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Category: Worldwide PSE

The AfD and German Higher Education

In many ways, Germany seems like a higher education paradise. Sure, the funding might not be as generous as elsewhere and career progression can be problematic—but basically, academic freedom is highly prized, as are continental connections across Europe, and policymaking within the system is highly consensual. You can’t have everything, but that’s quite a lot. But as Germans are discovering, consensual decision-making only works if everyone agrees to the ground rules. And in recent years, a new political force has

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October 8, 2026 No Comments

Comparative Spending Statistics

Just a short one today, based on some data from the OECD in its annual Education at a Glance Report which was released last week. I won’t do a full report, as many of the post-secondary indicators are banal and predictable (Canada does well at churning out post-secondary graduates, etc., etc.). But the report does contain one intriguing set of new tables: for the first time (AFAIK), the OECD has gathered data that, in theory at least, allow for international

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October 5, 2026 No Comments

Lords of Serendipity

As you might imagine, I am pretty fond of campus novels. A frequent weakness, however, is that the idealize the idea of a campus, or at least the of a particular type of campus, or at least of a particular types of program (English professors are hugely over-represented in campus novels and indeed among campus novel-ists). What you don’t often see is a campus novel that actually exhibits genuine skepticism about the enterprise itself. That’s not the case with Randy Boyagoda’s new

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October 1, 2026 No Comments

That Was the Quarter That Was, Summer 2026

Hi, all. Time for a quarterly recap of what’s been going on in higher education. You might think summer would be a quiet time for developments in higher education but a) “summer” is a geographically relative term and b) “back to school” is usually when things go bananas in the higher education world. This year was no exception. Let’s get to it. Therewas drama, as there always is, with respect to funding for higher education. In Argentina, Javier Milei continues

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September 30, 2026 No Comments

Data for Internationalization

The following is adapted from a talk given at the National Association of Foreign Student Affairs (NAFSA) conference in Orlando, Florida, back in May. My thanks to Mike Alcott of ApplyBoard for the invitation to participate in the panel. There are a lot of folks in the business of moving international students from one place to another who want more data. They think more data will help them target students better by predicting changes in international student demand. But is

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September 28, 2026 No Comments
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