Category: Worldwide PSE

Fall 2020 international Round-Up: Australia

Australia, along with New Zealand, was among the first countries where higher education grappled with the virus.  In Canada, where term starts at the beginning of January, international students all made it into the country before the virus really hit; in Australia, where it starts in March, they didn’t.  This led to an immediate hit in the region of A$3-5 billion (which is a lot, considering that fee income in 2018 from international students was about $9.5 billion). Universities Australia

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Fall 2020 International Round Up: Qatar

Some of the world’s most fantastical higher education systems are in the countries that make up Gulf Co-operation Council, or GCC.  Among them, no system is more unique than Qatar’s.  And over the last few years, it has been on an ever-stranger course. Qatar is one of those tiny gulf emirates that entered the modern world under treaty protection of the British Empire.  Along with Bahrain, Qatar chose to remain independent rather than join the United Arab Emirates in 1971,

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Fall 2020 International Round Up: England

This week, I’ll look at news from around the world of higher education.  I’ll skip the US because regular media coverage of the ongoing disaster seems adequate.  Instead, let’s start in the United Kingdom, and specifically in England. Term is just starting over there, so we have yet to see any US-style nightmares, but that’s definitely in the cards.  As far as I can tell, the re-start plan is closer to the US than to Canada’s: less than 100% in-person

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Two Great Books on Admissions

An important shift during the last half-decade or so in US higher education is the serious consideration that increased selectivity at the top 5-10% of institutions may be doing real damage to the goal of social mobility.  It’s not just data nerds like Raj Chetty doing big data projects on outcomes: it’s becoming a topic of national conversation.  If you want to learn more about it in detail, you couldn’t do better than two new books: Jeff Selingo’s Who Gets in and

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OECD Education at a Glance 2020

The OECD released its Education at a Glance (you can download yesterday’s release here), and every year at this time I do a report on the release (see previous articles from 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019).  Mostly my précises focus on the same couple of things, to wit: Canada has among the highest rates of higher education participation in the world, mainly because our college/polytechnic system is bigger and richer than that of any other country. Whether you measure expenditures on a per-student basis or on a %

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