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Category: Worldwide PSE

Better Know a Higher Ed System: Japan (Part 1)

I haven’t done one of these in awhile and since I’m vacationing here, so it seems like it’s time. Japan is a fascinating country for any number of reasons, but one of them is that it has played technological catch-up with the west not once but twice, and in both cases very successfully.  As such, reflecting on the role universities have played sheds considerable light on what we think of as “universal truths” about the benefits of higher education. Until

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May 22, 2018 No Comments

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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May 1, 2018 1 Comment

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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April 25, 2018 No Comments

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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April 24, 2018 2 Comments

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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April 13, 2018 No 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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