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Category: Worldwide PSE

Hi From NAFSA

I love the annual conference of the National Association of Foreign Student Advisors (NAFSA), which is being held this week in Washington DC.  NAFSA, for uninitiated, is both a conference with lots of interesting presentations on international education (I was doing one on International Education Policies in the Americas, as part of the work I have done with colleagues Janet Ilieva, Vangelis Tsiligiris and Pat Killingley for the British Council—watch the blog next week).   But it is also a massive

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May 30, 2019 No Comments

Closing Programs

You may, over the past year, followed the story of Stevens Point, a mid-sized (8000 student) regional campus in the University of Wisconsin system.  I want to look at this story today, because I think it contains some important lessons about how universities actually make and spend their money. Back in March 2018 the college, facing falling enrolment, announced it was going to kill thirteen humanities and social sciences programs – American studies, art (excluding graphic design), English (excluding English

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May 29, 2019 1 Comment

Balanced Budgets

A few weeks ago, the federal and länder governments in Germany reached a ten-year accord with respect to funding for scientific research.  Result: a decade of planned 3% annual increases.  Needless to say, this elicited quite a few envious glances from folks in Canada, who only get funding increases in jerky fashion, often after years of neglect.   Partly, this was a product of Germany’s more healthy system of science federalism, where different levels of government talk to each other like grown ups instead of

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May 28, 2019 No Comments

Adversity Scores

Who deserves to go to university?  Particularly the prestigious ones with selective admissions?  It’s easy enough to say “everyone”, or “anyone with the ability to benefit from it”, but when it comes to any specific institution, usually the demand for spaces exceeds the supply.  When that happens, some type of rationing procedure comes into play.  In nearly every country in the world (Canada is a rare exception), this rationing gets done either partly or completely on the basis of a

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May 22, 2019 3 Comments

Policy Stasis in Australia

Saturday was election day in Australia, and pretty much everyone knew what was going to happen.  The clapped-out two-term Coalition (Liberal-National, i.e. right-wing) government, which was so internally faction-riven that it had three prime ministers in six years via a series of “spills” that Canadian political geeks find so thrilling: the smooth Malcolm Turnbull defenestrating the Jurassic Tony Abbott in 2015, and winning an election before being booted by caucus last fall and replaced by the somewhat more Conservative Scott

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May 21, 2019 No 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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