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Category: Worldwide PSE

Higher Education and the Democratic Primaries, 2020

The Iowa caucuses take place south of the border tonight.  The Democratic Primary has come down to four serious candidates – Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg and Joe Biden – with another two (Mike Bloomberg and Amy Klobuchar) circling around the edges.  It’s a short primary season this time out, partly because Iowa is taking place a few weeks later than usual and partly because California is voting four weeks from now instead of four months from now.  Because

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February 3, 2020 1 Comment

Working Hours

I was intrigued to read this story in the Times Higher Education about Dutch academics complaining about having to work “structural unpaid overtime” of 12-15 hours per week, which this report says is 36% above their regular paid hours.  One can infer that Dutch academics’ contracts actually stipulate they are to work a 35-hour week, which is quite a foreign concept in North America, where many “professional” jobs usually have no hours attached to them, our theory effectively being that if you are in one of

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January 29, 2020 1 Comment

Black Wednesday

At 6:12 AM last Wednesday morning at Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport, Ukrainian International Airways Flight 752 (PS752) trundled down the runway for take-off on its scheduled flight to Kyiv.  The flight, with 176 souls aboard, carried roughly 60 Canadian citizens (source counts vary), as well as another 82 Iranians and 24 others, including the plane’s crew who were all Ukrainian.  At least 130 of the passengers were connecting in Kyiv to another flight destined for Toronto and from there

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January 13, 2020 3 Comments

The Higher Ed Reading List

It’s the next-to-last blog of the year, and so as usual it’s time to review the various higher ed-related books I have read over the course of 2019, just in case some of you are dying to spend the holidays boning up on higher ed history/policy.  I will spare you a potted description of all the 40-odd books, and just stick to the highlights. (For all you weirdos who for some strange reason prefer to read something other than higher education stuff over the

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December 12, 2019 1 Comment

UK Election Promises

The UK goes to the polls on Thursday.  There are one or two things of higher importance at stake than higher education (mainly: which party gets to drive the entire country off a cliff and at what speed), but it’s still worth looking at what ideas are bouncing around over on the other side of the pond.  Fees and funding are essentially the same issue in the UK, because so much of universities’ income is tied up in domestic student

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December 10, 2019 1 Comment

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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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