Category: Worldwide PSE

2003-04: The Historical Hinge of International Rankings

Cast your minds back, if you will, by about 15 years.  Paul Martin had yet to show us why great finance ministers make lousy Prime Ministers.  The ghastly CROCS fad was still three years away.  And in China, Professor Nian Cai Liu had just released the inaugural Academic Ranking of World Universities, known more colloquially as the Shanghai Rankings. While national rankings were old hat, the Shanghai Rankings’ global nature was something genuinely new.  The sadly-defunct magazine Asiaweek had tried

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How Not to Argue About Free Tuition (New Zealand Edition)

Yesterday, I talked a little bit about how Canada needs better data to improve understanding of what various types of intervention – like Alberta’s tuition freeze or Targeted Free Tuition in Ontario and New Brunswick –do in terms of access.  But data is not enough: it’s a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one.  An example from our friends down in New Zealand can perhaps show why. We are coming up on the first anniversary of the implementation of free first-year

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France’s New International Education Strategy

On Monday, Campus France (which is roughly equivalent to Canada’s CBIE, if CBIE were an arms-length government agency) published its new Stratégie d’attractivité pour les étudiants internationaux.  It’s an intriguing document for a couple ofreasons so I thought I would talk a bit about it today. It starts off run-of-the-mill, with some gee-whiz stats about the growth of the international student market.  Then, on page 6, we get to the heart of the matter.  The page is titled “La France, 4ieme pays

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Wānangas, Tribal Colleges, and Canadian Indigenous PSE Institutions

A little over a year ago, Ontario brought in legislation to create the country’s first system of Indigenous universities.  In the upcoming federal budget, it seems possible that the Government of Canada may look at ways to finance Indigenous post-secondary education as well.  The question I want to look at today is what model or models of Indigenous higher education Canada might want to borrow from when developing its own system(s). Internationally, there are essentially three models for systems of

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Understanding Higher Education in the Gulf

On my way home from India last week, I stopped off in Dubai to take a quick peek at what was going on in the Gulf (which, just to define our terms a bit, consist of Saudi Arabia, Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, the last of which is a confederation of seven tiny statelets, including Abu Dhabi and Dubai).  Here’s my quick primer: The Gulf basically has four kinds of universities. First, it has “public” universities.  The

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