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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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The Coming Federal Cuts – Part 2: ESDC
Yesterday, I explained why the federal government now finds itself in a position where it has to cut program budgets by at least 15% just to keep the budget deficit to $50 billion by 2028. Today, I am going to explain how this will play out at Employment and Social
The Coming Federal Cuts – Part 1
The biggest thing everyone is going to be talking about this year – barring another university doing a surprise Laurentian – is the set of federal cuts coming down the pike. They are big. And they are nasty. So, it’s worth understanding exactly the scale of what is heading in
The Fifteen: September 5, 2025
Welcome back to year two of the Fifteen. I think I’ve got the hang of this finally, so I think this will be a much better product now. Without further ado then, some of the world’s biggest higher ed stories from the last three weeks or so. That’s all folks.
From Funding Formulas to AI: Pedro Teixeira on Higher Education’s Next Challenges
Welcome back to our fourth season. Time Flies. We’ve gone back to an audio only format ’cause apparently y’all are audio and bibliophiles and not videophiles, so we decided to chuck the extra editing burden. Other than that, though, it’s the same show. Bring you stories on higher education from
The State of Postsecondary Education in Canada, 2025
Hi all. Today, HESA is releasing the eighth edition of The State of Postsecondary Education in Canada, co-authored by myself and HESA’s Jiwoo Jeon and Janet Balfour. Many thanks to our partners – Pearson, Studiosity, Duolingo, Capio, Element451 and Riipen – for supporting this year’s edition. You probably don’t need
Five Rules for 2025-26
Morning all. It’s been a busy summer at HESA Towers. We’ve been developing Boardwise, our new suite of governance products with our partners at Balsam Advisory, and exploring new ideas on data governance and analytics with our friends at Plaid Analytics. We’ve also been touring the country with the Royal
Re: University is on. Are you in?
Hi everyone — pardon the summer interruption, but we’ve got news worth breaking the quiet for. You may recall that earlier this year, we announced something new: a national conference dedicated to helping Canadian universities rethink what they are and what they could be. We called it Re:University. We said
The Year the Money Ran Out: Global Higher Ed Review
Hello everyone, and welcome to the World of Higher Education podcast. I’m Tiffany MacLennan, and if you’re a faithful listener, you know what it means when I’m the one opening the episode—this week, our guest is AU. We’re doing a year in review, looking at some of the global higher education stories
Summer 2025
So. This is the last blog of the academic year. Service resumes Tuesday, 2 September. It’s been a long year. I’m pretty tired. How about you? This was the year it all kind of came crashing down: not just here in Canda, but everywhere else too. It’s too long to
That Was the Quarter That Was, Spring 2025
What’s been going on around the world since the end of March, you ask? Well, unsurprisingly, the biggest stories have come from the United States. There are in effect four fronts to the Trump administration’s attacks on the world of higher education. First of all, the government’s new budget is
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