Commonality Across Countries

Commonality Across Countries - Doug Lederman, September 16, 2010 INSIDE HE

PARIS -- Concisely summarizing the themes of any conference is difficult; doing so for a meeting where the 30 main speakers hailed from 15 countries and gathered to talk about a topic as broad as where higher education is headed around the planet seems a fool's errand.

And yet the striking thing about the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's biennial higher education conference that ended here Wednesday was that, despite the vast differences in how higher education institutions are operated and funded and governed from country to country, there was enormous commonality in the issues and problems they're facing, the questions their governments are asking of them, and how their leaders are responding.