The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Worldwide PSE

Polish Higher Education Reforms

I was briefly in Warsaw last week talking about university rankings and how to improve overall institutional performance.  Poland is one of the most interesting higher education systems in the world right now, so I thought it would be worth talking about what’s going on there. Among the former socialist states that were not part of the Soviet Union, Poland is the largest, has the longest history as an independent state, and has the longest history of mass opposition to

Read More »
December 9, 2019 No Comments

Designing Student Aid Programs from Scratch (1)

Over the years, I have concluded that one of the reasons policy debate can be so stifling is we’re usually debating options within existing policy parameters: that is, “fixes” to existing policy.  It’s pretty rare that anyone talks about “greenfield” policies in areas where no policy ever existed.  This is kind of a shame, because it means people don’t really understand the process of trade-offs that go into original policy-making. So, just for fun, I am going to spend this week talking about

Read More »
December 2, 2019 2 Comments

Nordic Student Aid, Nordic Access

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a little bit about Nordic countries and some of the trade-offs they consider in order to keep tuition fees at zero when public funding is under stress.  I thought I would complement this with a piece that looked at the access side of the Nordic system, both in terms of student aid and in terms of the kinds of access challenges that exist even in a free-tuition system. To start with student aid:

Read More »
November 20, 2019 6 Comments

Light Weekend Reading

It’s Friday, so I thought I’d skip the heavy stuff and lay out some quick notes on my recent higher ed reads. I’ve been trying to read more about the history of Canadian institutions.  One very short pamphlet-like read is called Hatching the Cowbird’s Egg by David R. Murray, about the origin of the University of Guelph (the title vaguely make sense if you read the whole book; in context it’s a reference to the fact that Guelph is a weirdly

Read More »
November 8, 2019 1 Comment

Big News on Free Speech

Cast your mind back oh, about fifteen months, to the Dawn of a New Era on Ontario campuses.  One in which Speech Would Be Free.  The Ford Government was new and fresh and so was the ink on a proclamation requiring all Ontario institutions to adopt a policy on free speech, consistent with the University of Chicago Statement of Principles on Free Expression, by January 1, 2019. The government charged the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO) with oversight of the

Read More »
November 6, 2019 2 Comments

One Thought to Start Your Day

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.

Subscribe

Search Posts

Search Publications

Social Media

Linkedin Youtube Spotify

Recent Posts

More thoughts on...