The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Worldwide PSE

Empire of Ideas: Creating the Modern University from Germany to America to China with William C. Kirby

The history of the research university is a much-discussed thing. Fundamentally, these histories tend to focus on two countries: Germany, where it all began in 1810 thanks to the genius of Wilhelm von Humboldt, and the United States, which took fitful steps towards challenging Germany from the 1870s to the 1930s, at which point American universities, taking advantage of the exodus of scientific talent from Europe, moved decisively into a position of global intellectual leadership. And so things stayed for

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June 13, 2024 No Comments

Illiberal Universities

One of the most interesting stories in global higher education over the past couple of years has been the creeping government takeover of higher education in Hungary. The most famous example of this was the government expelling the George Soros-funded Central European University, which subsequently took up residence in Austria. Less well-known perhaps is the process of severing public universities from the state and creating Foundation universities. For the most part this meant giving institutions North American-style managerial and financial

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June 6, 2024 No Comments

HESA’s AI Observatory: What’s new in higher education (June 2nd, 2024)

Spotlight Good afternoon all,  This coming week, HESA will be at the QS EduData Summit “AI and Digitally Empowered Education”, in Washington DC. If you are attending the event, come say hi! Next Roundtable Meeting Date: Thursday, June 20th, 2024Time: 12h00-1h30PM ET Online Book Club: “Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI” by Ethan Mollick Although we officially completed our Winter 2024 series of AI Roundtables last week, we are coming back to you with a special summer event!  Inspired by

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June 2, 2024 No Comments

2 Topics, 1 Episode: Germany Higher Education and U-Multirank

A bit of a change this week. Our scheduled episode with Dr. Andrea Peto and Dr. Jo-Anne Dillabough about illiberal universities has been moved to next week. This week, instead, we’re trying a little experiment: talking to my colleague, Dr. Gero Federkeil, who is head of international projects at the Centrum für Hochschulentwicklung, or Center for Higher Education, in Gütersloh, Germany, about two totally unrelated topics. The first has to do with the changing profile of university enrolments in Germany,

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May 30, 2024 No Comments

A China Update

If you’ve been reading this bog for a while, you’ll know that I occasionally keep tabs on what’s going on at some of China’s top universities. I haven’t done it in a couple of years or so, so I thought it was time for an update. Figure 1 shows total expenditures at what I call China’s Big 8 universities (which is actually just the C9 League of universities—that is, the Chinese equivalent of Canada’s U15, only even more elite—minus the

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May 28, 2024 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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