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Category: Worldwide PSE

Update from India: The National Institutional Ranking Framework

Yesterday, I discussed the need to change culture in Indian universities to make them a bit more focused on output and less focused on the employment privileges of their faculty.  There is one trick the Modi government has used in this respect, the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF).  That’s right – in India, the government ranks its institutions.  And not for funding purposes – just to rank them and give them a kick in the tail to pay attention to performance.

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November 13, 2018 No Comments

Update from India (1)

I spent the last couple of weeks in India and the Middle East.  Over the next couple of days, I thought I would lay out some of my observations about higher education in these countries. First up, India, which has maybe the world’s most complicated higher education system (which I detailed in a three-parter back in 2014, here, here, and here – this blog will probably make more sense if you read them first).  Stripped to its essentials, India has the world’s second largest

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November 12, 2018 No Comments

Harvard on Trial

If you’re at all interested in American higher education, you’ll no doubt have been paying some attention these last couple of weeks to the Harvard Admissions Trial.  On the off chance you haven’t, here’s a quick re-cap: The basics of the case were stated back here by Ron Unz about five years ago: Asian-Americans (meaning mainly Chinese and Korean) get much higher SAT scores (and academic results generally) than other ethnic groups in the United States, yet their share of enrolments at places

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November 5, 2018 No Comments

Culture

It occurs to me, after sitting in a conference talking about change in universities, that nearly everything in the public discourse about how universities need to change is nonsense.  Well, maybe not nonsense, but at least seriously beside the point. Here’s the issue.  When you see politicians or consultants or university leaders talk about “where the university/my university needs to go”, they are almost always talking about ends.  The university needs to be more skills/employment-focused.  The university needs to adopt

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November 1, 2018 3 Comments

“Innovative” Funding Mechanisms

Adapted from a talk delivered yesterday at the 14th FICCI Higher Education Summit in New Delhi, India. If you spend any time talking higher education policy in developing countries, the talk turns pretty quickly to the subject of “innovative methods of financing”. It’s easy to see why: money is always short, quality higher education costs a lot, and so these systems are always terribly squeezed.  Anyone holding out hope for “innovations” always gets a ready audience. The problem is that actual innovations

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October 31, 2018 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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