Category: Worldwide PSE

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

Read More »

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

Read More »

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

Read More »

Canadian PSE Funding Is Weirder Than You Think

I’ve been playing around with funding data and discovered something a bit mind-altering.  It has to do with Ontario and how different it is from the rest of the country when it comes to post-secondary funding.  (All of the following graphs show income of PSE institutions – that’s colleges and universities together – from public and private sources expressed as a percentage of GDP.  Data for other countries come from OECD Education at a Glance 2018; data for Canadian provinces

Read More »

Delusional in Delhi

Last week, the Modi government in Delhi released a draft National Education Plan (NEP).  This is a big deal because the last new NEP came out over 30 years ago, and the Modi government has been promising a new one ever since it was first elected in 2014.  It’s also a big deal because it proposes some very big things, especially in higher education.  But Modi while has a reputation for talking up big goals, his track record on delivery is

Read More »