One of the most amazing things about Joe Biden’s presidency is that we don’t have to hear about it all the time. For days – nay, weeks – on end, we can go about our business without thinking about what the US Head of State is doing or saying. It’s brilliant. But while the vacation is nice, it’s time to start paying attention again because very big things are afoot in DC with respect to higher education. It’s worth surveying
You may have seen stories in Inside Higher Ed and University World News about the QS World Rankings, and specifically, a claim by a Senior Researcher at Berkeley named Igor Chirikov that QS’s conflicts of interest “may produce significant distortions in global university rankings”. Cue much clucking on the interwebs about issues with rankings. All I can say, having read the paper, and having some idea of what QS does, is that the word “may” is doing a fair bit of work in that
Over the past two decades, tuition rises in Canada have been relatively low: on average, we consistently see rises of about 1-2% above inflation, with almost no sudden upwards jags (though there was one sudden decrease when the Ford government cut tuition by 10% in Ontario in 2019). This is quite different from the 1990s, when rises of inflation plus 5-6% was the norm and instances of tuition doubling (Quebec, 1990 to 1992) or increasing by over 50% (British Columbia,
I have been getting emails soliciting my option about the Government of Ontario’s decision to make the Northern Ontario School of Medicine (NOSM) a stand-alone university. This is a big issue in Northern Ontario, with many people getting upset over what I think amounts to very little. But perhaps we should rewind to the beginning. NOSM is a fairly unique medical school. It was created in the mid-2000s to deal with a persistent shortage of doctors in Northern Ontario. In
A couple of years ago in a blog post I noted a tendency among western academics to assume that the Western view of the university was the only possible one, and specifically that universities which existed in illiberal or autocratic settings were not “real” universities. At the time, I said: There are other university traditions, not all of which require liberal democracy to flourish: Lord knows the continual ascent of Tsinghua, National University of Singapore and others in international rankings is
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.
