Category: Worldwide PSE

Scandinavian Round-Up

Every once in awhile it’s useful to take a look at how things are developing in other parts of the world.  Today, a quick trip to the three Scandinavian countries.  Norway is by some distance the most affluent of the Scandinavian countries, thanks to a few bazillion barrels of offshore oil.  But as the price of oil tumbles, financial pressures are appearing.  A wave of institutional mergers – touted not as a cost-saving measure but as a means to strengthen institutions

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Changing Finances of World-Class Universities Part 3

So now we come to the heart of the matter: what’s actually going on in terms of publication outcomes (both the number and the impact)? For the first couple of graphs, I’m going to include the 11 top-200 schools from the People’s Republic of China just for the sheer fun of it (I have China data for research, but not finances). Figure 1 takes shows the increase in research output at top-200 universities, by country, for the years 2014-2017 over

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The Changing Finances of World-Class Universities (part 1)

Last week, I was in Shanghai at the biennial World-Class Universities Conference, held by the Academic Ranking of World Universities/Shanghai Rankings Consultancy, for which I have the honour to sit on the advisory board.  I was presenting some work-in-progress that we have going at HESA Towers concerning the finances of the world’s top universities, and thought I could share some of our findings with you over the next couple of days. (I know, I know, y’all want to know what

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From the Shelves of HESA Towers—Soviet Education

Sometimes, I think back to 40 or 50 years ago and imagine what my job would have been like and I realise it would have been more or less impossible.  My shtick is mostly “the guy in Canada who knows what’s happening elsewhere” – and back then it was practically impossible to know what was going on in other countries.  There were some books, of course, but they were necessarily occasional and tended to touch only on the most basic

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Education at a Glance, 2019: The Key Data

It’s that time of year when literally everyone is releasing data and reports for the back-to-school period (SELF-PROMOTION KLAXON: look for my new paper on Performance-Based Funding of post-secondary education, out from the CD Howe Institute Tuesday next week). Over the next couple of days, we’ll be doing a deep dive on Canadian university finances; today, though, I wanted to go through some of the highlights of this year’s Education at a Glance from the OECD, which dropped yesterday morning

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