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Author: Alex Usher

China Update 2026

Hi all. Every couple of years I spend some time going through data on Chinese higher education and, in particular, the finances of the country’s top universities. It’s been two years since the last time I did this, so here goes: Figure 1 shows total expenditures at what I call China’s Big 8 universities (which is actually just the elite C9 League of universities minus the Harbin Institute of Technology, which does not make previous years’ financial data available), in

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May 25, 2026 No Comments

The Knowledge Coalition

The Netherlands has one of the most knowledge-intensive economies not just in Europe, but in the entire world. Despite its small size, it has many world-class universities, a remarkably collaborative research culture, deep ties between academia and industry — basically everything you’d want to stay at the forefront of the global economy. And yet, the Netherlands has not been immune to the factors that have hampered the drive for innovation in many other countries, most notably lack of funds and

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May 21, 2026 No Comments

Garbage In, Garbage Out: Nova Scotia Edition (Part 2)

Yesterday, I began outlining how the Nova Scotia government is trying to measure university program costs, and got as far as working out how the scheme was capturing certain facts about program income (excluding government grants and fees of students yet to declare a program) and certain facts about expenditures (excluding infrastructure, student services, IT, and roughly 60% of tenured professors’ salaries and benefits) and considered various ways that some assumptions about how to distribute both costs and revenues were

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May 20, 2026 No Comments

Garbage In, Garbage Out: Nova Scotia Edition (Part 1)

You may have heard of the program costing exercise (as part of an Academic Program Review) that the government of Nova Scotia has foisted on the institutions in that province. Today, I am going to go through how the exercise is being conducted as well as a few ways in which I find it lacking. Before I start, two nota benes (notas bene?). First, no one has paid HESA to do this analysis. This is a labour of…well, not love,

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May 19, 2026 1 Comment

The Fifteen: May 15, 2026

Morning everyone. It’s been a crazy couple of weeks in global higher education, with a lot of countries dealing with very similar issues. I’m not just talking about the canvas hack here: we also have a lot of action on culling academic programs and dealing with issues in student dormitories. But this edition also touches on universities for sale in Finland, student aid disasters in South Africa, spy schools in Russia, fake philology awards in France, a very interesting rector’s

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May 15, 2026 No Comments

One Thought to Start Your Day

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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