Tag: Prestige

International Alliances and Research Agreements

In business, companies strive to increase market share; in higher education, institutions compete for prestige.  This is why, despite whatever your told by people in universities, rankings are catnip to university administrations: by codifying prestige, they give institutions actual benchmarks against which they can measure themselves. But prestige is actually much harder to amass than market share.  Markets can increase in size; prestige is a zero-sum affair (my prestige is related directly to your lack thereof).  And universities have fewer

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Better Know a Higher Ed System: the East African Community

Yeah, I know: Africa’s not a country. But in higher education, at least, Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda are similar enough that they can be described as a single unit. The story starts with Makerere University in Kampala, which was founded in 1922.  It’s the mothership for the whole region – both the University of Dar Es Salaam and the University of Nairobi (the Tanzanian and Kenyan flagships) started as its branch campuses back in the 1960s, when it was known

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The Opposite of Strategy

The London Free Press recently published a summary of Western’s new draft strategic plan (there’s a longer version on Western’s website, but it’s password protected).  I urge you to read it.  It’s not uniquely bad by any means – there are lots of other institutions who have published similar sorts of documents – but it nevertheless represents a kind of quintessence of what’s wrong with university strategic plans.  It is a Stepford Wife of a strategy.  Nothing about it says, “Western”.  You

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Where MOOCs are really headed

This year was supposed to be the Year of the MOOC. With summer coming, it’s worth asking the question: how have they done and where are they headed? To me, the answer comes down to developments in three areas: Demand. This year, MOOCs have proved that i) there is lots of interest in free, continuing education out there – mostly from people who already have degrees – and ii) there are an awful lot of universities who think that catering

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The Economics of Merit Scholarships

There is a wonderful moment in Philip Delves Broughton’s Ahead of the Curve in which he describes a fight between a student and an administrator at Harvard Business School.  During the altercation, the student asks why he is being jerked-around, since, after all, he is “the customer”.  To this, the administrator calmly replies: “no you’re not, you’re the product”. For serious institutions, this is exactly right.  People judge a school based on its alumni and their accomplishments.  Students are just inputs in

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