The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Worldwide PSE

Who Wins and Who Loses in the “Top 100 Under 50” Rankings

The annual Times Higher Education “Top 100 Under 50” universities came out a few weeks ago.  Australians were crowing about their success, and a few people in Canada noticed that Canada didn’t do so well – only four spots: Calgary 22nd, Simon Fraser 27th, UQAM 85th, and Concordia 96th.   So, today, we ask the question: why do young Canadian universities not fare well on these rankings? Well, one way to look at this is to ask: “who does well at these rankings?”

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May 20, 2015 1 Comment

Trust, Transparency, and Need-Based Aid

If you look around the world at the kinds of subsidies made available to students, you’ll be struck by the fact that there are two very large chunks of the world where need-based aid isn’t the dominant form: post-Socialist Europe and Africa.  The reasons for this boil down to a simple issue: trust. In the post-socialist countries, the preference for merit-based aid over need-based aid is a relatively recent affair.  Prior to 1990, access to university was restricted both in

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April 28, 2015 No Comments

Better Know a Higher Ed System: South Africa (Part 2)

A couple of weeks ago, I laid out some of the basic issues in South African higher education.  Today, I want to focus on two particular sets of institutional issues that I think make the country’s policy landscape quite distinctive. The first area has to do with how institutions raise income.  Sub-Saharan African countries tend to fall into two groups: those that are over-reliant on government funding (most of Francophone and Lusophone Africa), and those that are reliant on private

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April 10, 2015 No Comments

Australian Deregulation (Again) and the Future of Tuition Fees

So deregulation in Australia now looks to be dead and buried.  But in its death throes, the debate finally coughed-up some interesting ideas about how to pay for higher education.  Here’s the re-cap: Not long after my last article on this subject, the coalition decided to put a second deregulation bill to a vote in the Senate.  The first bill failed by two votes.  The second one, after months of lobbying and arm-twisting, failed by four.  This suggests a couple of

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April 9, 2015 No Comments

Better Know a Higher Ed System: South Africa

So, I was in South Africa last week talking to people from various ends of the higher education system.  It’s a fascinating place, which is attempting the almost-unimaginably difficult task of creating a single, functional system of education from the wreckage of apartheid. One key aspect of contemporary South Africa is that genuine political competition is still some ways off.  Opposition parties exist, and the ruling alliance is experiencing some strain due to the increasing unhappiness of the main trade

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March 27, 2015 No 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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