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Category: Worldwide PSE

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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March 13, 2019 1 Comment

Excellence Initiatives

Over the past couple of decades, countries have designed policies to improve their research universities and make them more “world-class”, largely on the assumption that this will pay some kind of economic dividend.  A lot of these policies involved what became known as “excellence initiatives” – projects that concentrated spending on a restricted number of institutions with the idea that these extra resources would propel these universities into some kind of global elite.  This raises the question: do they work?

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March 11, 2019 2 Comments

Higher Education in Federal Countries

Maybe the most childish thing about Canadian higher education policy debates is the recurring insistence on the part of some English Canadians that higher education needs to be more of a federal responsibility (i.e. the central government needs to take a more active role).  If you exclude the motivated reasoning of Ottawa-based higher ed groups who want more things to happen in Ottawa so that they themselves can have more interesting things to do, this position is mostly born of

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March 8, 2019 1 Comment

How Equitable Can We Get?

Last month, the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO) published a paper entitled “Redefining Access to Postsecondary Education”.  It raises a number of interesting questions about access in Ontario (which apply to Canada generally), so it’s worth examination. Stripped to the basics, the document lays out the following point (quoted from the Executive summary) that Ontario funding and student aid policies “have resulted in a dramatic increase in overall enrolment at Ontario’s colleges and universities over the last two

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March 7, 2019 No Comments

The “Marketization” Critique

If you pay attention to the train wreck that is higher education policy in the UK, you will no doubt quickly come across claims that “marketization” is to blame.  Skyrocketing vice-chancellor’s (i.e. President’s) salaries?  Marketization at work.  Student Mental Health pressure?  Also marketization.  Universities doing dodgy property deals?  You bet that’s marketization. When one phenomenon gets blamed for literally everything that goes wrong, my spidey senses start tingling.  What is this “marketization” exactly?  How do we know it is to blame for everything? 

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February 27, 2019 1 Comment
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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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