Category: Worldwide PSE

2020 Rankings Round-up

The three big global ranking outfits – The QS World University Rankings, the THE World University Rankings and the Academic Ranking of World Universities (aka Shanghai Rankings) have all released their rankings in the last few weeks, so it’s time to check in and see what if anything has changed.  (A couple of preliminaries: the Shanghai rankings go by the calendar year in which they are released, so this year’s the 2020 edition, while the other two are more like automobile manufacturers and have their date

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Summer’s Over, New Sources of Exhaustion on the Way

Morning all.  The good news is: the blog is back!  The bad news is: that means summer’s over.  My apologies. Not that “summer” has been more than a vague reference to warmer temperatures this year.  Instead of a mixture of research and downtime, what we’ve had this summer is – for most, anyway – an all-out effort to make a semester (fingers crossed) of remote teaching workable.  The aggregate sum of all these incredible efforts is a remote semester that might not be

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The Winter/Spring 2020 Reading List

All right, it’s nearly summer and even if going to the beach seems like a forlorn hope this year, I know you are all desperate for my higher education book picks.  So, here goes. Among the 35 higher education books I have read so far this year, there are a lot to forget.  I bought a ton of higher education books from Palgrave in December when they were running a ludicrous 90% off sale, and…let’s just say that a lot

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It Could Be Worse

Next term is going to be awful in pretty much every way imaginable.  But it could be worse.  Most obviously, it would be worse if a remote fall term is not a one-off.  It’s possible the virus will not be contained sufficiently for a resumption of face-to-face classes or international travel by January.  We could be looking at a full year of this, in which case i) many will wish they spent more time working on better online delivery over the summer, ii)

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Jobs

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago how the financial position of US universities during the pandemic was going to be absolutely shattered.  In the public sector, that’s because states can’t deficit finance and so a declining tax base translates directly into lower public revenues for institutions; in the private sector it’s because there’s a real question about whether any students are going to pay $40K+ for an online semester.  The Chronicle of Higher Education is keeping track of the layoffs at US

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