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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 Fifteen: May 29, 2026
Morning all. It’s been a pretty crazy couple of weeks, with all sorts of bizarre stuff happening in Latin America, a strange construction deal in Madagascar, politically-motivated campus closures in Türkiye, budget news from Austria and Australia, mergers in the UK, and much more. Let’s get to it. That’s it
How China Built a Higher Education Superpower
It’s hard to think of a higher education system that has changed more dramatically over the past half-century than China’s. In the space of just two generations, the country’s gone from the chaos of the Cultural Revolution to building one of the world’s largest and most influential university systems, complete
Some Notes on Artificial Intelligence in Higher Education, May 2026
Today is just a quick round-up of recent news and trends re: artificial intelligence in higher education – hopefully one which is a bit different from the everything-is-awesome/everything-is-terrible style of think pieces that you often see on this subject. Artificial intelligence is having significant impacts in fields like astronomy and
Overestimating in the Short Run
Nearly fifty years ago, California futurist Roy Amara coined a widely quoted adage on the subject of technological change. It says: “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” This is a quote very much worth keeping
China Update 2026
Hi all. Every couple of years I spend some time going through data on Chinese higher education and, in particular, the finances of the country’s top universities. It’s been two years since the last time I did this, so here goes: Figure 1 shows total expenditures at what I call
Focus Friday: May 22
Hi all! It’s the second last Focus Friday before a summer break. Joining me this afternoon is David Hornsby, Vice-Provost (Academic and Global Learning) at Carleton University, for a conversation on Carleton’s newly released institutional AI Framework and what it actually takes to move from “we should probably do something
The Knowledge Coalition
The Netherlands has one of the most knowledge-intensive economies not just in Europe, but in the entire world. Despite its small size, it has many world-class universities, a remarkably collaborative research culture, deep ties between academia and industry — basically everything you’d want to stay at the forefront of the
Garbage In, Garbage Out: Nova Scotia Edition (Part 2)
Yesterday, I began outlining how the Nova Scotia government is trying to measure university program costs, and got as far as working out how the scheme was capturing certain facts about program income (excluding government grants and fees of students yet to declare a program) and certain facts about expenditures
Garbage In, Garbage Out: Nova Scotia Edition (Part 1)
You may have heard of the program costing exercise (as part of an Academic Program Review) that the government of Nova Scotia has foisted on the institutions in that province. Today, I am going to go through how the exercise is being conducted as well as a few ways in
The Fifteen: May 15, 2026
Morning everyone. It’s been a crazy couple of weeks in global higher education, with a lot of countries dealing with very similar issues. I’m not just talking about the canvas hack here: we also have a lot of action on culling academic programs and dealing with issues in student dormitories.
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