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Tag: Australia

The Canada-Is-Falling-Behind-on-Study-Abroad Fallacy

If there’s one drum Canadian universities love to beat on international education, it’s that Canada is falling way behind other countries in terms of students gaining international experience during their studies.  It’s a great story, except for one tiny thing: it’s not true.   It’s really not true. Check out, for instance, this data below, from the most recent OECD Education at a Glance, which shows the percentage of total students from each country who are enrolled abroad (Data is from Table C4.3, for

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November 2, 2017 1 Comment

Data on Sexual Harassment & Sexual Assault in Higher Ed-an Australian Experiment

Earlier this year, I raged a bit at a project that the Ontario government had launched: namely, an attempt to survey every single student in Ontario about sexual assault in a way that – it seemed to me – likely to be (mis)used for constructing a league table on which institutions had the highest rates of sexual assault.  While getting more information about sexual assault seemed like a good idea, the possibility of a league table – based as it would be

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September 8, 2017 No Comments

The Australian Experiment in Cutting Red Tape

One thing everybody hates is red tape – especially pointless reporting requirements which take up time, money and deliver little to no value.  Of late, Canadian universities have been talking more and more about various types of reporting burden and how they’d really like being freed from some of it.  For those interested in this subject, it’s instructive to see how the issue has been handled in Australia. The peak university body in Australia (called – appropriately – Universities Australia)

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November 25, 2016 No Comments

Innovation to Watch at the University of Sydney

Australian universities seem to do “Big Change” a lot better than universities elsewhere.  A few years ago, the University of Melbourne radically overhauled its entire curriculum in the space of about two years partly to create a more North American-like distinction between undergraduate and professional degrees and partly to reduce degree clutter by winnowing the number of different degrees from over a hundred to just six.  (For a refresher, I wrote about this back here). If you read press reports about

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April 7, 2016 4 Comments

(#fake)Tenure, Governance, and Academic Freedom

If you follow higher education news from south of the border, one scrap you’ll probably have noticed over the past year or so is the one over tenure in Wisconsin.  Until recently, tenure provisions at the University of Wisconsin were inscribed in state law.  Last year, Wisconsin Governor and erstwhile presidential candidate Scott Walker decided to remove tenure protection, leaving the University’s Board of Regents to inscribe it in their own rules.  At the same time, the Governor gave university

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February 8, 2016 3 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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