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Category: Worldwide PSE

Bologna – The Real Lessons

Europe’s Bologna Process may be winding down, but that’s not to say it was a failure. In fact, one could argue that one of the reasons Bologna is not quite so front-and-centre as it used to be is that it did its job spectacularly well and that barriers to both educational and labour market mobility have fallen significantly in the last decade. There are some lessons for Canada here. Briefly, these are: 1) Improving Mobility Means Paying Attention to Quality. This is

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October 24, 2012 2 Comments

Does Bologna Still Have a Pulse?

For the last decade or so, pretty much all North Americans have heard about European higher education is “The Bologna Process.” In fact, Bologna has become a sort of Rorschach test for higher education types in the rest of the world. Canadians tend to see it through the prism of our own federal-provincial relations issues. For the most part, die-hard centralists like using it as a rhetorical drum to beat for more (e.g., “Europe is creating a common higher education area and

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October 23, 2012 No Comments

More Korean Lessons

Higher education is an inherently conservative industry – it’s extremely rare to come across something genuinely new and unique in the field. Which is precisely why Korea’s so interesting: it has a number of genuine system innovations, particularly in lifelong learning, from which a lot of countries could learn. Koreans have what some commentators call “education fever”; as in many Confucian countries, the sacrifices families make to ensure their children get an education are almost incomprehensible to North Americans. But

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October 19, 2012 No Comments

Korean Lessons

I’m in Seoul this week, studying some aspects of the Republic of Korea’s system of lifelong learning (picture me Gangnam-dancing if you must). But the country’s overall system of higher education is so flat-out amazing, I thought it would be worth a post or two. How amazing is it, you ask? Well, they kick our behinds in terms of access and success – 90% of their high school graduates attend university or “junior college” right after high school and the

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October 18, 2012 No Comments

Getting a Global Common Data Set Off the Ground

How could a global common data set (CDS) come into existence? Here are a few considerations: In addition to improving accuracy and comparability, common data sets come into existence for two reasons. The first is to save money by limiting the number of data requests flying in from every yahoo wanting to create his or her own ranking. The second, less obvious reason, is that the creation of an open-access data platform lowers the barriers to entry for new rankers.

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June 8, 2012 1 Comment

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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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