Category: Worldwide PSE

Credit-Transfer, Korean Style

There are not many genuinely unique ideas in higher education.  Today, we at HESA are releasing a paper about one of them: Korea’s Academic Credit Bank System (ACBS), available here. Korea has long had a problem with credit transfer.  Its higher education institutions are fairly rigid in terms of admissions, and few like accepting transfer students.  Another big problem is that Korean males have to do two years (roughly – it depends on the service) of universal military service, and

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The Effects of Tuition Fees (Part 2)

As I mentioned last week, a major paper I’ve been working on for over a year with colleagues from DZHW on the subject of the effects of fees was published last Monday by the EC (available here).  In my last post, I talked about how fees affected institutions – today, I want to talk about how they affect students. In our report, we looked at case studies over 15 years (1995-2010) from nine countries – Austria, Canada, England, Finland, Germany,

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Tremors in China

I wanted to point everyone’s attention to a small article in the Chinese People’s Daily last Wednesday, which is potentially of enormous significance. Apparently, of the country’s 31 Provinces, Municipalities, and Autonomous Regions, only seven have disclosed their figures with respect to higher education recruitment.  Every single one of them missed their targets, some by over 10%.  And these seven provinces represent a mix of economic backgrounds: Anhui and Quinghai are relatively poor interior provinces; Shandong and Fujian are richer coastal ones,

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Articles of Faith

Further to Tuesday’s blog about STEM panics, I note a new report out from Canada 2020, a young-ish organization with pretensions to be the Liberals’ pet think tank called Skills and Higher Education in Canada: Towards Excellence and Equity.  Authored by the Conference Board’s Daniel Munro, it covers most of the ground you’d expect in a “touch-all-the-bases” report.  And while the section on equity is pretty good, when it comes to “excellence” this paper – like many before it – draws

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Institutional Strategies: Simulacra or Reinvention?

I recently had the chance to read a re-issue of Simon Marginson and Mark Considine’s, The Enterprise University: Power Governance and Reinvention in Australia.  It’s a heck of a good read; among those currently writing about higher education, Marginson’s probably got the best turn of phrase around.  Some of it – around managerialism and the role of research expenditure in cementing it – seems a bit dated now, in the sense that no one would any longer find it surprising.  And the

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