Moody’s ‘Special Comment’ report on the global recession and public/private universities

They say a year is a long time in politics. This last year has been a particularly long one, not only in political and policy circles, but for whole nations and their institutions. The sub-prime mortgage collapse quickly turned into a fiscal meltdown and is now a full-blown global recession.  ‘Hunkering down’, weathering the effects, [...]

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University institutional performance: HEFCE, UK universities and the media

This entry has been kindly prepared by Rosemary Deem, Professor of Sociology of Education, University of Bristol, UK. Rosemary’s expertise and research interests are in the area of higher education, managerialism, governance, globalization, and organizational cultures (student and staff).
Prior to her appointment at Bristol, Rosemary was Dean of Social Sciences at the University of [...]

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‘Passing judgment’: the role of credit rating agencies in the global governance of UK universities

This week, one of the two major credit rating agencies in the world, Standard & Poor’s (Moody’s is the other), issued their annual ‘Report Card’ on UK universities. This year’s version is titled UK Universities Enjoy Higher Revenues but Still Face Spending Pressures and it has received a fair bit of attention in media outlets [...]

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Science and the US university: video lecture series by editor-in-chief of Science and former (1980-92) Stanford University president

The Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California, Berkeley, is one of the more active centres of its type in North America. They sponsor an excellent working paper series (e.g., see ‘Universities, the US High Tech Advantage, and the Process of Globalization’ by John Aubrey Douglass. CSHE.8.2008 (May 2008)), workshops, seminars, [...]

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Changing higher education and the claimed educational paradigm shift – sobering up educational optimism with some sociological scepticism

If there is a consensus on the recognition that higher education governance and organization are being transformed, the same does not occur with regard to the impact of that transformation on the ‘educational’ dimension of higher education.
Under the traveling influence of the diverse versions of New Public Management (NPM), European public sectors are being molded [...]

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International students in the UK: interesting facts

Promoting and responding to the globalisation of the higher education sector are a myriad array of newer actors/agencies on the scene, including the UK Higher Education International Unit. Set up in 2007, the UK HE International Unit aims to provide:
credible, timely and relevant analysis to those managers engaged in internationalisation across [...]

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The Global Public University: global reach, local impact

On 11 March, William Brustein (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) and Susan Jeffords (University of Washington), two experts on the internationalization of higher education, held a candid discussion at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (pictured to the right) about how communities and regions benefit from the global efforts of their public universities.
Topics in this two hour-long [...]

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‘Branding’ global higher education services in the Netherlands

Governments are increasingly turning to ‘branding’ their higher education sector in order to promote them as globally competitive knowledge services sectors, and to secure a competitive advantage on the basis of imagined lifestyles, access of cultural experiences, a quality education, and so on. New Zealand, Malaysia, Singapore and Australia, to name just a few countries, [...]

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Implementing the Bologna process in Portugal: ‘how can we know the dance from the dancer?’

Editor’s note: This entry on Bologna and Portugal is one of a series of entries examining the role of the Bologna Process in the construction of the European Higher Education Area (see recent entries by Patricia Leon, Per Nyborg and Kris Olds) and exploring the consequences for member states and beyond. Today’s entry [...]

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EUA launches ‘Council for Doctoral Education’ to strengthen Europe’s global competitiveness

This week Georg Winckler, President of the the European Universities Association (EUA), launched what is billed as the first organization of its kind across Europe – the Council for Doctoral Education (EUA-CDE) committed to the development of Europe’s doctoral degrees.
According to Winckler, the purpose of the EUA-CDE is to develop greater levels of cooperation and [...]

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Benchmarking ‘the international student experience’

GlobalHigherEd has carried quite a few entries on benchmarking practices in the higher education sector over the past few month – the ‘world class’ university, the OECD innovation scoreboards, the World Bank’s Knowledge Assessment Methodology, Programme of International Student Assessment, and so on.
University World News this week have just reported on an interesting new [...]

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The Global Colloquium of University Presidents: events for global challenges?

University presidents (or their equivalents – vice-chancellors, rectors), especially those associated with universities that seek to be at the forefront of the internationalization/globalization agenda, are searching for suitable mechanisms to make their voices heard, create momentum for change, and generate discursive effects at a wide variety of scales. In other words university presidents seek material [...]

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