The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Author: Alex Usher

The Free World Higher Education Area

The world is changing.  The goal of the Trump Administration, fairly clearly, is to create a world where “rules” are set by the Three Bullies (itself, Russia and China) with all other countries basically left at the mercy of these three major nuclear powers.  It is a terrifying prospect, with more than a little of echo of Orwell’s Oceania/Eurasia/Eastasia trio with their boots “stamping on the face of humanity, forever” But the thing about all those other countries?  They have

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April 1, 2025 No Comments

That Was The Quarter That Was, Winter 2025

 I’m trying something new today.  Every second Friday since last September, HESA’s Matt Doyle and I have been putting together the Fifteen – a list of interesting stories on higher education from around the world.  I am hoping to turn the results of this little project, along with some data analysis on student enrolments and university finances, into an annual almanac – a little bit like State of Post-Secondary Education in Canada only a bit more narrative and a lot more global.  As a

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March 31, 2025 1 Comment

The Learning Centred University with Steven Mintz

Hi everyone, Tiffany and Sam here — your World of Higher Education podcast producers. While Alex is away in Japan, we’re here to introduce this week’s episode. In this interview, Alex speaks with Steven Mintz, a renowned scholar and postdoctoral researcher, and author of the book, “The Learning-Centered University: Making College a More Developmental, Transformational, and Equitable Experience” In the following conversation, Mintz discusses what makes a learning-centered university, the benefits of active learning over traditional lectures, and the practical

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March 27, 2025 No Comments

Check-in on Administrative Bloat, 2025 Edition

Check-in on Administrative Bloat, 2025 Edition It’s been a little over five years since I took a serious dive into the question of “administrative bloat,” which apparently exists everywhere but in the statistics. Still, always good to check assumptions every once in a while, and I thought five years was long enough to make a new look at the data worthwhile. So here goes: Let’s start by reviewing what we can and cannot know about staffing at Canadian universities. StatsCan

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March 26, 2025 2 Comments

EDI and the Measurement of Merit

Across most of the world, the concept of academic merit tends to get operationalized as “best at passing a certain test taken by a limited group of people at a certain point in time.” A competition, in other words. For young people, it tends to involve passing an exam or set of exams, be they the American SAT, the Chinese gaokao, the Indian JEET, the French baccalauréat, etc. For aspiring professors, the competition is a little more subjective in the sense that

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March 25, 2025 2 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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