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Category: Worldwide PSE

Ten Years of Global University Rankings

Last week, I had the honour of chairing a session at the Conference on World-Class Universities, in Shanghai.  Held on the 10th anniversary of the release of the first global rankings (both the Shanghai rankings and the Times Higher Ed Rankings – then run by QS – appeared for the first time in 2003).  And so it was a time for reflection: what have we learned over the past decade? The usual well-worn criticisms were aired: international rankings privilege, the measurable

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November 15, 2013 1 Comment

Canada’s Bologna Moment

If you can cast your mind back all of three weeks, before the Ford video(s) and Mike Duffy going kamikaze on the Prime Minister, there was some big news out of Ottawa about how a Canada-Europe Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement (CETA) had finally been reached. The finer details of the deal are still unavailable, but one thing that has been promised all along is that this deal will permit the free movement of labour between Canada and Europe.  And that’s

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November 14, 2013 No Comments

Using PIAAC to Measure Value-Added in Higher Ed: US Good, Australia Abysmal

A few weeks ago, when commenting on the PIAAC release, I noted that one could use the results to come up with a very rough-and-ready measure of “value added” in higher education.  PIAAC contains two relevant pieces of data for this: national mean literacy scores for students aged 16-19 completing upper-secondary education, and national mean literacy scores for students aged 16-29 who have completed Tertiary A.  Simply by subtracting the former from the latter, one arrives at a measure of

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November 13, 2013 6 Comments

Kevin Lynch is Horribly Wrong

It’s disappointing that Kevin Lynch, former head of the public service in Ottawa, is the latest victim of that peculiarly Canadian disease, where one’s casual knowledge of the German apprenticeship system leads one to lose all critical faculties – as demonstrated in this awful article from the weekend Globe. The article starts by noting that, “in proficiency in numeracy and literacy among 16-24 year-olds…, Canada is lagging the results for the Nordic countries, Australia and Germany”.  Wrong.  Well, at least partly wrong.

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November 11, 2013 3 Comments

Better Know a Higher Ed System: Qatar

Until about fifteen years ago, Qatar was a pretty typical Gulf country as far as higher education was concerned. With a single state university, founded and staffed mostly by Egyptians, it satisfied the needs of the small domestic population.  But then the country decided to get serious about higher education. With help from the RAND corporation, the ruling al-Thani family’s Qatar Foundation established something called Education City, an absolutely unique experiment in cross-border education.  Lots of institutions have set up

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November 8, 2013 5 Comments

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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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