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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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That Was The Quarter That Was, Summer 2025
Welcome to TWTQTW for June-September. Things were a little slow in July, but with back to school happening in most of the Northern Hemisphere sometime between last August and late September, the stories began pouring in. You might think that “back to school” would deliver up lots of stories about
Three Notable StatsCan Papers
Over the summer, Statistics Canda put out a few papers on higher education and immigration which got zero press but nevertheless are interesting enough that I thought you might all want to hear about them. Below are my précis: The first paper, Recent trends in immigration from Canada to the
Notes on Research Policy, Here and Abroad
Hi all. I thought I would take some time to have a chat about how research policy is evolving in other countries, because I think there are some lessons we need to learn here in Canada. One piece of news that struck me this week came from Switzerland, where the
The Fifteen: October 3, 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 just for this once, I will add a sixteenth: the IgNobel prize was awarded this week, to a scholar from Bath University in England, for a piece
Undoing Bologna: Russia’s Conservative Turn in Higher Education with Dmitry Dubrovsky
One of the consequences of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has been a vast reconfiguring of Russia’s academic and intellectual life. Universities, thought of as a potential hotbed of opposition since the White Ribbon movement of 2011, came under intense control and its personnel placed under even greater scrutiny. Many
How About Grade 13?
Hey everyone, quick bit of exciting Re: University news before we get started. Our speakers are beginning to go live on the site here. We’ll be shouting them out on the blog over the next few weeks, so watch this space. Also, a huge thanks to our many dynamic partners
Truth and Reconciliation, Ten Years On
Today is September 30th, National Day for Truth and Reconciliation and Orange Shirt Day. It has been just over ten years since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission issued its report, and so this seemed like a good time to review the state of Truth and Reconciliation – and Indigenous issues
Education at a Glance 2025, Part 2
Three weeks ago, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) released its annual stat fest, Education at a Glance (see last week’s blog for more on this year’s higher education and financing data). The most interesting thing about this edition is that the OECD chose to release some new data from the recent
Focus Friday: September 26
Hi everyone, Tiffany here. A quick reminder that Focus Friday kicks off today (Sept 26) at 12:30-1:30pm Eastern on the Future of Higher Education. I’m being joined by Jackie Pichette from RBC and Sunny Chan from Business + Higher Education Roundtable. If you haven’t registered yet, it isn’t too late. Sign
The Widening Gap: Income, College, and Opportunity with Zachary Bleemer
One of the great promises of higher education is that it acts as a social ladder—one that allows students from low-income backgrounds to climb up and reach a higher social and economic status. No one, I think, ever believed it was a guaranteed social leveler, or that children from wealthier
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