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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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2026 Rankings Overview (International)
Yesterday we looked at how individual institutions within Canada fared in the last round of international rankings. One of the key phenomena that we saw was that while the eight Canadian institutions in the top two hundred of the major rankings were more or less holding their own, the slightly
2026 Rankings Overview (Canada)
Most years, I do a quick overview of the major international rankings and how Canadian institutions have fared in them. Today is the day I do that for the 2026 rankings from the Times Higher and QS, as well as the 2025 Shanghai Ranking (Shanghai is dated the year they
The Small-Tent Path to Disaster
Morning all. Back to the grind. One of the surprising things I discovered over the break was that the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) seems to think that the sector is in good enough shape that it can afford to apply purity tests to external support. See specifically the
The Fifteen: December 12, 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. That’s it for now. The next Fifteen will return on January 9. See you then.
The Annual Kelchen Review: The Top 10 U.S. Higher Ed Stories in 2025
Hi everyone. I’m Alex Usher, and this is the World of Higher Education Podcast. This is our last podcast for 2025, and as usual, our Christmas edition comes from the University of Tennessee with Robert Kelchen, our favourite guest from the United States. He’s here to talk about the top
Trust Requires Change Requires Trust
Hi all. Tomorrow will feature my annual interview with Rob Kelchen about the year in US higher education, and Friday is the final Fifteen of the year, so that makes today the final regular blog of the year. And that means time to sum up and look forward. To sum up:
Books of the Year 2025
Exams have started, it’s getting cold, so that means the blog is winding down soon and I have to tell you about all the higher education books I’ve read since summer. Books from January to mid-June can be reviewed here. Buckle up. (Digression: if you want some good non-fiction, I
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,
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