Tag: United States

Nobody is Coming to Save Us, But…

You may have heard me say once or twice that “nobody is coming to save us.” I’ve been told that this has become something of a catchphrase in Canadian universities over the past year, so much so that I kind of wish we’d done merch with that slogan. The phrase is still true; in fact, given the metastasizing national security crisis, it’s arguably truer now than it was a year ago. But given the chaos south of the border, it

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That NIH Thing You’re Hearing About

If you’re in the higher education field, you have probably heard a lot in the last four days about the Trump regime reducing funding to the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—roughly the equivalent of our Canadian Institutes of Health Research, only with a budget four times larger even after adjusting for population size. Specifically, the Trump administration is limiting the amount of overhead costs that institutions can recover from government. Cue much shouting in the US about adverse impacts, destruction

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Taking Donald Trump Seriously and What it Means for Canadian Higher Education

If there is a unifying element to Canada, it is a desire not to be American. Sometimes, this leads us down some pretty juvenile pathways; for instance, the impossibility of having serious discussions about health care because anyone against the clearly inadequate status quo simply must be in favour of “American-style private care.” But sometimes, like right now, this unity is a pretty handy political asset. A maniac is in possession of our southern border. He wants something from us. It’s not trade

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Top 10 U.S. Higher Ed Stories of 2024 with Robert Kelchen

Robert Kelchen is a prolific higher education researcher and also the head of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville’s Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies. He is also a pretty steady blogger on higher education, but he doesn’t have the time to post quite as much as he did before he took on all those extra admin duties. One of the casualties of his reduced blogging schedule is that he no longer posts his regular “top ten” stories of the year in US

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Some Notes on Global Funding of Higher Education

This blog post is adapted from a presentation I gave last week at the European Universities’ Association’s Funding Forum in Helsinki. My colleague on the panel, Enora Pruvot, was tasked with summarizing funding trends from the perspective of European institutions; mine was to zero in on the world’s 11 biggest spenders on tertiary education outside Europe, which is why you won’t see data in here on places like France, Germany, the UK, or Spain. (Why eleven? It was supposed to

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