The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Worldwide PSE

Back to School 2018

Morning all.  Welcome back.  Everyone emotionally prepared for the semester?  No, me neither. So, it’s been an eventful summer.  The Saudi spat was most unfortunate: several thousand lives disrupted and a short-term hit of about $140 million to Canadian universities and colleges (they’ll make it all up on next year’s intake).  There’s some buzz around Ottawa on next year’s (pre-election) budget, particularly with respect to Indigenous education, something I’ll be talking about over the next couple of weeks.  And, of course, the Future Skills Centre (formerly

Read More »
August 27, 2018 No Comments

Post-Soviet Higher Education

As loyal readers know, I am a big believer that Soviet Higher Education teaches some real eternal truths about our sector (see here and here in particular).  This week I’ve been reading a book of essays called 25 Years of Transformations of Higher Education Systems in Post-Soviet Countries: Reform and Continuity edited by Jeroen Huisman, Anna Smolentseva and Isak Froumin.  And although structurally it’s a bit repetitive (as any book containing 15 identically-structured essays is likely to be), it’s very much worth a read

Read More »
June 15, 2018 No Comments

A Taxonomy of Private Universities

When people hear the words “private higher education”, most North Americans’ imaginations immediately jump to one of two mental images: prestigious Ivy League universities, or predatory chains of private colleges like ITT Technical Institutes or Corinthian Colleges or something like that.  But private higher education globally is actually more varied than this.  Let’s take a quick tour. Prestigious Private Non-Profits.  These are your Harvards, your Stanfords, your MITs.  Outside the United States, these are pretty rare: Japan has a few (Waseda, Keio), and there

Read More »
June 13, 2018 1 Comment

Chinese Higher Education in Four Graphs

Every once in awhile you have to just sit and marvel at what the Chinese government has managed to pull off in higher education.  Since the turn of the millennium, enrolments have increased five-fold.  That’s staggering enough, but check out figure 1 below. Figure 1: Change in Enrolment and Size of 18-21 Cohort, 2000-2017 (2000 = 100) That five-fold jump in enrolment?  It occurred at the same time as a 21% drop in the size of the 18-21 cohort (in

Read More »
June 8, 2018 No Comments

What’s Left of the Bologna Process

Last week, Ministers responsible for higher education from the 48 countries, constituting the members of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), met in Paris for the regular triennial “Bologna Process Ministerial Conference”.  Which was odd, because the substantive bits of the Bologna Process have been over for about a decade now.  So, what were they talking about? Back in the day (20 years ago, to be exact), higher education across Europe was a hodge-podge of systems.  The French had initial

Read More »
May 30, 2018 1 Comment

One Thought to Start Your Day

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.

Subscribe

Search Posts

Search Publications

Social Media

Linkedin Youtube Spotify

Recent Posts

More thoughts on...