Category: Worldwide PSE

Many Bolognas

I spent part of October in Bucharest at the Bologna Future of Higher Education conference, trying, as I always do at these things, to get my head around what is happening in European higher education. Part of the problem of trying to follow the Bologna Process is that there are many Bolognas that exist side by side. There is the “formal” Bologna – which is actually a crashing bore, unless you’re really into diploma supplements and qualifications frameworks and quality

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New Markets

Let’s say you’re an institution interested in moving into new international markets. India’s been done to death, coastal China’s saturated and the Europeans aren’t interested in coming to North America. So what do you do? You look for new markets – preferably ones with weak post-secondary systems, rising family incomes, and yet to be seriously exploited by foreign recruiters. Here’s the three we’d pick right now: 1) Indonesia. Two hundred million people, an Asian tiger, and yet arguably one of

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Interest on Student Loans – Time to Go Dutch

News out of the U.S. suggests that one possible casualty of that country’s budget crisis is the in-school interest subsidy on student loans. Since Canadian governments almost always end up copying the Americans on student aid eventually (see: income-based grants, rules on institutional designation, workforce-related loan forgiveness, etc.), this seems like a good time for Canada to review its own policies on student loan interest. Some countries, like Germany and many developing countries, charge no interest at all on student

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International Student Recruitment: Not as Good as We Think We Are

One of the most startling things about Canada’s recent success in attracting international students is how easy it has all been. Australia and the U.K. took decades to build up their position in international higher education, and in the former case it took decades of government-backed investment in developing overseas networks. Our recent extraordinary spurt of growth in international higher education – particularly in the Indian market – came in the space of about five years in a comparatively uncoordinated

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What the U.K. Tuition Fight Tells Us About Universities

The U.K. is a great country when it comes to higher education innovation – good or bad, they’re not afraid to take new policy ideas to their logical conclusion. Their most recent move – allowing tuition fees to rise up to £9000 – is a case in point, and it is already providing some valuable lessons with respect to the essential dilemmas of higher education policy. The government clearly thought that this kind of “big bang” deregulation of tuition would

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