The prospect of going to university is exciting but can also be a daunting time. There are many questions to address and a number of unknowns, then there’s the challenge of imposter syndrome – wondering whether you’ll fit in with other students along with fears about how to make your own way in the world. And that’s […] … learn more→

With autumn upon us, here’s a familiar scene on Canadian campuses. Eager young students queue in bricks-and-mortar bookshops to pay as much as C$600 (£350) for a single textbook. Yes, that’s correct. For a student with a full course load, dropping a couple thousand dollars on textbooks is the new norm. In an era of […] … learn more→

Interdisciplinary research utilizes techniques from two or more disciplines to come up with solutions to problems. Increasing number of universities worldwide are recruiting professors who can lead interdisciplinary research projects. While there are many benefits that entail doing interdisciplinary research, there are some downsides to it as well. My masters research was highly interdisciplinary involving […] … learn more→

Writing a draft. Mmm. The word ‘writing’ suggests that all you have to do is sit down and type or scribble away. And lo and behold a text is born. But there are different pathways to writing a draft. Some are less freeform than others. As Helen Sword suggests, academic writers are generally either planners or […] … learn more→

In a 2009 speech, President Barack Obama proclaimed that by 2020, the United States will “once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.” As we near 2020, it is worth asking how close are we to reaching that lofty goal and what have been the results of focusing so intently on college graduation […] … learn more→

In The Communist Manifesto of 1848, Marx and Engels claimed that capitalism has got itself into an unlikely fix. It was in the midst of “an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity – the epidemic of overproduction”. Nearly two centuries on, the affliction has spread all the way from the […] … learn more→

From a very young age, we are conditioned to learn to succeed by avoiding failures or mistakes. Our traditional education system is built largely on examination that marks down students for their mistakes in any assessed work. Students don’t often get a chance to have those mistakes highlighted early on so they can correct them before […] … learn more→

Our campuses are bloated with administrators, so many that not only is it a puzzle to those who work on campus what these people actually do, it’s a puzzle to the administrators themselves. They mostly work very hard to justify their jobs, and their efforts manifest in a variety of ways. One way is to […] … learn more→

By the financial measurement standards of the Obama administration, Trump’s presidency has seen an incredible boom in the American economy. Of course, those old standards are rubbish, and many of our states are running huge deficits because the economic numbers, no matter how you manipulate them, can’t change the reality of our failing economy (even […] … learn more→

These words, the under-20s may not know them. But like Francis Cabrel sang in a 1981 title, bachelors who do not yet have a post in higher education for the fall of 2019 seek to take “their place in the traffic” … And this before the Parcoursup site , whose complementary phase opened on June 25, will close on September 11th. This countdown […] … learn more→