The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Worldwide PSE

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

Read More »
November 15, 2018 1 Comment

Notes on Canada’s International Advantages (and Disadvantages)

During my brief trip to Asia, I spent a fair bit of time chatting with people who one way or another are in the international education business.  Two somewhat connected thoughts: Canadians Continue to be Not Very Good at the Whole International Campus Thing.   I spent a couple of days in Dubai, where there are now somewhere on the order of 100-odd institutions operating, a substantial portion of which are international.  The only “semi”- Canadian one is an outfit called

Read More »
November 14, 2018 1 Comment

Update from India: The National Institutional Ranking Framework

Yesterday, I discussed the need to change culture in Indian universities to make them a bit more focused on output and less focused on the employment privileges of their faculty.  There is one trick the Modi government has used in this respect, the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF).  That’s right – in India, the government ranks its institutions.  And not for funding purposes – just to rank them and give them a kick in the tail to pay attention to performance.

Read More »
November 13, 2018 No Comments

Update from India (1)

I spent the last couple of weeks in India and the Middle East.  Over the next couple of days, I thought I would lay out some of my observations about higher education in these countries. First up, India, which has maybe the world’s most complicated higher education system (which I detailed in a three-parter back in 2014, here, here, and here – this blog will probably make more sense if you read them first).  Stripped to its essentials, India has the world’s second largest

Read More »
November 12, 2018 No Comments

Harvard on Trial

If you’re at all interested in American higher education, you’ll no doubt have been paying some attention these last couple of weeks to the Harvard Admissions Trial.  On the off chance you haven’t, here’s a quick re-cap: The basics of the case were stated back here by Ron Unz about five years ago: Asian-Americans (meaning mainly Chinese and Korean) get much higher SAT scores (and academic results generally) than other ethnic groups in the United States, yet their share of enrolments at places

Read More »
November 5, 2018 No Comments

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...