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Category: Worldwide PSE

Breadth of Quality vs. Concentrations of Excellence

There was a time, perhaps twenty years ago, when the whole world wanted the American system of higher education.  The United States had the world’s most buoyant economy and a booming tech market, all apparently underpinned by a great, meritocratic system of universities.  Imitating it was the central if not fully-stated goal of China’s 985 program, Japan’s “Big Bang”, Germany’s Excellence Initiative and half a dozen other major national higher education systems. At the heart of most of these plans

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May 2, 2019 No Comments

The Warren Proposal

No doubt everyone has heard about the ginormous ($1.25 trillion) promise that Massachusetts Senator and Democratic Presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren made around post-secondary education last week.  But I suspect more people heard/saw the heat and noise about the promise rather than the promise itself.  So, herewith, a quick rundown and analysis: So, the first thing to note is that technically the package contained several policies.  The two major ones are about making tuition free in public schools, and a massive

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April 30, 2019 1 Comment

The End of the Heisei Era

At about 3 AM tomorrow, Eastern Daylight time, Japanese Emperor Akihito will abdicate the Chyrsanthemum Throne in favour of his son, Naruhito. With that, the Heisei Era will end and the Reiwa Era will begin (time in Japan being marked by Imperial reigns; after their death, emperors become known by the “reign names”, which is why we know refer to Emperor Hirohito as the Showa Emperor and yes this does go all go back to Han-era China, why do you

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April 29, 2019 No Comments

A New Set of International Rankings (II)

The Times Higher Education “Impact” Rankings (which I described yesterday) just dropped a couple of hours ago.  You can browse the results here.  The main news you readers need to know is that CANADA IS AWESOME (at least if you give any credence to these rankings).  McMaster came second overall, UBC third, U Montréal seventh, and five other institutions (Waterloo, York, Toronto, Laval and Ottawa) making the top 100. McMaster also came first overall in the category “decent work and economic growth”

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April 3, 2019 No Comments

A New Set of International Rankings (I)

Times Higher Education (THE) is putting out its brand spanking new “Impact Rankings” tomorrow morning in North America (it’s an evening launch at an event in Korea but timed to hit the papers at lunch time in Europe and for the early news cycle over here).  Today, I want to go through a little bit of background to these new rankings: tomorrow (Wednesday), the blog will be delayed a few hours so I can get you some analysis of the

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April 2, 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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