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Category: Worldwide PSE

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

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November 5, 2018 No Comments

Culture

It occurs to me, after sitting in a conference talking about change in universities, that nearly everything in the public discourse about how universities need to change is nonsense.  Well, maybe not nonsense, but at least seriously beside the point. Here’s the issue.  When you see politicians or consultants or university leaders talk about “where the university/my university needs to go”, they are almost always talking about ends.  The university needs to be more skills/employment-focused.  The university needs to adopt

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November 1, 2018 3 Comments

“Innovative” Funding Mechanisms

Adapted from a talk delivered yesterday at the 14th FICCI Higher Education Summit in New Delhi, India. If you spend any time talking higher education policy in developing countries, the talk turns pretty quickly to the subject of “innovative methods of financing”. It’s easy to see why: money is always short, quality higher education costs a lot, and so these systems are always terribly squeezed.  Anyone holding out hope for “innovations” always gets a ready audience. The problem is that actual innovations

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October 31, 2018 No Comments

League-Table Rankings, Sumo Style

Most university rankings (U-Multirank is the big exception) take a league table format originally used by esteemed psychologist, eugenicist and baseball enthusiast James McKeen Cattell in his early rankings early 20th century (for more on Cattell see back here).  One effects of borrowing league tables as a metaphor is that there is an implicit assumption that the inhabitants of that table are able to move up and down the league table as baseball or football teams do.  If a team can crash

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September 28, 2018 4 Comments

“Free Fees” in New Zealand

New Zealand recently became the darling of a certain wing of the post-secondary world when it’s new Labour Government, led by Jacinda Arden, translated a second-place finish in the 2017 election into government (via some deft coalition negotiations) and proceeded to implement a free-tuition plan. Tuition-free universities aren’t new to New Zealand; in fact the whole country was more or less tuition free until 1991.  It was in that year that a former Labour government (of an unusually pro-market, privatizing

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September 27, 2018 2 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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