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Tag: Prestige

Lessons from Mid-Century Soviet Higher Education

I’ve been reading Benjamin Tromly’s excellent book Making the Soviet Intelligentsia: Universities and Intellectual Life under Stalin and Khrushchev. It’s full of fascinating tidbits with surprising relevance to higher education dilemmas of the here and now. To wit: 1) Access is mostly about cultural capital. There were times and places where communists waged war on the educated, because the educated were by definition bourgeois. In China during the cultural revolution, or in places like Poland and East Germany after WWII,

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April 6, 2017 4 Comments

Shifting Sources of Prestige

The currency of academia is prestige.  Professors try to increase theirs by publishing better and better papers, giving talks at conferences and so on.  Becoming more prestigious means offers to co-author with a more illustrious class of academics, increasing the chance of book deals at better university presses, etc.  And at the institutional level, universities become more prestigious by being able to attract and nurture a more prestigious group of professors, something which is done by lavishing them with higher

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November 9, 2016 1 Comment

Are NSERC decisions “skewed” to bigger institutions?

That’s the conclusion reached by a group of professors from – wait for it – smaller Canadian universities, as published recently in PLOS One. I urge you to read the article, if only to understand how technically rigorous research without an ounce of common sense can make it through the peer-review process. Basically, what the paper does is rigorously prove that “both funding success and the amount awarded varied with the size of the applicant’s institution. Overall, funding success was

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June 8, 2016 4 Comments

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Universities and Colleges

One of the problems in higher education is that there’s a whole lot of effort expended on “who’s the best” (which, as measured by most rankings, is some function of money, age, and size), and not a lot of serious effort put into answering the question: “how can institutions get better”?  (Or at least, in finding answers that don’t boil down to: publish more/get more international students.) I get to see a fair number of universities around the world.  And

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December 2, 2015 No Comments

World-Class Universities in the Great Recession: Who’s Winning the Funding Game?

Governments always face a choice between access and excellence: does it make more sense to focus resources on a few institutions in order to make them more “world-class”, or does it make sense to build capacity more widely and increase access?  During hard times, these choices become more acute.  In the US, for instance, the 1970s were a time when persistent federal budget deficits as a result of the Vietnam War, combined with a period of slow growth, caused higher

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November 5, 2015 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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