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Category: Worldwide PSE

Higher Education Management, Hermit Kingdom-Style

Frabjous day!  I have just read one of the great higher education management tracts of all time. I’m of course speaking about, On Improving Higher Education, by Kim Il Sung.  (Pyongyang Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1974). Don’t let Kim’s “communist” label fool you – what this guy cared most about was the concept of Juche  (self-reliance), which continues to be the underlying ideology of the north’s nationalist, quasi-fascist state.  As you can imagine, this meant a lot of belt-tightening.  As such, Kim’s thoughts have

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May 27, 2013 2 Comments

Think Big?

With all the chat recently about reducing unit costs through ever-larger instructional units (e.g. MOOCs), it occurred to me that the world already has a lot of models for this.  They just aren’t in the developed world. University World News recently carried a very interesting article regarding a new higher education master plan in Nigeria.  One of the plan’s key elements is to construct a half-dozen “mega-universities” – each with 100-150,000 students – to soak up the rising demand for higher education. 

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May 16, 2013 No Comments

The Schwartzman Scholarships

So, a big deal was made by all last week when businessman Stephen Schwartzman decided to fork over $300 million (one-third his own money, two-thirds money he’s collected from a whip-round of blue-chip American companies) to create a set of scholarships for (mostly) foreign students to study at Tsinghua University.  The money will fund 100 students per year – 20 Chinese, 45 American, and the balance from the rest of the world – to study at Tsinghua’s newly created Schwartzman

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May 1, 2013 No Comments

A Thought for Gabriel Betancourt

In early 1918, a fellow by the name of Gabriel Betancourt was born in Medellin, Colombia.  If the name sounds faintly familiar, it’s probably because of his daughter, Ingrid, the Colombia politician who was famously held captive by FARC guerrillas for six years.  But in education, Gabriel is the one that matters.  He’s the one who invented the idea of student loans. To be fair, student loans weren’t entirely unheard of prior to WWII, but they were rare, and were offered by

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April 26, 2013 No Comments

Canadian Innovation, Seen from Abroad

So, I came across this quite remarkable little document yesterday – it’s a report prepared by MIT-Skoltech on the universities around the world who contribute the most to their local innovation systems. (What is Skoltech, you ask?  Well, it’s a university located in a nascent science and tech hub, just outside Moscow, in a place called Skolkovo, and is the pet project of the Medvedev wing of the Kremlin.  Anchoring this tech hub is the new Skolkovo University of Science

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April 24, 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.

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