Current Projects
Local and global public goods: A ten nation study
While it is widely agreed that higher education contributes to the public dimension of society, the public benefits of higher education are untheorized, poorly defined and not readily measured. As a result, higher education tends to be undervalued and under-financed. This project takes a comparative approach to considering this tension, using contrasting case studies from ten countries around the world. The project is coordinated by colleagues at the University of Oxford (UK). CIHE is responsible for conducting the US case study and for contributing to the overall comparative analysis. Gerardo Blanco, Rebecca Schendel, Maia Gelashvili, Marisa Lally and Bingran Zeng are the CIHE staff members involved in this project.
The Future of Internationalization Partnership
CIHE is working with the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education听(OISE) at the University of Toronto and the International Association of Universities (IAU) to chart the future of internationalization post-pandemic. This multi-year, mixed-methods research project funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada will identify innovative practices in response to the ongoing crisis and expand a network of international scholars and practitioners dedicated to exploring future possibilities for sustainable, ethical and equitable internationalization. Gerardo Blanco, Maia听Gelashvili, Ekaterina Minaeva and Bingran Zeng are the CIHE staff members supporting this project.
Higher Education Quality Amid Disruption
While disruptive change in higher education has been at times romanticized, in actuality, higher education leaders are frequently working toward managing, or at least containing, disruption as they seek to maintain and even improve quality. Disruptions to higher education can take the form of social unrest, public health emergencies, armed conflict, political transition, economic crises鈥搉ot to mention climate change. This project aims to learn from adaptations to quality assurance practices and assumptions amid specific disruptions in global settings. By comparing and contrasting approaches and perspectives in diverse settings, this project distills principles of good practice that can inform responses to disruptions in different settings. Eglis Chacon, Maia Gelashvili, Marisa Lally and Gerardo Blanco are the CIHE staff members involved in this project.
Mapping the landscape of support to higher education in low- and middle-income contexts
In recent decades, there have been significant changes that have affected the flows of funding to support higher education systems and institutions in low- and middle-income contexts. This project seeks to capture some of these changes, not by focusing primarily on the "who" (i.e. in identifying who is involved in supporting higher education in low- and middle-income contexts), but by foregrounding the 鈥渨hat,鈥� the 鈥渨hy,鈥� and the 鈥渉ow鈥� - that is, by seeking to understanding the range of modalities through which financial support is provided to higher education systems in such contexts (what), the rationales that drive the different donors involved (why) and the ways in which major donors to higher education understand the support that they provide and view their work vis-a-via other significant donors in this space (how). This project involves researchers from both CIHE (Rebecca Schendel and Tessa DeLaquil) and the Centre for Global Higher Education in the UK (Tristan McCowan and Lee Rensimer).
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