Current Projects
The Future of Internationalization Partnership
CIHE is working with the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education (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. Maia Gelashvili, Lizhou Wang, Gerardo Blanco, Rebecca Schendel, and Hans de Wit are among the CIHE staff 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–not 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. Tessa DeLaquill, Maia Gelashvili, and Gerardo Blanco are CIHE staff members involved in this project.
Academic Excellence Initiatives around the World
In recent years, many countries have sponsored academic excellence initiatives (AEIs), aimed at improving their research universities. China has had the largest such program over a period of several decades and has spent billions of dollars. Other countries, including Germany, France, South Korea, Denmark and others, have also sponsored AEIs. This collaborative project, which aims to capture some of the similarities and differences in the approaches taken by different AEIs, is co-directed by Philip Altbach, Jamil Salmi and Maria Yudkevich.
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 “what,” the “why,” and the “how” - 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).