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
Testing Times & Interesting Discussions
Last week, The Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) put out a discussion paper called Testing Times: Fending Off A Crisis in Post-Secondary Education, which in part is the outcome of a set of cross-country discussions held this summer by RBC, HESA, and the Business Higher Education Roundtable. (BHER). The paper,
Education at a Glance 2025, Part 1
The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) released its annual stat fest, Education at a Glance (EAG), two weeks ago and I completely forgot about it. But since not a single Canadian news outlet wrote anything about it (neither it nor the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada saw
Turning the Corner
Things have been bleak in higher education the last couple of years, and no doubt they will remain bleak for a while. But it recently became clear to me how we’ll know that we are turning the corner: it will be the moment when provincial governments start allowing significant rises
The Fifteen: September 19, 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. See you back here in two weeks!
Crisis or Reform? Higher Education in Milei’s Argentina with Marcelo Rabossi
Back in late 2023, a little known libertarian by the name of Javier Milei was elected President of Argentina with a strong mandate to conquer that country’s hyperinflation. His strategy for doing so was pretty straightforward — freeze public spending, which would mean a big loss in real terms until
Fun with Tuition Data
I want to show you something kind of intriguing about how tuition is changing in Canada. By now you might be familiar with a chart that looks like Figure 1, which shows average tuition, exclusive of ancillary fees (which would tack another $900-1000 on to the total), in constant $2024.
The Shrinking Research University Business Model
For most of the past 30 or so years, big Canadian universities have all been working off more or less the same business model: find areas where you can make big profits and use those profits to make yourself more research-intensive. That’s it. That’s the whole model. International students? Big
Born on Third Base
Cast your minds back to January of 2024, when the federal government suddenly decided that housing was an issue, international students were the problem and implemented a complicated and irritating-to-implement set of caps that were 35% lower nationally than for 2023 (and in Ontario significantly more than that). Then, in
Introducing Focus Friday
Hi everyone, I’m excited to share a new initiative we’re launching this fall: Focus Friday. Focus Friday is a biweekly webinar series that brings people together around some of the most pressing issues in higher education. Each session runs for an hour and features a few short conversations with invited guests, followed by
Higher Ed at the Ballot Box: Australia’s Election and the Accord with Andrew Norton
It’s been about eighteen months since this podcast last visited Australia. The story at the time was about something called “the Universities Accord”, an oddly-named expert panel report which was supposed to give the Labor government a roadmap for re-structuring a higher education system widely believed to be under enormous
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.