The World of Higher Education

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. 

To help sort out all the complexities of the US system, our guest today is Brendan Cantwell, professor at Michigan State University who specializes in the political economy of higher education. He takes us through some of the more notable state-level battles going on right now in America, the difference in how Republicans attack public vs private institutions, and most interestingly of all, the qu...

Today my guest is Phil Hill, an ed tech consultant and Lead at Phill Hill and Associates . Today he joins us to talk about the last twenty years and how they have shaped the sector. The conversation ranges pretty widely across a number of topics here, one of the most interesting has to do with the historic role of MOOCs. Alex and Phil agree that they are a historic failure judged by the claims mad...

Today's guest is Professor N. V. Varghese, the Vice Chancellor of the National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration in New Delhi. He's the co-editor of a recent book entitled India Higher Education Report 2021, Private Higher Education and he's with us today to discuss his book. Two points really stand out. The first is the truly different worlds inhabited by private colleges in In...

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 t...

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 ”. Toda...

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...

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...

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...

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 o...

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:...

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 throu...

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 actuall...

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 powerle...

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 sens...

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 Phili...

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 o...

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...

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...

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...

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 c...

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

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 knowl...