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Tag: Competitiveness

Study Gods and Losers

This week’s guest on the World of Higher Education Podcast is Yi-Lin Chiang, author of Study Gods: How the New Chinese Elite Prepare for Global Competition which was published in 2022 by Princeton University Press. It’s a really extraordinary work of ethnography, following a group of students from a pair of elite Beijing secondary schools as they make their way towards China’s extremely challenging Gaokao system and on to university in China and beyond.  I reviewed it a few months ago and I was

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March 23, 2023 1 Comment

One More Thought on Administrative Bloat

One of the great things about Twitter is the quick feedback about things.  And last Wednesday, when I posted the graph below, people started banging on right away, saying “Yeah! Right on!  Administrative Bloat!” Figure 1: Percentage Growth in Academic vs. A&S Staff numbers, Self-Selected Institutions Which Actually Publish Staffing Data, 2010 to most recent year available             Nobody took me up on the offer about how to think about that graph in connection with what I had published the previous

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February 24, 2020 No Comments

Competition, Markets and the Persistence of Hegemonic Institutions

Competition metaphors abound in higher education.  We talk about competition for students, competition for academics.  Since the introduction of rankings – particularly the global ones about fifteen years ago – we talk about “moving up the tables”, in a squash-ladder kind of way. (There are some sumo metaphors with which I could regale you here but using my incredible powers of self-control, I will spare you, even though the Kyushu basho is currently bumming me out, what with all the top dudes

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November 19, 2019 2 Comments

A Book Unaware of its Own Argument

One minor Canadian publishing event of note this fall was the release of Anthony Lacavera’s How We Can Win (or possibly, Kate Fillion’s How We Can Win, since it’s fairly clear she’s the one who actually wrote it).  Lacavera is a minor celebrity in Canada for having been a serial CEO, most notably of WIND Canada, which briefly challenged the Bell/Telus/Rogers telecom oligopoly.  Since the book is about innovation policy, it sort of falls into the ambit of this blog, so here we are.

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December 8, 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

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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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