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Category: Worldwide PSE

Banning the Term “Underfunding”

Somehow I missed this when the OECD’s Education at a Glance 2014 came out, but apparently Canada’s post-secondary system is now officially the best funded in the entire world. I know, I know.  It’s a hard idea to accept when Presidents of every student union, faculty association, university, and college have been blaming “underfunding” for virtually every ill in post-secondary education since before Air Farce jokes started taking the bus to get to the punchline.  But the fact is, we’re tops.  Numero uno.  Take

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March 24, 2015 7 Comments

Rankings in the Middle East

If you follow rankings at all, you’ll have noticed that there is a fair bit of activity going on in the Middle East these days.  US News & World Report and Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) both published “Best Arab Universities” rankings last year; this week, the Times Higher Education (THE) produced a MENA (Middle East and North Africa) ranking at a glitzy conference in Doha. The reason for this sudden flurry of Middle East-oriented rankings is pretty clear: Gulf universities have a lot of

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February 25, 2015 2 Comments

Demand Sponges

If you’ve ever spent any time looking at the literature on private higher education around the world – from the World Bank, say, or the good folks at SUNY Albany who run the Program for Research on Private Higher Education (PROPHE) shop – you’ll know that private higher education is often referred to as “demand-absorbing”; that is, when the public sector is tapped-out and, for structural reasons (read: government underfunding, unwillingness to charge tuition), can’t expand, private higher education comes to the

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February 23, 2015 No Comments

Performance-Based Funding (Part 3)

As I noted yesterday, the American debate on PBF has more or less ignored evidence from beyond its shores; and yet, in Europe, there are several places that have very high levels of performance-based funding.  Denmark has had what it calls a “taximeter” system, which pays institutions on the basis of student progression and completion, for over 20 years now, and it currently makes up about 30% of all university income.  Most German Länder have some element of incentive-based funding

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February 19, 2015 2 Comments

Performance-Based Funding (Part 2)

So, as we noted yesterday, there are two schools of thought in the US about performance-based funding (where, it should be noted, about 30 states have some kind of PBF criteria built into their overall funding system, or are planning to do so).  Basically, one side says they work, and the other says they don’t. Let’s start with the “don’t” camp, led by Nicholas Hillman and David Tandberg, whose key paper can be found here.  To determine whether PBFs affect

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February 18, 2015 1 Comment

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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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