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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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The Canadian Autonomy Scorecard (Part 2)
Morning all. This week, I am doing a thing on institutional autonomy in Canada, using the European University Association’s Autonomy Scorecard methodology as a basis to compare institutional autonomy in four dimensions (organizational, financial, staffing, and academic) across Canada – and eventually with Europe as well. Yesterday, I explained the
The Canadian Autonomy Scorecard (Part 1)
Institutional autonomy is one of those things that is hard to pin down. First of all, because it’s a multi-dimensional concept – institutions may have more freedom in some areas of action than in others – and, second of all, because it’s hard to come up with practical measurements of
Budget Commentary 2026
Earlier today, Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne stood in the House of Commons to deliver his second budget, the tenth of a Liberal government first elected in 2015 (it would be eleven, but they skipped a year during COVID). The government had dropped large hints over the previous weeks that the budget
Lula’s Return and the Future of Brazilian Higher Education
It’s been quite a big few weeks for elections around the world. The US midterms on Tuesday, of course, as well as the election in Israel last week, and in Serbia, where a student movement-backed and coordinated movement actually ousted the Serbian Radical Party from power. Another big election played
Apprenticeships
Apprenticeships are the red-headed stepchildren of post-secondary education in Canada, mainly because while the instruction is considered to be at a post-secondary level, the learners aren’t actually enrolled in any institution. Rather, they are employees who i) have been registered as apprentices and therefore have regulated wage rates and working/learning
Rapid Collegiality and How to Achieve It
Over the past few years, I have on occasion (see here and here) emphasized the need for institutions to practice “rapid collegiality”: that is, to find ways of making decisions more rapidly without sacrificing the notion that in a shared governance system, decision-making responsibilities have to be broadly inclusive. The
Alberta in a Nutshell (2026)
Morning all. A couple of weeks ago, I told you I’d be spending a good number of blogs this year looking at provincial higher education systems and how they are doing. I’m going west-to-east and today it’s Alberta’s turn. As figure 1 shows, overall enrollment in Alberta post-secondary institutions is
Focus Friday: Oct 30
Hi everyone, Thank you so much to everyone who joined us for our last Focus Friday on October 16th. Today, I’ll be joined by Dr. Brenna Clarke Gray, Coordinator, Educational Technologies and Assistant Professor, Learning Design and Innovation at Thompson Rivers University, for a conversation about AI inevitability discourse and
The Fifteen: October 23, 2026
Hi all. A big one this week, with education-related protests in at least half a dozen countries. Let’s get started. That’s all for now. The blog is off next week – we’ll see you back here on November 13 for the next edition of the Fifteen.
Inside Italian Higher Education: Excellence, Affordability and Change
This podcast basically comes in three flavours. In one, we interview authors of new and interesting books. In the second, we talk about current events in one country or another. And in the third, we talk about specific countries’ higher education systems and what makes them interesting and/or distinctive. In
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