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Tag: Technology

H > A > H

I am a big fan of the economist Paul Romer, who is most famous for putting knowledge and the generation thereof at the centre of  discussions on growth.  Recently, on (roughly) the 25th anniversary of the publication of his paper on Endogeneous Technological Change, he wrote a series of blog posts looking back on some of the issues related to this theory.  The most interesting of these was one called “Human Capital and Knowledge”. The post is long-ish, and I recommend you read it

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December 7, 2015 No Comments

Game-Changing Institutional Alliances

A couple of weeks ago, Arizona State University and EdX announced an institutional tie-up, which received a fair bit of publicity.  Basically, the deal was that EdX – a well-known MOOC platform, owned jointly by Harvard and MIT – would help ASU put an undisclosed (but judging by the rollout, somewhere between 15 and 20) number of its big first-year courses online.  There were two startling things about this announcement: 1)      The MOOCs are not time-delimited, requiring students to start and

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May 26, 2015 1 Comment

The State is not Entrepreneurial

If you’re interested in innovation policy, and haven’t spent time under a rock for the last couple of years, you’ve probably heard of Mariana Mazzucato.  She’s the professor economics at the University of Sussex who wrote The Entrepreneurial State, which is rapidly becoming the source of an enormous number of errors as far as science and economic policy are concerned. Mazzucato’s work got a fair bit of publicity when it was released for pointing out that a lot of private sector

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April 23, 2015 1 Comment

ATMs and the Future of Education

I recently came across a fascinating counterintuitive piece of trivia in Timothy Taylor’s Conversable Economist blog.  At the time ATMs were introduced in 1980, there were half a million bank tellers in America.  How many were there 30 years later, in 2010?  Answer: roughly 600,000.  Don’t believe me?  See the data here. Most people to whom I’ve told this story tend to get confused by this.  ATMs are one of the classic examples about how technology destroys “good middle class jobs”.  And

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April 8, 2015 2 Comments

The End of College? (Part 2)

As discussed yesterday, Kevin Carey’s The End of College pinpoints higher education’s key ills in its inability (or unwillingness) to provide students with any real signal about the quality of their work.  This serves students badly in a number of ways.  First, it makes finding job matches harder, and second, it means institutions can mis-sell themselves by investing in the accoutrements of excellence (ivy, quads, expensive residences) without its substance. Essentially, Carey believes that technology will solve these problems.  He’s not a

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March 12, 2015 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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