Greetings from the other side of the world. I'll post pictures and offer lengthier observations that aren't clouded by the effect of the 12-hour time difference on my mental state when I get back later this week. A few notes in the meantime:
*Shanghai is vast. Once you get outside of the Bund and the older touristy areas like the French Concession, it's just huge swathes of helter-skelter construction, wide boulevards, and liberal use of neon. It's like Houston crossed with Las Vegas except ten times bigger and everyone is Chinese.
*There's really been an explosion in activity internationally around college rankings. Twenty-five years ago it was pretty much just U.S. News & World Report; now there are multiple global higher education rankings (like those produced by Shanghai Jia Tong University, host of the event), as well as lots of countries doing internal rankings, continental rankings, etc. Apparently the Malaysian equivalent of Margaret Spellings got canned a few years ago when the state university dropped 19 places in the Times Higher Education Supplement rankings (even though the decline was entirely a function of a switch in the methodology).
*I wish I could say that I was able to listen to a half-hour presentation from the very nice woman from the Kazakhstan Ministry of Education describing their new, quite sophisticated college rankings system without mentally composing various snarky blog posts with titles beginning "Cultural Learnings of...." But that would be a lie.
More later this week.
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