The World of Higher Education

With us today is Roger Smyth. He’s a consultant based in Christchurch New Zealand and a former senior official in New Zealand’s Ministry of Education, and he’s had a privileged perch to observe changes in the country’s student assistance policies over the past two decades. Roger is skeptical about the value of the new program. But what was fascinating in this interview is how much evidence actually exists that the previous policy of making first year free had almost no impact either. Links referenced:Education Counts: Fees Free tertiary educationRoger Smyth: The new take on fees free

Today my guest is Brian Rosenberg, a former president of Macalester University of Minnesota and currently a president in residence — that's really a thing — at Harvard University's Graduate School of Education. He's just written a book about academic politics with the wonderful title, “Whatever It Is, I'm Against It”: Resistance to Change in Higher Education. In it, Rosenberg describes how powerless are most universities, those supposed bastions of evidence and truth, to get their faculty to actually pay attention to anything regarding to the science of learning. Or even getting faculty to collectively agree to change of any sort. Link to book:“Whatever It Is, I'm Against It”: Resistance to Change in Higher EducationInterested in learning more about HESA's AI Advisory Services? Contact Us

With us today is Marcelo Rabossi, a professor of higher education policy and management at Universidad Torcuato di Tella in Buenos Aires. Over the course of this conversation, he guides us through the ins and outs of the country's public and private university systems, provides insight into previous attempts to introduce tuition fees in the system, and reflects on the deep conservatism in the sense of resistance to change that exists within Argentina's universities.

Today's guest is Philip Altbach. Phil is Professor Emeritus at Boston College, the former Founding Director of that university's internationally-renowned Centre for International Higher Education, and author of countless books and articles on HE. The new book "Academic Star Wars: Excellence Initiatives in Global Perspective", which consists of a series of nine national case studies edited by Philip Altbach, Maria Yudkevich, Jamil Salmi is available here:Academic Star Wars: Excellence Initiatives in Global PerspectiveOpen Access Link

Joining us today is Robert Kelchen, professor and head of the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and author of the genuinely excellent book Higher Education Accountability from Johns Hopkins Press. In his pre-administration life when he was at Seton Hall University, Robert kept up a very active blog o higher education issues, and one of his most-read features was an annual list of the top ten most important stories in American Higher Education, published each December.  We asked Robert a couple of months ago if he’d come on the show to reprise the top ten and to our great delight, he agreed.Book link:Higher Education Accountability

This week, we welcome Professor Isak Froumin onto the podcast. Froumin is Head of the Observatory of Higher Education Innovations at Jacobs University, in Bremen Germany and the co-editor of two key books on what has happened to universities across the 15 ex-republics. The first, 25 Years of Transformations of Higher Education Systems in Post-Soviet Countries: Reform and Continuity, which appeared in 2018, and the second is Building Research Capacity at Universities: Insights from Post-Soviet Countries, out earlier this year from Palgrave Macmillan. The discussion ranges over a wide variety of topics: how to develop system typologies in post-Soviet space, how various nations went about de-Sovietifcation and also how a few seem now to be re-Sovietizing just in the past couple of years. Books:25 Years of Transformations of Higher Education Systems in Post-Soviet Countries: Reform and ContinuityBuilding Research Capacity at Universities: Insights from Post-Soviet Countries

With us today is Tamson Pietsch, author of a new book on the Floating University from the University of Chicago Press. Her book covers a number of facets of this story: the extraordinary journey itself to over 40 ports around the world, the students’ curriculum and on-shore activities (which included meeting an extraordinary number of world leaders), and the extraordinary shenanigans that went on between NYU and Lough that threatened to stop the voyage before it even began. It’s a multi-faceted story, concentrating to a significant extent on the politics of educational tourism: which students got to take part, what parts of the world were they shown, and how were local issues framed?Book:The Floating University

This week's episode features Paula Clasing Manquian, a postdoctoral researcher in education from Chile’s Nucleo Milenio de Educacion Superior. The discussion takes a look back at the past dozen years and how the politics of higher education in Chile have changed, including the rise of individuals such as Gabriel Boric, Camila Vallejo and Giorgio Jackson, the compromises that were required to bring “gratuidad” into existence, and how this policy has become universally accepted across the political spectrum. 

Today's guest is Marion Lloyd, a higher education researcher at UNAM, and she’s here today to give a tour of UNAM’s electoral system, the behind-the-scenes power politics that accompanies this process and handicaps the current race which is coming to a head in the next week or so.    

Today's guest is Raffaele Trapasso, a Senior Economist at the OECD who heads the that organizations Platform for the Entrepreneurship Education Collaboration and Engagement Network or EECOLE. This episode ranges over a number of issues including the role that the UN Sustainable Development Goals in focussing collaborations, how best to formalize ties between institutions and communities, and the continuing differences between Europe and America in terms of the pattern of collaboration.Related Blog Post:Smart Specialization