Category: Worldwide PSE

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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Science Federalism

A couple of months ago, I read a rather interesting book called National Innovation Systems and the Academic Enterprise, which is a collection of essays edited by David Dill and Frans van Vught.  It’s a collection of essays about national – and in the case of the US, subnational – innovation policies, and while the quality of the national essays is a bit uneven (the Canadian one was marked mainly by overuse of the word “neoliberalism” and excessive off-point moaning about

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Roll On, Targeted Free Tuition

I’ve written a few times over the years about the spread of Targeted Free Tuition (TFT) programs.  Starting in Chile and Ontario in 2016 (after a false start in the UK in the late 1990s), they have started to spread around the world.  There are three new spots where the program is either now in place or under consideration, so I thought I would keep you all up to date on its spread.  South Africa.  You may recall that back in

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Antipodean Tuition News

All the really interesting news about tuition these days is happening south of the equator–let’s catch up. Chile.  When last we checked in on things in Santiago, we noted how President Bachelet’s gratuidad program had kind of foundered on the rocks of reality.  Having brought in free fees for the students in the bottom six income deciles at a cost of 607 billion pesos (roughly $1.25B Canadian), it turned out that the additional cost to make education free for the top four deciles

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