It’s now midnight eastern time and it’s looking more and more like we are not going to know who won the U.S. election until later today or perhaps even late this week (Pennsylvania probably will not report fully until Friday). But it’s not too late to take a few moments to take a good look at the damage done to American higher education over the past four years, and where the system might be headed next. In some ways the
Back in the spring, there was widespread panic that postsecondary enrolments – particularly international enrolments – would crumble if students had to spend a whole term online. What do we know about how this has turned out this fall? Well, in other countries, this is a relatively straightforward question to answer. In the UK, national data on new university acceptances are published right around the time students go back to school. This probably overstates enrolments (not everyone who is accepted
One maddening thing about universities is that so much of what they claim to value is so badly measured. Take internationalization. Usually, this gets measured by the number or proportion of international students, which is ludicrously reductive given the extent to which in many countries international students are primarily income sources; occasionally, you might get some information about the number of foreign faculty. Maybe. But that’s it. Anything deeper on internationalization is usually judged to be unmeasurable, so there is no way
From Denmark and New Zealand, we have some very interesting policy developments to review. Let’s start down south, where Jacinda Ardern’s Labour Party seems to be cruising to a massive electoral victory in next week’s election. Labour, which came second in 2017 but grabbed the brass ring via a coalition agreement with the nationalist/populist New Zealand First party, seems to be within touching distance of a standalone majority, which is almost impossible in a proportional representation system. I guess that’s
Yesterday, we discussed whether a university can have too many faculties (answer: yes, but just try reducing them and see how far you get). Today, I thought I would ask a similar question about universities. It’s a familiar problem in many parts of Canada. In Nova Scotia, arguments about whether there are “too many” institutions have been going on for almost a century. Fifteen years ago, significant parts of BC went a bit bananas when the provincial government decided to
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.
