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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 AfD and German Higher Education
In many ways, Germany seems like a higher education paradise. Sure, the funding might not be as generous as elsewhere and career progression can be problematic—but basically, academic freedom is highly prized, as are continental connections across Europe, and policymaking within the system is highly consensual. You can’t have everything,
Why Ottawa Can’t Do the Knowledge Economy
I have read two very interesting things in the past couple of weeks. One is Justin Ling’s excellent piece in the Toronto Star about the inner workings of the Carney PMO and what the government thinks it’s accomplishing (tl;dr: as efficient and business-like as the new PMO is, it isn’t
Lampedusianism at the University of Waterloo
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a finance and governance experiment at Concordia. Today I want to talk about one that caught some headlines over the summer; namely, the re-organization of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Waterloo. The full details of the re-organization can be
Comparative Spending Statistics
Just a short one today, based on some data from the OECD in its annual Education at a Glance Report which was released last week. I won’t do a full report, as many of the post-secondary indicators are banal and predictable (Canada does well at churning out post-secondary graduates, etc.,
Focus Friday: Oct 2
Hi everyone, A huge thank you to all those who attended and participated in our first Focus Friday on September 18th. Today, we have Alan Roberts, the CEO of InSite Information Systems, a company that focuses on competency-based assessment, such as the ShiftIQ platform. In today’s webinar, we are going
Lords of Serendipity
As you might imagine, I am pretty fond of campus novels. A frequent weakness, however, is that the idealize the idea of a campus, or at least the of a particular type of campus, or at least of a particular types of program (English professors are hugely over-represented in campus novels
That Was the Quarter That Was, Summer 2026
Hi, all. Time for a quarterly recap of what’s been going on in higher education. You might think summer would be a quiet time for developments in higher education but a) “summer” is a geographically relative term and b) “back to school” is usually when things go bananas in the
2026 Quebec Election Manifesto Analysis
Morning everyone. We are now six days away from an election in the province of Quebec, which the polls have pegged as being an absolute nail-biter. With five parties polling above 10%, it’s conceivable that the Parti Québécois might gain an absolute majority with less than 30% of the vote.
Data for Internationalization
The following is adapted from a talk given at the National Association of Foreign Student Affairs (NAFSA) conference in Orlando, Florida, back in May. My thanks to Mike Alcott of ApplyBoard for the invitation to participate in the panel. There are a lot of folks in the business of moving
The Fifteen: September 25, 2026
Most universities in the northern hemisphere are now back to school and, bow howdy, they are generating a lot of stories. While the big global story this outing has to do with a new global report on academic freedom, there is some quite amazing news on private universities out of
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