The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Worldwide PSE

Faculty Salary Data You Should Probably Ignore

Recently, the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations (OCUFA) published a comparison of American and Canadian academics’ salaries.  Using Canada’s National Household Survey (NHS) and the US Occupational Employment Statistics (OES) survey (which they described as being not quite apples-to-apples, but at least Macintosh-to-Granny Smith), they noted that average salaries for the combined college-and-university instructor population (the OES cannot disaggregate below that level) were $76,000.  In Canada, the figure was $65,000.  Hence, according to them, with the dollar at par, there is

Read More »
October 22, 2013 7 Comments

Better Know a Higher Ed System – Scandinavian Labour Market Edition

A bit of a different tack for this week’s Better Know a Higher Ed System.  I’m not actually going to bore you by explaining the intricacies of four different systems of higher ed, or drone on about the ever-trendy Finnish polytechnics, or anything like that.  I am, however, going to tell you some nifty things about the way education and the labour market interact in these Scandinavian countries, and why, as a result, one should be quite careful when interpreting

Read More »
October 18, 2013 No Comments

Some Bombshells from the Programme for International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC)

So, yesterday saw the release of the first results from the Survey of Adult Skills, a product of the OECD’s Programme for International Assessment of Adult Competencies.  This survey is meant to examine how adults from different countries fare on a set of tests measuring cognitive and workplace skills, such as literacy, numeracy, and ICT skills; perhaps somewhat controversially, some of the OECD’s own employees are referring to it as a “ranking” (though, honestly, that does them a grave disservice).

Read More »
October 9, 2013 12 Comments

Better Know a Higher Ed System – Poland

So, you’re a new, post-communist country.  You have an undereducated population; your universities are filled with discredited Marxists; you’re broke, and your constitution says you can’t charge tuition fees.  What do you do? Well, if it’s 1990, and you’re Poland, you do two things: 1)      Let the private sector rip.  Sure, private universities are low prestige, and they only do cheap subjects like business, law, and social sciences.  But since those were precisely the areas where the – traditionally high-prestige – public universities

Read More »
October 3, 2013 1 Comment

The View from Vilnius

I spent an enjoyable couple of days in Lithuania last week, at a meeting of the EU’s Directors General of Higher Education.  I was there to talk about some research we at HESA (along with some colleagues from DZHW in Germany) are doing for the European Commission, assessing the impact of cost-sharing on institutions and students.  Unsurprisingly, at the margins of the conference (and occasionally within its proceedings), what really drove conversation were tales of austerity, and their effects on

Read More »
September 30, 2013 1 Comment

One Thought to Start Your Day

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.

Subscribe

Search Posts

Search Publications

Social Media

Linkedin Youtube Spotify

Recent Posts

More thoughts on...