Category: Worldwide PSE

Higher Education Funding in Oil-Dependent Jurisdictions

I was fooling around this weekend with some data on public higher education funding for HESA’s forthcoming publication World Higher Education: Institutions, Students, Finances.  For the most part, the report’s data shows that funding around the world continues to increase, but not always enough to offset student number growth or inflation.  It’s not flashy growth, but it is fairly consistent. There are three significant exceptions: Indonesia, Nigeria, and Saudi Arabia, all of them OPEC members.  In these countries have recently

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The Twelve Student Aid Programs That Matter

One of the challenges of trying to do large-scale global comparative higher education work is focusing.  It’s a big world out there – and there are so many interesting variations and models that you just want to get your hands on everything.  But at some point, you must choose a few things in order to make sense of the bigger patterns. So it is with student financial assistance.  There are aid programs in a lot of countries, many with some

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Two Rankings Stories You May Have Missed

Today I want to discuss two interesting developments in rankings, one purely American and the other intriguingly transatlantic. The first is a new set of rankings published by Third Way, a vaguely centre-left Foundation based in Washington DC under the direction of Michael Itzkowitz, an Obama administration appointee who directed the creation of the College Scorecard. Suffice to say Itzkowitz has spent a long time thinking about how to use data to compare colleges’ efforts with respect to public policy

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The South Korean Student Aid Miracle

Last week, we did a piece on Canadian student financial assistance over the years.  Today, I want to jump across the Pacific to South Korea, because that country’s student aid system undergone some incredible policy shifts over the past 15 years. I truly think South Korean student aid policy might be one of the biggest stories in higher education finance anywhere in the world in the past decade, and it has, hitherto gone completely unnoticed by most in the rest

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Kota Factory > The Chair

Some – most? – of you probably watched The Chair on Netflix last term (for the uninitiated, it’s Sandra Oh playing Ji-Yoon Kim as she runs an English Department at what appears to be a bottom-of-the-top-tier liberal Arts College in the US Northeast).  Reaction to the show was justifiably mixed: it got a few important things right about academia, but it did so in an irritatingly unrepresentative setting – my kingdom for a campus drama not set at a private

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