The World of Higher Education

Today's guest is Dr. Ernest Aryeetey. He has not only led one of Africa’s premier universities — the University of Ghana — but is also currently the Secretary-General of the African Research Universities Alliance, or ARUA.Previous episodes mentioned:2.4: Higher Education in India1.5: Corruption in South African Higher Education

Today our guest is Professor Marcelo Knobel.  He is a highly respected Physicist and Science Educator.  He also holds the rare distinction of having been a rector both at one of Brazil’s top public universities, Universidade Estadual de Campinas or UNICAMP and also at a rising private university, the Insper Institute of Education and Research in Sao Paolo.  And that makes him a fantastically knowledgeable guide to the growth, structure and politics of higher education in Brazil.

Today's guest is Dr. Pushkar — just one name — the Director and Chief Executive of the International Centre Goa, and a frequent commentator on higher education in India. Dr. Pushkar and Alex cover how the Modi government is attempting to raise standards through the creation of a National Research Foundation, a system of “Institutions of Eminence” and by inviting foreign universities to set up campuses on the country. 

Today’s guest is Daniel A. Bell, a professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Hong Kong.  Originally from Montreal, he became a specialist in this study of Confucius from the angle of political theory, worked his way into a position at the famed Tsinghua university in Beijing before being named Dean of the School of Political Science and Public Administration at Shandong University. Bell — so far as I know — is the first westerner to be given senior responsibilities of this nature at a Chinese university, and he has written a charming book about his experiences, called The Dean of Shandong: confessions of a Minor Bureaucrat at a Chinese University, published by Princeton University Press. Book:The Dean of Shandong: Confessions of a Minor Bureaucrat at a Chinese UniversityThe State of Postsecondary Education in Canada 2023:Link to PDF

Joining us this week is Romania’s Minister of Education, Ligia Deca. Ministers in Romania are not generally speaking elected politicians — the country works on a model similar to that in France — and over the past two decades, an astoundingly high proportion of Education Ministers in Romania are university Presidents or Senate Chairs on temporary leave from their position. Ligia’s experience both as a student leader and a policy analyst means she represents the experiences of a wider constituency than most of her predecessors.SPEC 2023:The State of Postsecondary Education in Canada, 2023

We're back! Welcome back to the World of Higher Education, Season 2. In this episode, Alex Usher is joined by one of his favourite authors, Jeff Selingo, author of Who Gets in and Why: A Year Inside College Admissions. If you’re not American, listen hard to this podcast. Drink in all the weird details about the admissions process, and the amount of effort selective institutions put into identifying things which are not academic achievement but which are nevertheless similarly correlated to wealth and privilege. Have a listen.Book:Jeff Selingo, Who Gets in and Why: A Year Inside College AdmissionsRelated Past Podcast Episode:WorldEd 1.18: Admissions, Affirmative Action, and SCOTUSSPEC 2023:The State of Postsecondary Education in Canada, 2023

On the season finale of the World of Higher Education Podcast, we’re joined by Zach Bleemer, currently an Assistant Professor of Economics at Yale

Joining us on today’s episode of the World of Higher Education Podcast is Annalisa Pavan from University of Padova Italy. She's been studying Saudi higher education for many years. In particular, the way the country's most prestigious scholarship program, the scholarship of the custodian of the Two Holy Mosques functions. This episode discusses how the country's human resource development system is changing under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's leadership, and in particular, how the country is using study abroad as a tool for long-term economic development and diversification. 

Last fall, a quartet of Canadian higher education scholars – Julia Eastman, Olivier Bégin-Caouette Glen Jones, and Claude René Trottier, published a book with U of T Press entitled University Governance in Canada: Navigating Complexity. Joining on the World of Higher Education Podcast today is one of those four authors, Julia Eastman.  Read the book:University Governance in Canada: Navigating Complexity

If you’re in North America, you know that one of the perennial debates in higher education finance is about the efficacy of performance-based funding, or PBF, with the bulk of the academic evidence suggesting in one way or another that such schemes do not achieve their purported aims. On this week’s episode of The World of Higher Education Podcast, Dr. Ben Jongbloed from the Centre for Higher Education Policy Studies – that’s CHEPS – at the University of Twente in Enschede, the Netherlands joins us to a discuss a recent European Commission report on the subject. Read the report:Final Report of the Study on the state and effectiveness of national funding systems of higher education to support the European Universities Initiative (Volume I)