Ben Wildavsky is a senior scholar in research and policy at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities Are Reshaping the World and co-editor of Reinventing Higher Education: The Promise of Innovation.

His previous blog posts can be found here.
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A paradox of American higher education is the disconnect between our vaunted international reputation and the severe problems we face at home. America’s top research institutions consistently dominate the global rankings sponsored by organizations like Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Times Higher Education. The U.S. model of competitive research funding, merit-based hiring and promotion of faculty, and unfettered pursuit of the truth is closely watched and often …

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For anybody who missed it, there was an edu-wonk brouhaha this week over an embarrassing error in the New York Times’ big series on student debt. The Times vastly overstated the percentage of students with debt – a particularly significant mistake given that this statistic was the linchpin of the story – then ran a rather defensive correction three days later. In a Facebook dialogue with several academics and journalists, a former colleague known for her care with data reminded me that we all live in glass houses, and that sometimes bad things happen even to good writers.

Her comment was a useful cautionary note (even though I still think the Times’s error was pretty horrendous) and it got me thinking about some of the mistakes I made in The Great Brain Race. There were more than one or two, I’m sorry to say. And while none were too awful, I’ll mention some here, both to…

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Far be it from me to oppose the democratization of education. I’m a big fan of the idea, which in its most recent manifestation focuses heavily on the potential of technology to bring more educational opportunities to more people than ever before in history. But what do we really mean by the ubiquitous “democratization” phrase? How does aspirational talk about using technology to upend convention translate into concrete action? I’ve been mulling over two divergent strands in educational philosophy that seem to be emerging, each with quite different implications for how techno-reformers ought to proceed.

The first strand came into relief for me last month at the British Council’s Going Global 2012 conference in London, when I chaired a session on how technology is changing postsecondary education. There were six discussion tables, three led by Americans and three led by India…

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Why does the presence of foreign students still evoke periodic ambivalence in the countries to which they flock? Recent examples of this uneasiness are abundant. From Australia and the United States to France and the United Kingdom, universities’ desire to enroll foreign students’ – whether for their brainpower, the tuition revenues they bring, or both – coexists uneasily with immigration policies that too often thwart the desires of graduates who want to stay on and join the host country’s workforce.

The resulting tensions have sometimes led to policy flip-flops. Two years ago, Australia tightened visa rules significantly for students wishing to study at universities, vocational colleges, and language schools. The goal was to crack down on visa scams that were letting unsavory trade school operators essentially sell work permits to foreign students. But the ensuing drop in …

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Thanks to The Chronicle’s Global Ticker RSS feed, the other day I read about a surprising – at least to me – impediment to academic internationalization in Sweden. It seems that the government’s Justitieombudsmannen, or Ombudsman for Justice, has reprimanded universities for requiring that job applications and promotion requests be written in English. This practice, according to the Ombudsman, violates the country’s two-year-old language law, which mandates that Swedish – now formally designated as the nation’s official language – be used by public institutions.

As it happens, in a couple of weeks I’m traveling for the first time to Sweden, a part of the world that I have always associated with a citizenry whose English is so impeccable it would put many native speakers to shame. I’ll be participating in a conference sponsored by STINT, the Swedish Foundation for…

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Is the spread of the Western higher education model around the world evidence that repressive colonialism is alive and well in academe? Apparently so, according to a statement issued by participants in the International Conference on Decolonizing Our Universities, held recently at the Universiti Sains Malaysia in Penang. The authors of the manifesto, which I read about last week in GlobalHigherEd, minced no words in describing the alleged harm done to universities outside the West by “the tutelage and tyranny of Western institutions.” They complained that in non-Western nations “indigenous intellectual traditions” have been denigrated and marginalized.

The group, which included participants from Australia, China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Japan, Malaysia, Nigeria, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Tanzania, Thailand, Turkey, and Uganda, duly issued a call to…

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I hope somebody has told NACAC—the National Association for College Admission Counseling—about an alarming new trend signaling the further crass commercialization of college admissions. It seems that colleges around the country have established large corps of recruiters, often headed by a well-compensated numbers-whiz cum head salesman, intent on roping in undergraduates whose tuition dollars can make or break an institution’s bottom line. According to a reliable recent account, the competition for these students is now “intergalactic.” One admissions guru says he views his college’s admissions push as a “campaign.” No wonder that colleges now employ search firms to find the best possible admissions and enrollment leaders. At the same time, there’s rising concern that this new marketing mentality is undermining educational values and neglecting the best interests of…

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“Everybody’s got talent – they’re just talented in different ways!” In contemporary parent-speak, this is the kind of thing a mom or dad might tell a crestfallen fourth-grader who didn’t get the lead in the school play (but perhaps won a Best Tree award instead). This self-esteem-building mentality came to mind the other day when I read about the release of a prototype of U-Multirank. That’s the latest global university ranking to come on the scene, premised on the idea that every university should have the chance to spotlight its own special talent.

Sponsored by the European Commission, the prototype was developed by a consortium led by the Center for Higher Education Policy Studies at the University of Twente and Germany’s Center for Higher Education Development. It uses metrics in five areas – teaching and learning, research, knowledge transfer, international…

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