Blog
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.
Search the blog
The Fifteen: October 31, 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. From the US, an update on the Compact: of the nine original invitees, there are now seven “no”s, one “we’re not not saying no” (Vanderbilt) and one radio silence (UT
Inside the Gaokao: China’s Defining Test with Ruixue Jia
Every year, over 13 million students in China spend two full days taking the country’s university entrance exam, the Gaokao. It’s an event that most take years preparing for, starting in primary school, and the results determine not only where students will end up spending their university years, to a
Some Thoughts on the Use of AI in Teaching
I spent part of last week in Tempe at Arizona State University’s conference on Agentic AI and the Student Experience, which was a pretty interesting event. It made me think awhile about AI in higher education, which I thought I’d share with y’all. My POV on this basically comes down to
Quebec’s Private Student Loan Moment
Although we tend to think of student loans as either being something done by banks for profit or by governments to correct for market failures, there is a third type of student loan: namely, private, not-for-profit companies using a mix of private and public funds for charitable reasons. Probably the
Fees Up and Fees Down, 2025
One perennial topic – maybe the most perennial topic – in higher education is that of tuition fees. There have been quite a number of developments with respect to tuition fees around the world this year and I thought it was worth recapping some of them for y’all. So here
Focus Friday: October 24
Hi everyone, Tiffany here. A quick reminder that there is a Focus Friday session today (October 24) from 12:30-1:30pm Eastern on International Student Enrolment. I’ll be joined by Victor Tomiczek (Director of International Recruitment and Global Partnerships at Cape Breton University) and Eric Simard (Director of Fanshawe International and former Director of International Recruitment
Re: University | Join the Conversation Before It’s Too Late
Hello Everyone, The Re: University team here! I know you didn’t expect to hear from us this week, but we just passed the 100-day mark until the Re: University conference and the excitement is getting real. For those of you who don’t know, we are hosting the conference in the
The Fifteen: October 17, 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. And that’s the mid-October edition of the Fifteen. See you back here on Hallowe’en for the next edition. The blog is off next week, but you can still
Access and Aftermath: What Racial Quotas Changed in Brazil’s Universities with Luiz Augusto Campos
Brazil exited the age of slavery 135 years ago. It remains a multi-racial society today. But for much of the twentieth century, Brazil suffered an enormous bout of amnesia. From being one of the last societies on earth to give up slavery, it immediately began touting itself as a place where colour did
That Alberta Post-Secondary Review, Again
Just before I headed out on a work/vacation trip (I’m in Costa Rica today), the Government of Alberta dropped the report of the Expert Panel on Post-Secondary Institution Funding and Alberta’s Competitiveness, which I had previewed back here when the panel was formed about a year ago. So, on the way to the airport,
Subscribe
One Thought. Once a Day. Get clear, sharp perspectives on higher education sent straight to your inbox.
Categories
More thoughts on...
-
Academia
-
Access
-
Administration
-
Admissions
-
Apprenticeships, Skills & Trades
-
Artificial Intelligence
-
Budgets
-
Canada
-
Colleges and Polytechnics
-
Data
-
Funding and Finances
-
Governance
-
Government
-
Hello Goodbye
-
History Lesson
-
Humour
-
Indigenous PSE
-
Innovation
-
Institutions
-
Internationalization
-
Media
-
Now Reading
-
Podcast
-
Policy
-
Politics
-
PSE Outcomes
-
Rankings
-
Research
-
Retrenchment Watch
-
Student Aid
-
Students
-
The Fifteen
-
Tuition
-
Universities
-
Worldwide PSE
Enjoy reading?
Subscribe and have Alex Usher’s One Thought to Start Your Day blog sent straight to your email.