Welcome to The Fifteen, a global round-up of the stories animating higher education institutions and systems around the globe. Let’s get to it. And that’s the mid-October edition of the Fifteen. See you back here on Hallowe’en for the next edition. The blog is off next week, but you can still join Tiffany MacLennan for Focus Friday on October 24 (they’ll be chatting about international student enrolment).
Brazil exited the age of slavery 135 years ago. It remains a multi-racial society today. But for much of the twentieth century, Brazil suffered an enormous bout of amnesia. From being one of the last societies on earth to give up slavery, it immediately began touting itself as a place where colour did not matter, that it was a post-racial society. But then about 30 years ago, things changed. Race — or more accurately race and inequality — became a much more prominent subject
The economics of higher education are tricky. It’s a labour-intensive industry, and generally speaking the cost of producing labour-intensive goods will always increase faster than the price of producing capital intensive goods, because the latter have more scope for increasing productivity. That’s not a problem if you are a public institution in a country with bottomless pockets, or if you are a prestigious private institution with almost unlimited ability to raise prices. If you’re among the other 99 percent of the
Welcome to TWTQTW for June-September. Things were a little slow in July, but with back to school happening in most of the Northern Hemisphere sometime between last August and late September, the stories began pouring in. You might think that “back to school” would deliver up lots of stories about enrolment trends, but you’d mostly be wrong. While few countries are as bad as Canada when it comes to up-to date enrolment data, it’s a rare country that can give
Hi all. I thought I would take some time to have a chat about how research policy is evolving in other countries, because I think there are some lessons we need to learn here in Canada. One piece of news that struck me this week came from Switzerland, where the federal government is slashing the budget of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) by 20%. If the Swiss, a technological powerhouse of a nation, with a broad left-right coalition in
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.
