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Category: Worldwide PSE

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).

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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

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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

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September 30, 2013 1 Comment

Better Know a Higher Ed System – Malaysia

If you pay attention to internationalization in higher education, you’ve probably come across laudatory stuff about Malaysia, either as a source country for international students, or as a higher education hub.  But what you may not know is the extent to which Malaysian internationalization is a result of the country’s deep-seated racial divisions. Malays are the majority in the country, but there is a very large Chinese minority, and a smaller Tamil one.  Since independence, Malays have kept control of

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September 27, 2013 No Comments

Better Know a Higher Ed System: United Arab Emirates

SERIES INTRODUCTION: We too easily tend to think of other people’s education systems as being like our own, when often they are anything but.  Higher Ed is actually a big and pretty strange world and, starting today, I’ll be doing some thumbnails of some of the systems I know best.  First up, the UAE, where I’ve recently been doing some work on the funding formula for their universities. According to the UAE constitution, education is exclusively a federal responsibility.  There are

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September 20, 2013 No 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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