Picture this. You’re walking through a chemistry lab, watching as some students happily experiment with hazardous substances while others interact with 3D projections of the molecules as they react to each other. Over in the next room, a trainee nurse triages a stream of patients based on their various symptoms, while across the hall a […] … learn more→

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Some people are dramatically better at activities like sports, music and chess than other people. Take the basketball great Stephen Curry. This past season, breaking the record he set last year by over 40 percent, Curry made an astonishing 402 three-point shots – 126 more than his closest challenger. What explains this sort of exceptional […] … learn more→

In the storm over how much money the federal government spends on student aid, and the spiraling amount of federal loan debt graduates face, Hillsdale College is an oasis. That’s because the Michigan school, founded by Baptists, doesn’t let its students take any of that government aid, which comes with strings attached — among other […] … learn more→

Latin American countries with growing economies are investing effort, money and time in higher education to provide opportunities to new generations of students whose families did not have such opportunities. In a working paper for the Centre for Global Higher Education, I examine the main global trends in higher education that are having an impact […] … learn more→

The southern hemisphere’s cold weather is a certain signal that winter conference season is upon us. In the coming weeks academics – from many disciplines – will be spending freezing nights in student dorms and days exchanging disciplinary gossip on the plight of the universities and on what is new in their chosen field. But […] … learn more→

On Friday 24 June, as tattooed or cashmere-clad forearms punched the air in Brexit triumph, a disconsolate group of journalism educators were struggling through their annual conference. Struggling because most of us were dealing with the first two stages of Kübler-Ross’ model of grief – denial and anger; but struggling also to debate something that […] … learn more→

Last time around, I discussed the “go to” method for research nowadays, data mining. You simply take a large data set, and slice it into as many ways as needed until you get lucky. So many of today’s “hot” results come from this method, and the key to its success is a quirk in our […] … learn more→

Four years ago, while I was writing a paper for my Master’s degree at Oxford, I came down with a stomach bug. No, not a stomach bug, the mother of all stomach bugs. I had the worst stomach pain of my life; I had a fever; I couldn’t sleep, let alone eat. At one point […] … learn more→

Fifty years ago, there was a seismic shift away from the longstanding belief that Earth’s continents were permanently stationary. In 1966, J. Tuzo Wilson published Did the Atlantic Close and then Re-Open? in the journal Nature. The Canadian author introduced to the mainstream the idea that continents and oceans are in continuous motion over our […] … learn more→