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Category: Worldwide PSE

Excellence vs Progress

Earlier this week, I was in Moscow at a session talking about (among other things) national excellence programs, making the point that there aren’t really that many examples of successful ones.  One of the university rectors in the audience then asked me the following question (I apologize for paraphrasing a bit here because I don’t remember the exact wording): “look, the real problem in science is that we are spinning our wheels, not making any great discoveries.  Instead, all we

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March 21, 2019 No Comments

Skills Accounts: Singapore

Since it’s budget time next week and everyone I know thinks we are fated to have an announcement around Individual Skills Accounts (ISAs) I thought I would give a little bit of prominence to the two countries there that have been most active this area recently and talk about their experience.  And so, today, I’ll be talking about Singapore and tomorrow, France. The reason Singapore is getting a lot of attention these days is because of something called SkillsFuture.  This

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March 14, 2019 1 Comment

Best Higher Ed Scandal of the Year

The following statement was issued in a Massachusetts courtroom yesterday morning. Dozens of individuals involved in a nationwide conspiracy that facilitated cheating on college entrance exams and the admission of students to elite universities as purported athletic recruits were arrested by federal agents in multiple states and charged in documents unsealed on March 12, 2019, in federal court in Boston. Athletic coaches from Yale, Stanford, USC, Wake Forest and Georgetown, among others, are implicated, as well as parents and exam

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March 13, 2019 1 Comment

Excellence Initiatives

Over the past couple of decades, countries have designed policies to improve their research universities and make them more “world-class”, largely on the assumption that this will pay some kind of economic dividend.  A lot of these policies involved what became known as “excellence initiatives” – projects that concentrated spending on a restricted number of institutions with the idea that these extra resources would propel these universities into some kind of global elite.  This raises the question: do they work?

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March 11, 2019 2 Comments

Higher Education in Federal Countries

Maybe the most childish thing about Canadian higher education policy debates is the recurring insistence on the part of some English Canadians that higher education needs to be more of a federal responsibility (i.e. the central government needs to take a more active role).  If you exclude the motivated reasoning of Ottawa-based higher ed groups who want more things to happen in Ottawa so that they themselves can have more interesting things to do, this position is mostly born of

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March 8, 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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