HEPI has undertaken a small piece of desk research on the tenure of university leaders over the past half a century.
For a full explanation of the chart below, see the new blog outlining the research on the Times Higher website. More...
13 novembre 2016
How long do vice-chancellors stay in post?
How Philip Hammond could turn £1 of spending into £22 of savings
Like the UK, New Zealand faces severe challenges in recouping student debt, particularly when it is owed by overseas borrowers. Around 3.25 billion New Zealand dollars are owed by those overseas. Two-thirds of those in default are in Australia, as Australians have access to loans from the New Zealand Government when studying there – just like EU citizens do for tuition fee loans when studying in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. At the end of June, outstanding student loans in default topped $1 billion in New Zealand for the first time and, while borrowers living overseas make up just 15% of the borrowing population, they account for 90% of the amount in default. More...
Speech to the HMC / GSA University Admissions Conference
Earlier today, I delivered the speech below to the Headmasters and Headmistresses’ Conference (HMC) / Girls’ School Association (GSA) annual University Admissions Conference at the University of Leicester. More...
The New WSJ/Times Higher Education Rankings
By Alex Usher. Almost the moment I hit send on my last post about rankings, the inaugural Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education rankings of US universities hit the stands. It didn’t make a huge splash mainly because the WSJ inexplicably decided to put the results behind their paywall (which is, you know, BANANAS) but it’s worth looking at because I think in many ways it points the way to the future of rankings in many countries. More...
Measuring Innovation
By Alex Usher. Yesterday, I described how the key sources of institutional prestige were beginning to shift away from pure research & publication towards research & collaboration with industry. Or, to put it another way, the kudos now come not from solely doing research, but rather in participating in the process of turning discoveries into meaningful and commercially viable products. More...
A Second Thought About Half-Way Through A Pretty Awful Day
By Alex Usher. Forgive the intrusion. But our neighbour to the South electing a quasi-fascist narcissist isn’t an every day occasion. There are some significant short-term consequences for Canadian higher education, and I thought I would just quickly enumerate them so that debate and preparation can begin. More...
Shifting Sources of Prestige
By Alex Usher. 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. More...
Student Living Standards
By Alex Usher. Last month, a group called Meal Exchange, an inter-university student anti-hunger group, in collaboration with the Ryerson School of Social Work, published an interesting paper called Hungry for Knowledge: Assessing the Prevalence of Student Food Insecurity on Five Canadian Campuses. People are mostly drawing the wrong conclusions from it, but it’s worth examining nonetheless. More...
Offshore Medical Schools
By Alex Usher. One of the most interesting (to me, anyways) facets of international higher education is the phenomenon of international medical schools.
In North America, we associate these exclusively with medical schools in the Caribbean. These mainly for-profit institutions have little research capacity and mainly teach students who are unable to get into mainstream domestic institution (they were most famously satirized in Doonesbury, when the famously dissolute Duke went to Port-au-Prince to open the Baby Doc School of Offshore Medicine in Port-au-Prince). More...
The European Way of Student Services
By Alex Usher. One of the delights of working in international higher education is that while higher education is pretty much isomorphic the world over, it’s not entirely so. There’s not so much variation that expertise isn’t transferable, but not so little that you can’t be learn something new by appreciating another country’s system. One are of particular interest is student accommodations and student services. More...
