Cutting NSF Is Like Liquidating Your Finest Investment
Look closely at your mobile phone or tablet. Touch-screen technology, speech recognition, digital sound recording and the internet were all developed using […]
How Germany Managed to Abolish University Tuition Fees
If Germany has done it, why can’t we? That’s the question being asked by many students around the world in countries that charge tuition fees to university. Barbara Kehm explains how Germany reached this point, and whether it’s likely to stay there.
Shake By All Means, But Social Science is Not Natural Science
Will Davies responds to the calls for a social science shake-up by questioning the status of the social sciences in 2014 as something other than mere understudies to the natural sciences. The shared terrain of the two, he argues, seems to rest on various acts of forgetting on the part of the social sciences, but no acts of learning on the part of the natural sciences.
Shaken and Stirred: Christakis on Re-ordering Social Science
With one foot firmly planted in natural science and one in social science, Yale’s Nicholas A. Christakis looks at the landscape of the latter and wonders why it’s changed so little in the past century. Is it time for a common-sense, and yet radical, reshuffling of the institutional frameworks that we tend to accept as permanent?
World University Rankings: The Haves Have It
There’s a rankings mania affecting institutions of higher education. But just because it’s a mania, does that make bad?
What Should Universities Make of Online Brand Awareness?
Awareness and prestige of universities is increasingly being driven by their exposure on online platforms. But what does that really mean? Fernando Rosell-Aguilar explores that question.
Neoliberal Education and Its Discontents in South Korea
What might be the reductio ad absurdum of academic ranking? South Korea might offer a hint, as the ‘spec’ generation focuses on its monetizable skillset –sometimes to the exclusion of most anything else.
The Perverse Results of Performance Funding for Universities
Given the rise of policies that try to link state appropriations for public universities to the student outcomes for those institutions, the natural question must be: do these funding policies correlate with higher student achievement? The answers may surprise …
The Slippery Slope: Dumbing Down into Secondary Schools
Although this piece first posted at The Conversation was not intended as a response to Daniel Nehring’s request for opinions about effect of ranking-mania on academic labor, Alister Scott’s observations on the current state of British higher education do shine a light on one facet of the larger issues involved.
