 5, 2015 No Comments

Amusing Footnotes on Global Academic Pay

A few months back, I finished reading The Global Future of Higher Education and the Academic Profession: The BRICs and the United States (edited by – among others – Phil Altbach and Liz Reisberg). It’s a good book for two reasons: first, it contains pretty good thumbnail sketches of the four BRIC countries’ higher ed systems, and second, it shows how crazy and fragile academics lives are in most of the world. (An aside here: one thing I really like about this book is

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October 22, 2015 No Comments

Better Know a Higher Ed System: Brazil

Brazil is the smallest and probably the least-known of the BRICs.  It doesn’t have a big economy or a big diaspora like China or India, and it isn’t a former superpower like Russia.  But it is still the second-largest country in the Americas, and with more Brazilian students heading abroad, it’s a country well-worth knowing more about.  So here goes: First, it’s a pretty young system.  The first functioning university – Universidade de Sao Paolo (USP) – was founded in 1934 (prior

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October 2, 2015 No Comments

Fields of Study: Some International Comparisons

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: “We really need to have more STEM grads in this country.  Really, we ought to be more like Germany or Japan – fewer of these ridiculous philosophy degrees, and more of those lovely, lovely engineers and scientists.” Personally, I’ve heard this one too many times.  So, just for yuks, I decided to take a look at the distribution of degrees awarded by field of study across the G7 countries, plus (since I’m

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September 30, 2015 4 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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