Category: Worldwide PSE

From the Shelves of HESA Towers (I)

It’s Friday, so it seems like a good day to write about one of the crazy books I have on my shelves (which, as any of my staff can tell you, is a theme that could last for quite some time).  Here’s one that’s kind of relevant, given that it’s about an event that ended 50 years ago next week: Shut It Down!  A College in Crisis, which is about the strike at San Francisco State (SFS) College in 1968-1969.

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The Krueger/Card Studies

Very sadly, Princeton labor economist Alan Krueger died by suicide last week.  Krueger was much-loved in the profession. He produced an enormous amount of work on the minimum wage and for a couple of years served as Chair of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers.  He also thought a lot about education and famously declared in one paper (co-authored with Stacy Dale) that the effects of attending an extremely selective university (i.e. one of the top Ivy League Schools) on

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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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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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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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