Category: Worldwide PSE

Miracle at Purdue?

[the_ad id=”12142″] If you follow US higher ed news at all, you will have heard the story of Purdue University, Indiana’s other, somewhat more STEM-focussed, state university system.  Under the leadership of former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, Purdue has managed to freeze in-state tuition stable for the last seven years. How is this happening, you ask?  By what miracle does a major university like Purdue, which regularly ranks in the top 60 or 70 universities in the world, which relies on

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Student Protest Roundup

In the world of student protest, the kids from Parkland are justifiably getting all the attention, but there are other interesting manifestations of student protest that are important to note.  A quick round-up of other movements: In the United States, maybe the most interesting story of the last few weeks has been the student occupation of the Administration Building at Howard University, a historically black university in Washington DC.  The ostensible trigger was the revelation that several university employees had been

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Student Mobility in Asia

Typically, people in North America and Europe think about international student-mobility as either something which is internal to their geographic sphere (for example, circulation between Canada and the US, or within Europe through programs like Erasmus), or something in which students from outside Europe and North America (mostly Asia, a little bit from Africa and Latin America) move to our countries to attend university. But for the last five years or so, maybe one of the biggest trends in global

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Friday Book Reviews

Four books that have been across my desk recently: Higher Education Accountability. This is a short and sweet book by Seton Hall prof Robert Kelchen which provides maybe the best taxonomy of accountability measures in higher education measures I have ever seen.  Internal/external, to government, to the public – you name it, its in there, all with copious references to major events in US higher ed over the past ten years.  It perhaps occasionally resembles notes for a course a bit

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Left Bank Choosiness

To Paris, where a couple of big changes in education policy have led to student demonstrations.  Not particularly large or effective demonstrations (not yet, anyway), but significant nonetheless. The first – and for our purpose less important – set of changes are to the structure of the baccalauréat (which, confusingly for English speakers, refers to secondary school diplomas rather than undergraduate degrees which are called “licence”).  The new Bac rules – and as far as I can tell these only apply to the

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