The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Author: Alex Usher

Responding to Online Entrance Exam Cheating at UNAM

Higher education dominated the front pages of Mexico’s media for most of this past summer. The reason? Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, the country’s largest, most prestigious, and selective institution, better known as UNAM, put its entrance exam online for the first time. 158,000 students took the exam, and the results, well, they weren’t good. As the exams were marked, it became evident that there were an unusual number of extremely high, near-perfect scores. Suspicions of cheating were naturally aroused.

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September 24, 2026 No Comments

Concordia’s Quiet Revolution

Okay, so Canadian higher education is pretty cautious and risk-averse, and so perhaps the bar for calling something a ‘revolution” is pretty low. But everyone needs to take a look at what has been going on at Concordia this year, because if what has been happening there were to spread widely, I think you genuinely could call it a revolution. It’s big, bold, and has the potential to alter for the better some of the basic underpinnings of universities’ financial models. Concordia

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September 23, 2026 1 Comment

Associate EU Membership and Labour Mobility

Yesterday, I sketched out the likelihood of Canada joining the Erasmus program; now I wanted to address the issue of labour mobility. As a couple of news outlets breathlessly reported during the whole EU thing last week, a new agreement might allow Canadians to “live and work visa-free” in Europe (and vice-versa, although no one seemed to want to dwell on that). But how likely is this? So, we can’t know exactly until something is negotiated. But precedent is pretty

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September 22, 2026 No Comments

Erasmus for Canada? Not so Fast.

Everyone seems very excited about the prospect of Canada becoming an associate member of the European Union (even though “associate member” is not an actual thing in any EU statute, but whatever), and in particular are talking about the value of greater student mobility since apparently Prime Minister Carney would like Canada to join the EU’s Erasmus scheme. In the words of the world’s greatest living cartoonist, Aislin…”everybody take a valium”. Sure, everybody loves Erasmus in theory. Who could be

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September 21, 2026 1 Comment

The University: A History in Stone, Silk, and Blood

We tend to think of universities as places full of physical things: laboratories, libraries, property, above all, buildings. They’re more than that, of course. They’re communities of scholars with missions and values. Some people think they should be less, that education would be better off in the cloud, online, and liberated from mere place. But for most of their history, universities have been undeniably place-based, material to the max. Today, my guest is William Whyte. He’s a professor of social

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September 17, 2026 No Comments
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One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.

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