Category: Worldwide PSE

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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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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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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