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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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Book Report Summer 2025
Morning everyone. The days are getting long, so that means it’s getting close to the time when I need to wrap up this blog for the (northern hemisphere) summer. And that, in turn, means book report time, where I round up everything I’ve read on higher education for the past
The Fifteen: June 6, 2025
Welcome to the final edition of Fifteen before our summer break. Today’s voyages take us from Harvard (where else?) to Tashkent, Paris to Moscow, Dubai to Fez with a very brief stop in North Mitrovica. Too much is Trump-related, too much of it is about financial ills, but there are
Cut, Coerce, Control: What Trump Is Doing to U.S. Universities
The single biggest story in higher education for the first six months of this year, without a doubt, has been the Trump administration’s remarkable assault on science and universities. Arguably it’s the largest state-led assault on higher education institutions anywhere in the world since Mao and the cultural revolution. Billions
Effective Graduates
One of the most tiresome debates in post-secondary education is about whether or not students emerge from their studies “job ready”. To which the answer, of course, is that for the most part they do not. Education – including vocational education – is meant to prepare you for a long
Code Red on University Autonomy
There is no aspect of university autonomy that is more fundamental – in the British Commonwealth at least — than the right of each institution to select which students it chooses to admit. Along with financial autonomy, staffing autonomy, and financial autonomy (that last one being under increasing pressure these
Last Week in Parliament: Three Takeaways
It was a busy week in Parliament last week. The King came to Ottawa to deliver a Speech From the Throne. His speech – almost exclusively a re-hash of Liberal promises from the April election – was deeply depressing for anyone who thinks the words “knowledge economy” have any meaning.
Opening January 2026: Inside One of the Biggest University Mergers in Australia
There’s a huge story going on right now in Australian higher education, one that hasn’t made many ripples outside the country yet, but really should have. In January of 2026, two of the country’s major universities will be merging. The old research intensive University of Adelaide, one of the country’s
Data Flourishing for Universities and Colleges (Governance Edition)
Yesterday, we wrote about how to make institutions flourish through better use of data…for management. But just as important as management is governance, and here, we would argue, a very different set of issues is at play. Let’s start at the top, with Boards of Governors. As Alex has previously
Data Flourishing for Universities and Colleges (Management Edition)
Hi all. I’m writing jointly today with colleagues Andrew Drinkwater and Pat Lougheed from Plaid Analytics, a company with whom HESA is teaming up to offer services related to improving the state of data collection, analysis, and use on campuses across the country. We’re not going to spend time giving
Strategy Horizons at the Top
I’ve been working on a project recently, looking at current university strategic plans around the world, and particularly those of leading “world-class” universities. One of the key things I am looking at is what you might call “strategic horizons”— how long do institutions see or plan ahead? My sample for
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