Hans Schuetze

Professor Hans G. Schuetze is a Fellow and former Director, Centre for Policy Studies in Higher Education and Training, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. He is also a Senior Honorary Research Fellow, University of Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom.

PhD in international law and comparative government (University of Göttingen, Germany), LL.M. (University of California at Berkeley), German Bar Exam ('zweites juristisches Staatsexamen').

Studied social sciences, economics, and law at the universities of Göttingen and Bonn (Germany), Grenoble (France) and of California at Berkeley (USA). After a short career as a lawyer in private practice (specialized in public and international law) and Legal Counselor for two levels of government in Germany, he worked as a policy analyst and research co-ordinator at the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris, and later as a Minister's Counselor on technology and human resources development policies in the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Technology of the State of Lower Saxony (Germany). He was the founder and first General Manager of the North German Agency for Technology Transfer and Innovation (NATI), a model that was emulated in several of the new Länder after German reunification in 1991.

He also served for five years as the elected mayor of one of the districts of the City of Hannover. In this capacity he has been especially engaged in publicly sponsored self-help and housing projects for immigrants and minority populations as well as in establishing a municipal Learning and Cultural Centre (which, in 2014, celebrated its 25th anniversary).

Since 1991, he was Professor of Higher Education in the Department of Educational Studies University of British Columbia and a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Policy Studies in Higher Education and Training (of which he served as Director for seven years). Retired in 2006, he remains a Fellow at the Policy Centre. From 2005 to 2015 he also worked as a lawyer in Hannover, Germany, specializing in education and the law as well as on international human rights issues.

He was a consultant on educational policy (OECD, UNESCO, the EU, the Canadian government, the British Columbia provincial government as well as several other education policy bodies), and a visiting professor at the universities of Vienna and Graz (Austria), Hanover and Oldenburg (Germany), Rouen (France), and Hiroshima (Japan) as well as at the Centre for Research and Advanced Studies in Education - Centro de Investigacion y Estudios Avanzados (Mexico).

His fields of research and expertise are the economics and the organization of post-secondary education and training, comparative education, lifelong learning, and, more generally, the role of education and training in cultural, social and economic development. He has done research on the role of learning, knowledge creation and knowledge management in innovation in private industry, and especially in small and medium companies, and on university - industry collaboration.  He is fluent in German, French and English and has a good working knowledge of Spanish.