The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Worldwide PSE

The Western China Dilemma

The South China Morning Post ran an interesting piece recently on the roll-out of China’s Thirteenth Five-Year Plan for Education.  It suggested that in the central and western regions of the country – that is, the poorer, non-coastal bits – the bulk of the task of educational development , including higher education, is going to fall on the private sector.  And yes, this is communist China we’re talking about. Now at one level this might look like a smart move.  Across

Read More »
March 28, 2017 No Comments

Representing Universities

Some light reading today, after a heavy week. There’s a lot of talk these days about the political divide between those with higher education and those without. But I want to take you back to a time, where that political divide was made real. A time when universities actually had their own seats in Parliament, non-physical constituencies where the electors were made up entirely of alumni. The practice of granting universities representation in Parliament seems to originate in Scotland sometime

Read More »
March 24, 2017 3 Comments

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

Read More »
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

Read More »
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

Read More »
February 17, 2017 1 Comment

One Thought to Start Your Day

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.

Subscribe

Search Posts

Search Publications

Social Media

Linkedin Youtube Spotify

Recent Posts

More thoughts on...