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Category: Worldwide PSE

Shared Governance, Corruption in Education and Scientific Socialism

I’ve been in Romania this past week working with the World Bank and the Ministry of Education on an interesting strategy project. Just a few stories I thought I would pass on: Shared Governance: In what I think was an attempt to curry favour among faculty members, the previous Romanian government brought in a bill in 2011 which created what I think is quite a unique “bicephalous” system of university government.  Under this system, the University Rector (who, as in many

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June 7, 2013 2 Comments

Some Developments in Rankings

I was in Warsaw the week before last for the International Rankings Expert Group (IREG) Forum.  The forum is designed both for those interested in rankings, and for rankers themselves – the principals behind the US News & World report rankings, the Shanghai Jiao Tong rankings, Germany’s CHE rankings, and the  Quacquarelli Symonds rankings are all regular participants.  It’s always been an interesting place to hear firsthand how rankings are evolving.  When it first started nearly a decade ago, there

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May 28, 2013 No Comments

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

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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