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Category: Worldwide PSE

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

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

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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

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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:

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November 20, 2019 6 Comments

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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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