Join host Alex Usher and guest Simon Marginson, Emeritus Professor of Higher Education at Oxford University, as they discuss the current state of global higher education in this inaugural episode of Season 3 of the World of Higher Education podcast. They explore which countries are thriving, the implications of geopolitical tensions, the evolving missions of universities worldwide, and the challenges faced by the higher education sector amidst growing populist attacks and state control. Discover Simon's views on the roles and influence of big American universities, China's educational advancements, and the critical balance between employability and academic freedom.

Today's guest, for the final episode of the season, is William C. Kirby, T. M. Chang Professor of China Studies at Harvard University and Spangler Family Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, and formerly that university’s dean of the faculty of Arts and Sciences. Two years ago he wrote a book called Empire of Ideas: Creating the Modern University for Germany to America to China. Dr. Kirby, having had the rare good fortune to teach in all three countries is extremely well-placed to talk about how the top institutions in all three have evolved over the decade. 

Today's guest is Dr. Mykola Trofymenko, the President of Mariupol State University. He agreed to join the show to talk about the events of early 2022, how he steered the institution through the siege and after it, and how the institution, now known as “the Invincible University” came to gain a new home in Kyiv. It’s a harrowing story, but also an inspiring one — and one that gets to the heart of the question: what makes a university — bricks and mortar, or people?

To support Mariupol State University please click here.

This week we welcome back our very first podcast guest, Andrew Norton, Professor in the Practice of Higher Education Policy at Australian National University, to follow up on the Australian Universities Accord. Andrew has been at the forefront of higher education policy debates in Australia for over two decades, and is the author of several editions of “Mapping Australian Higher Education”. Today, Andrew's back to give us his expert take on questions including, what exactly does the final report recommend? How workable are recommendations? How much of it will the government actually choose to implement?

Links:

• Australian Universities Accord
• Mapping Australian Higher Education 2024
• The World of Higher Education, Season 1 Episode 1

With us today is Maria Yudkevich, a professor of Higher Education at the University of Haifa in Israel. She is the co-author, with Yaroslav Kuzminov of the excellent book Higher Education in Russia, published in 2022 by Johns Hopkins Press. She’s an expert guide to both the elements of change and continuity that have gone along with a century of constant upheaval, and, as a former academic in the Russian system, she also has a strong sense of the current system’s strengths and weaknesses. Maybe her most interesting point has to do with the nature of power in and over Russian universities: that even when universities appeared to have autonomy, the arm of the state was never that far apart. 

With us this week is David Kernohan, Deputy Editor of the website WonkHE. which is as close to a sister organization to Higher Education Strategy Associates as exists anywhere on the globe, David, more than anyone, has been tracking the development of the Lifelong Learning Entitlement since it was a wee nugget of a policy notion. He tells us about how the policy has changed over time, what recent pilot projects tell us about the policy’s chances for success are and – crucially – gives us some odds on the likelihood of this policy ever seeing the light of day given the number of still-unanswered questions on policy details and the upcoming UK elections.

With us today is Courtney Brown, Vice President of Impact and Planning at Lumina Foundation and the person most responsible for making sure the foundation hits its goals and develops new and even more meaningful ones. The conversation covers how Lumina went about its goal setting process, what tactics it's used to build a wide network of alliances across the U.S., how close it's come to succeeding in its goals, and what the organization's next set of goals might be. 

Today's guest is Angela Yung-Chi Hou. She is currently a Professor of National Chengchi University in Taipei and for nearly two decades has been the foremost English-language scholar of Taiwanese higher education. Bu her career has not been restricted to Academia; for much of the past few years she was also head of the Higher Education Evaluation and Accreditation Council of Taiwan, which is one of the most important bodies in the Taiwanese higher ed ecosystem. That makes her an ideal guide to the history and politics of higher education in Taiwan.

Our guest this week is Alex Usher, President and CEO of Higher Education Strategy Associates. Alex joins co-producer Tiffany MacLennan to talk about the Canadian Higher Education sector, higher education consulting, and his thoughts on the future of higher education. 

Today's guest is Andrée Sursock, a higher education consultant and Senior Advisor to the European Universities Association. She's here to take us on a guided tour of the French system and its history and also to describe the rapid pace of reforms that have taken place over the last two decades, in particular through the presidencies of Nicolas Sarkozy and Emmanuel Macron.

Past episodes referenced:
1.10: Autonomy Scorecard

Books referenced:
Academic Star Wars, Excellence Initiatives in Global Perspective
Edited by Jamil Salmi, Philip Altbach, Maria Yudkevich

Today's guest is Dr. Morshidi Sirat. He’s one of Malaysia’s most experienced higher education observers and policy-makers. Over the last two decades he;s been a Dean, a Vice-Chancellor, Advisor to the Minister of Higher Education, Director General of Higher Education for Malaysia and the Founding Director of Malaysia’s Commonwealth Tertiary Education Facility. In our discussion, he guides us through the ins-and-outs of Malaysia’s success over many decades of higher education investment. 

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 education
• Roger Smyth: The new take on fees free

Our guests this week are Andrea Petö from the Central European University in Vienna and Jo-Anne Dillabough of Cambridge University in the UK. These two are collaborators on the UK ESRC project Higher Education, States of Precarity and Conflict in the 'Global North' and 'Global South': UK, Hungary, South Africa, and Turkey and the Horizon Europe project Rising nationalisms, shifting geopolitics and the future of European higher education and research openness. In early May, they jointly penned an article for University World News entitled New Deceptions: How Illiberalism is hijacking the university. Today’s discussion ranges over the history of higher education (haven’t universities been illiberal for most of their history), institutional ownership (are private universities necessarily illiberal?) and the role of federalism in moderating illiberalism. 

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 Education

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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 Perspective
Open 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 Continuity
Building 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

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 India
1.5: Corruption in South African Higher Education

This week's guest is Dr. Gero Federkeil, head of international projects at the Centrum fur Hochschulenwicklung, or Center for Higher Education, in Gütersloh, Germany. He's with us to talk about two totally unrelated topics: the changing profile of university enrolments in Germany, and rankings — specifically U-Multirank. 

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 University

The 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 Admissions

Related Past Podcast Episode:
WorldEd 1.18: Admissions, Affirmative Action, and SCOTUS

SPEC 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)

On this episode of the World of Higher Education Podcast, Javier Botero joins us to discuss Colombian higher education. These days he's a lead consultant at the World Bank, but formerly he was the Vice Minister of Higher Education in Columbia, and he's here with us today to provide an overview of recent policy developments in the nation.

Today's guest today is Dr. Jisun Jung of the University of Hong Kong. She is an expert in Korean higher education and the discussion today ranges from the post-war history of higher education to the very real and immanent challenges that institutions are facing with respect to declining enrolment. 

On today’s episode of the World of Higher Education podcast, we’re talking about Nigerian higher education. Economically and politically, Nigeria is one of Africa's powerhouses. Yet, when it comes to higher education, it trails significantly. To help us understand why that's the case, Dr. Olabisi Deji-Folutile joins us. Dr. Deji-Folutile is editor-in-chief of Frank Talk Now and chief operating officer of AF24 News, and who writes frequently on higher education matters from Lagos. 

Bryan Alexander joins us to talk about his new book, Universities on Fire, Higher Education in the Climate Crisis. 

Download PDF transcript

Join Alex Usher as he talks all things Irish higher education. Joining as expert guide to the terrain is guest, Ellen Hazelkorn, principal at BH Associates, a Higher Education consultancy in Ireland, a Professor Emerita at the Technological University of Dublin and one of the sharpest all-around minds in European higher education.

Download PDF transcript

This week’s guest is Enora Bennetot Pruvot, Deputy Director Governance, Funding & Public Policy Development at the European University Association. She joins Alex Usher from Brussels to talk about the EUA’s recently-released University Autonomy Scorecard, of which she was a co-author.

Download PDF transcript

This week’s guest is Juan Carlos Navarro, International expert in higher education, innovation and digital talent; Senior advisor to several international institutions and universities; and Member of the international faculty of the Instituto de Estudios Superiores de Administración, in Caracas, Venezuela. He joins us talk about what has happened to higher education in Venezuela under the rule of Hugo Chavez, Nicolas Maduro, and their Bolivarian Socialist regime over the past 25 years.

This week’s guest on The World of Higher Education Podcast is Ethan Schrum, Associate Professor of history at Asuza Pacific University in California. Ethan is the author of a very nice work called The Instrumental University: Education in the Service of the National Agenda Since World War II which puts into perspective a very important piece of the history of higher education in North America.

Download PDF transcript

This week’s guest on the World of Higher Education Podcast is Yi-Lin Chiang, author of Study Gods: How the New Chinese Elite Prepare for Global Competition which was published in 2022 by Princeton University Press. It’s a really extraordinary work of ethnography, following a group of students from a pair of elite Beijing secondary schools as they make their way towards China’s extremely challenging Gaokao system and on to university in China and beyond.  Have a listen.

Download PDF transcript

This week’s The World of Higher Education podcast features the work of Dr. Elizabeth Buckner from the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. Dr. Buckner is the author of Degrees of Dignity: Arab Higher Education in the Global Era, published by the U of T Press in 2022.

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This week, Alex Usher is joined by guest, Dr. Jonathan Jansen. Jansen is a professor of education at Stellenbosch University, and the President of the Academy of Science in South Africa. He joins Alex Usher to discuss his harrowing new book, Corrupted, a study in chronic dysfunction in South African universities.

Download PDF transcript

This week's guest is Jamil Salmi, former tertiary education co-ordinator with the World Bank, global higher education consultant and all-around mensch.

Back in the mid-to-late 2000s, Jamil was perhaps the world-expert on the phenomenon of World-Class universities and his recipe for creating them — money plus talent plus good governance, and let stir for a few decades — has certainly stood the test of time.

Over the past couple of years, Jamil's been working extensively on the issue of equality of access in different parts of the world, in particular in low- and middle-income countries.  You will not be shocked to learn that higher education access is unequal everywhere. What is more interesting perhaps is the fact that these gaps vary *significantly* by country, and not always in ways that you would think. Have a listen.

Download PDF transcript

Today's guest is Thomas Jorgensen, the Director for Policy Coordination and Foresight at the European University Association. He walk us through the way policy is made in Brussels and how European Commission has gradually acquired competencies in areas relevant to higher education.

Join host Alex Usher as he meets with Chris Marsicano, Assistant Professor of Educational Studies at Davidson College in North Carolina, to discuss what's ahead for Higher Education in the United States in 2023.

Host: Alex Usher
 Guest: Chris Marsicano

Produced by: Tiffany MacLennan and Samantha Pufek

PDF Transcript

In this episode, Alex Usher is joined by Dave Guerin, Chief Executive and Editor-in-Chief of Tertiary Insight, a higher education news service based in Wellington, New Zealand. The subject: the higher education record of recently resigned New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.

Host: Alex Usher
 Guest: Dave Guerin

Produced by: Tiffany MacLennan and Samantha Pufek

PDF Transcript

In this episode, Andrew Norton, Professor in the Practice of Higher Education at the Centre for Social Research and Methods at the Australian National University joins host Alex Usher to talk about the new Labour Government’s “Universities Accord”. Andrew has been a long-time observer of the higher education scene in Australia.  For many years, he wrote the Mapping Higher Education in Australia, which was the inspiration for Higher Education Strategy Associates’ State of Post-Secondary Education in Canada.

Host: Alex Usher
 Guest: Andrew Norton

Produced by: Tiffany MacLennan and Samantha Pufek

PDF Transcript

This week's guest is Dr. Gerard Postiglione, Professor Emeritus and Honorary Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Hong Kong. In this episode, Gerry takes us through changes in higher education in China, from the initial opening under Deng Xiaoping, through the rapid system expansion under Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, to the present system under Xi Jinping.