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Category: Worldwide PSE

Amateur Hour

This week, in between negotiating computer crashes, dealing with angry university finance people and the usual grind, I managed to read a new book on the history of university teaching in the United States called The Amateur Hour by Jonathan Zimmerman.  It is pretty innovative in its way: there are histories of higher education in abundance, but most of them end up being histories of institutions (or institutional types), or sociological histories of the student body, or whatever: focussing on what was

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February 11, 2021 No Comments

Two Short Notes About China

Hi all.  Short blogs for the next couple of days because HESA Towers is hopping and I’m really up against it for time. So just a couple of bite-size pieces today. Tsinghua in Trouble Once upon a time, if you wanted to point to how universities in China were driving economic growth, you’d point to Tsinghua University and specifically Tsinghua Holdings, which was a conglomerate made up of all the spin-off businesses which came out of “China’s MIT.”  Tsinghua Holdings is simply massive

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January 26, 2021 No Comments

46

At noon eastern today, Joe Biden will take the Oath of Office and become the 46th President of the United States.  The Pumpkin Fascist may be out of our hair, at least for awhile, what with the pending bankruptcy, sexual assault charges, tax, bank and real estate fraud charges, the emoluments case, plus whatever charges he will face for his role in the Cosplay March on Rome earlier this month.  But the country still faces the task of getting out of

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January 20, 2021 No Comments

Smart Specialization

I want to draw everyone’s attention today to a short but quite interesting report from the OECD, the Evaluation of the Academy for Smart Specialization, a rather unique university/community partnership for regional economic development based in Karlstad, Sweden.  It seems to have been done on a contract basis (i.e. the Academy paid OECD for the analysis), but the unit that did it goes under The Geography of Higher Education, which I urge everyone to keep an eye on because it seems

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January 14, 2021 1 Comment

What’s in a Name?

When he was about ten, Cost Centre #1 (the boy, not the girl) started getting interested in US college football.  It occurred to him that maybe he and I had some “common ground”, since I was working a fair bit on rankings at the time.  Every Saturday morning, whenever the chyron threw up a new matchup, he’d yell “hey dad: Mississippi State, is that a good school?”  “hey, dad, what about Auburn?”, etc.  He had little interest in my explanations

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January 7, 2021 3 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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