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Category: Worldwide PSE

Mega-Trends in International Higher Education – A Summary

Over the past few weeks, we’ve looked at some of the big changes going on in higher education globally.  To wit: Higher education student numbers are continuing to rise around the world. This massification in many countries is being accompanied by stratification.  Getting a “distinctive” degree at a prestige university remains hard; going abroad remains a good way of getting it.  So increases in international student numbers are likely to continue, ceteris paribus. Institutions in developing countries are unlikely to

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March 3, 2017 No Comments

Four Mega-Trends in International Higher Education – Catch-up is Hard

One of the perpetual alleged threats to cross-border education is that universities in the developing world might someday rival those in the west. Once that happens, the theory goes, students won’t need to go abroad and the whole international student thing goes up in smoke. It’s not an implausible theory, but it underplays how difficult catching up actually is. The most basic problem for universities in developing countries is paying staff. Those talented and fortunate enough to have a terminal

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February 24, 2017 No Comments

Four Mega-trends in International Higher Education – Economics

If there’s one word everyone can agree upon when talking about international education, it’s “expensive”. Moving across borders to go to school isn’t cheap and so it’s no surprise that international education really got big certain after large developing countries (mainly but not exclusively China and India) started getting rich in the early 2000s. How rich did these countries get? Well, for a while, they got very rich indeed. Figure 1 shows per capita income for twelve significant student exporting

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February 17, 2017 1 Comment

How to Fund (2)

As I noted yesterday, in Canada we have some kind of phobia about output-based funding.  In the 1990s, Ontario and Alberta introduced, and then later killed, key performance indicators with funding attached.  Quebec used to pay some money out to institutions based on the number of degrees awarded, not just students enrolled, but they killed that a few years ago too (I’m sure the rumour that it did so because McGill did particularly well on that metric is totally unfounded).

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February 15, 2017 4 Comments

When Should the Education System Say “No”?

There’s an argument going on in the UK right now about re-introducing grammar schools.  Until the 1960s, grammar schools were a selective tier of the secondary system.  Everyone took exams at the age of eleven, and the most academically able were selected to go to these schools, the purpose of which (everyone understood) was to enable people to go to university.  Those who did not pass were essentially out of luck as far as further education went: their choices were

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February 13, 2017 5 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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