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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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Branch Campuses, Fake Research, and the Future of Indian Universities

Alex Usher April 2, 2026 No Comments

India’s higher education sector is in a permanent state of flux. There’s constant friction between the federal government and the states, as well as ongoing rivalry between a centralized public system and a dynamic private one. In the background, there’s a society that is deeply unequal and riven with discrimination,

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That Was the Quarter that Was – Winter 2026

Alex Usher April 1, 2026 No Comments

Morning, all. It being the first of April, it’s time for a quick look at the past three months of higher education stories from around the world. Let’s take a brief look at the issues that preoccupied the sector worldwide. The most important story of the last few months, obviously,

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Comparative Crises

Alex Usher March 31, 2026 No Comments

If you pay attention to higher education news from around the anglosphere, you may be under the impression that we are “all in it together”: that is, all suffering, in particular, from the loss of international student funding because of a variety of government policies discouraging them. But is it

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Throwback

Alex Usher March 30, 2026 1 Comment

Jambo! From Nairobi, where I’m spending the next couple of days. I’ve had some long plane flights to get here, and Lufthansa inexplicably hasn’t worked out how to put power chargers in economy seats, so I’ve been doing some re-reading of obscure texts. I want to tell you today about

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Focus Friday: March 27

Tiffany MacLennan March 27, 2026 No Comments

Hi all,  Tiffany here. It’s Focus Friday and today we have a chance to lean into a topic that many of you have been asking about: the relationship between industry and postsecondary institutions. So, today’s session (12:30-1:30 ET) will explore that broader ecosystem, beyond just work-integrated learning, and diving into

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Comparing Student Loan Outcomes

Alex Usher March 25, 2026 1 Comment

Yesterday, I said that the system of English student loans were the worst in the world. And I know the skeptical among you probably thought “how can he say that? Where is the comparative data?” So, today, some data on student loans programs around the world which will show, definitively,

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The World’s Worst Student Loan System

Alex Usher March 24, 2026 1 Comment

If you read the UK education press at all, you’ll have noticed a serious uptick recently in the number of stories describing the current student loan system as “a scam” by  Government back-bench MPs and “a mess” by a former Deputy PM who played a large role in designing it.

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A Thought on the Iran War

Alex Usher March 23, 2026 1 Comment

So, somehow, President Prince of Peace has got the United States into a shooting war with Iran, and, in a development NO ONE COULD HAVE POSSIBLY FORESEEN, Iran has retaliated in part by attacking American allies around the Persian Gulf. Although it is about an eight-tier priority right now, one of

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The Fifteen: March 20, 2026

Alex Usher March 20, 2026 No Comments

It’s been a busy couple of weeks in higher education. There are the downstream consequences of the attack on Iran, interesting developments on the left and the right in Latin America, a couple of important global reports and some AI-related developments in China as it approaches adoption of the 15th

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