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Category: Worldwide PSE

Better Know a Higher Ed System: Japan (3)

Japan is one of the world’s most hierarchical societies.  You could have a pretty good argument about whether or not this is an artefact of the Tokugawa bakufu of the 17th century or if it goes back to the Kamakura regime of the 12th – 14th centuries, but either way, it’s been that way a long-time.  It’s in the language, the culture, the politics – pretty much everywhere.  And so, too, in the higher education system. This hierarchy manifests itself in a few ways,

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May 24, 2018 No Comments

Better Know a Higher Ed System: Japan (Part 2)

We all know that Japan is a technological leader, right? An “innovation nation”?  And we all know innovation comes from universities, right?  So Japanese universities must be kind of god-like in their innovation abilities, right?  Right? Well, no, not exactly.  Or not the way Canadian universities think about the term, anyway.  And understanding why this is the case is a helpful way to think about the poverty of Canada’s own innovation thinking. So, let’s start by looking at Gross Expenditures

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May 23, 2018 No Comments

Better Know a Higher Ed System: Japan (Part 1)

I haven’t done one of these in awhile and since I’m vacationing here, so it seems like it’s time. Japan is a fascinating country for any number of reasons, but one of them is that it has played technological catch-up with the west not once but twice, and in both cases very successfully.  As such, reflecting on the role universities have played sheds considerable light on what we think of as “universal truths” about the benefits of higher education. Until

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May 22, 2018 No Comments

May ’68 – May ’18?

It’s May First, the day when new student union executives typically take office in Canada.  But it’s also now exactly fifty years since the events of Mai ’68 in France, which was maybe the totemic moment for those who believe in a “student movement”.  In the United States, it was the year the anti-war movement really hit its stride (following the January Tet offensive), and where the image of student power hit its peak at the August 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.  In France,

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May 1, 2018 1 Comment

Watching the Americans

[the_ad id=”12142″] Yesterday I looked at the situation at Purdue University in Indiana and noted that one of the things permitting the “miracle” of frozen tuition was the significant increase in state appropriations over the last few years.  This made me wonder whether Indiana was an outlier or not, and indeed how states had been performing in the recession’s aftermath. About ten years ago, as the economic crisis was starting to take hold in the United States, things started to turn really

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April 25, 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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