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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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New Statscan Data on Students and Academic Staff
Over the last few weeks – while I have been busy obsessing about Year in Review 2025 – a couple of big Statscan releases came out. One was about students in 2023/2024 and one was about academic staff in 2024/25. Time to catch up. The student data is the slightly
Focus Friday: December 5
Hi everyone, Tiffany here. A quick reminder that Focus Friday is happening today from 12:30-1:30 p.m. Eastern, and we’re diving into a topic that’s been bubbling up in nearly every conversation this fall: the future of work in an AI era. I’ll be joined by Andre Côté and Jake Allan-Hirsch from The Dias, who have been leading
Monsters in the System: Alex Usher on the Forces Transforming Higher Ed
Hello and welcome back to the World of Higher Education Podcast. I’m your host this week, Tiffany MacLennan. Today, we’re doing something a little bit different. With this podcast, as you know, we look at some of the major stories shaping the higher education sector around the world. This year,
The World of Higher Education – Year in Review 2025
Morning all. Today, HESA is releasing The World of Higher Education – Year in Review 2025, the first in our to-be-annual series chronicling how the world’s higher education systems have fared over the past twelve months. You can download it here. Despite taking up something on the order of 1%
That BC Post-Secondary Review
Last week, the Government of British Columbia announced it was going to hold a post-secondary review. Here’s the announcement. And here’s the terms of reference (ToR) for the review, possibly the longest ToR in Canadian history, including – get this – a bunch of blacked-out text indicating censoring, which was
Massification and its Unacknowledged Trade-offs
The following is an adaptation of a speech I gave at the Justus Liebig University in Giessen, Germany last week. My thanks to the University’s President Dr. Professor Katherina Lorenz for inviting me to give the talk. Across what we used to call the developed world, there are, at the moment,
The Fifteen: November 28, 2025
Welcome to The Fifteen, a global round-up of the stories animating higher education institutions and systems around the globe. Let’s get to it. 1. To Pyongyang, for a story about how a tightly-controlled, top-down, secretive admissions process leads to a system of rampant bribery, with parents paying party officials both for information and
Funding, Free Riding, and the Future of Canadian Science
Ever since World War II science — that is, state funded science — and economic progress have been seen to go hand in hand. And for the most part, governments have been happy to let scientists themselves decide where much of the money goes. But things have been changing lately,
The New Decliners
Morning all. Next week, we will be launching The World of Higher Education – Year in Review 2025, which is our new global equivalent to The State of Post-Secondary Education in Canada. As a document, it’s less data-driven and somewhat more narrative-driven than what you might be used to from
Factors Changing the Face of Global Student Mobility
The following is an adaptation of a talk I gave at the Conference of the Americas on International Education (CAEI), sponsored by the Inter-American Organization for Higher Education (IOHE), in San José, Costa Rica last month. My thanks to David Julien and the organizers for the invitation. There is a lot
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