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| Is international higher education just an elite club? | [A]s we draw near the end of the second decade of the new millennium, it is difficult to see how international higher education has evolved into a phenomenon which is ‘good’ and ‘meaningful’ for everyone. On the contrary, it has remained a tiny club based on physical mobility which is accessible only to the healthy, wealthy and brainy.Continue Reading

| A Public Higher Ed Primer for Politicians | The annals of political philosophy teem with pieces on the tension between expertise and democracy. Plato’s philosopher-king made sense if you assumed that most people were just staring at shadow puppets. It’s a straight line from the “noble lie” to “you can’t handle the truth!” When democracies failed, or morphed into tyrannies, the lesson that political thinkers drew was that the masses can’t be trusted to govern themselves. They needed experts, often appointed directly by God. America’s great contribution was to demonstrate that if you have a large and diverse enough group involved in politics, each group’s distinct idiocies are largely canceled out by those of other groups.Continue Reading

| Study: Less state funding has hiked college tuition by nearly 40% since 2008 crisis | Decreases in state funding have pushed the cost of higher education to historic levels over the past decade, according to a new report by a budgetary think tank. The 22-page analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities said Thursday the average cost for tuition at four-year public institutions in all 50 states increased by nearly 40 percent between 2008 and 2018, or a little over $2,700. Overall funding for two- and four-year state colleges and universities, meanwhile, decreased by $6.6 billion.Continue Reading