The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

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Tag: Systems

Arab Higher Education

This week’s The World of Higher Education podcast features the work of Dr. Elizabeth Buckner from the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education at the University of Toronto.  Dr. Buckner is the author of Degrees of Dignity: Arab Higher Education in the Global Era, published by the U of T Press in 2022.  It’s an excellent book on a topic that doesn’t get a lot of space in English language presses so I was very happy to see this book appear and even happier

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March 16, 2023 No Comments

Same But Different (Part 2)

Yesterday, I outlined the key similarities between the US and Canadian higher education systems.  Today, let’s talk differences.  The most obvious dissimilarity is some of the institutional forms. Religious colleges are much thicker in the ground in the US, as are liberal arts colleges (neither is unknown in Canada, but they take up a lot less space).  Community colleges look vastly different: in Canada they are their own sector, with most programs leading to stand-alone vocational credentials, though “vocational” is

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November 3, 2021 1 Comment

Studying Higher Education Decision-Making

One of the things that I find most interesting about higher education studies is how there are all these completely different regional/national literatures that pay almost no attention to one another.  For instance, in North America, higher education studies mostly come out of sociology and mostly deal with how institutions and institutional policies affect students.  In Latin America, there is a quite immense literature on things like pedagogy (seriously – go into any decent bookshop and there will be an

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November 26, 2020 1 Comment

How Many Universities are too Many?

Yesterday, we discussed whether a university can have too many faculties (answer: yes, but just try reducing them and see how far you get).  Today, I thought I would ask a similar question about universities.  It’s a familiar problem in many parts of Canada.  In Nova Scotia, arguments about whether there are “too many” institutions have been going on for almost a century.  Fifteen years ago, significant parts of BC went a bit bananas when the provincial government decided to

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October 7, 2020 1 Comment

That Alberta Transformation Contract

So, you may have seen on the weekend that the Alberta Government decided to award a $3.7 million contract to McKinsey & Company to conduct a review of the province’s post-secondary system. I have thoughts. The details of the contract are unavailable, but you can see the initial request for proposals here.  It’s actually a pretty cool set of research projects that might produce some interesting data.  I mean, admittedly they are things you’d expect your public service to mostly have

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June 15, 2020 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.

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