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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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Overskilled and Underused? What PIAAC Reveals About the Canadian Workforce
Before our show starts today, I just wanna take a minute to note the passing of Professor Claire Callender, OBE. For the last two and a half decades, she’s been one of the most important figures in UK higher education studies, in particular with respect to student loans and student
Election 2025: The Conservative Party Manifesto
Ok, the Conservatives finally released their platform yesterday. It’s…thin…so far as postsecondary education goes. It’s absolutely nothing like the extremely detailed and nerdy platform in 2021 which, let us recall, was released on Day 1 of the campaign (I remain firm in my belief that an Erin O’Toole-led Conservative Party would be walking
Election 2025: The Liberal Party Manifesto
Today, I’m doing the Liberals, mainly because at the time of writing on Easter Sunday they have issued an actual full platform and costing document while the Conservatives have not. Spoiler: this is not your average Liberal platform. That a new leader might bring a change in Liberal priorities should have been clear enough
Election 2025: The Minor Party Manifestos
Election 2025: The Minor Party Manifestos Morning all. As usual during federal elections, I devote some time to each of the party platforms before election day. Today, I am going to focus on the five parties that have absolutely no hope of forming government. Liberal and Conservative platforms will follow.
Innovation Without Borders: Galileo’s Networked Approach to Better Higher Education System
One of the biggest, but least remarked upon trends in European higher education in recent years is the growth of private for-profit, higher education. Even in countries where tuition is free, there are hundreds of thousands of students who now prefer to take courses at private for-profit institutions. To me,
Announcing Re:University
So, I have a bit of an announcement to make today. I hope you’ll find it at least modestly intriguing. In a year with no shortage of bleak higher education stories, one of the big questions we’ve been asking this year is: how do institutions actually recover? Not in the vague, inspirational
Indigenous Relations
To St. John’s, where last week Memorial University published a “Draft Policy for Consultation on Indigenous Verification.” It’s a doozy. Here are the key bits: Verification Pathways for Recognized Indigenous Collectives in Canada Under the policy, an applicant will follow one of the three verification pathways for membership/citizenship with a Recognized
To Poach or Not to Poach
Hi all. Welcome back to nine whole uninterrupted weeks of the blog. Let’s get to it. A couple of weeks ago, I mused about the possibility of individual universities using philanthropic dollars to start poaching some talented researchers wanting out from the United States. Now comes news that the University Health
The Fifteen, April 4, 2025
The latest edition of The Fifteen highlights stories on workforce readiness and labour productivity (Hong Kong, the UK) and the expansion and regulation of private higher education (Spain, Tunisia). But we’re also covering such issues as access problems in Finland, faculty issues in Iran and admissions reform in Vietnam, as
“Anything Can Be Done With Anything”: Innovative Universities with Dara Melnyk
There’s an old joke about innovation in higher education. It goes like this: How many universities does it take to screw in a lightbulb. Change? Maybe that’s a bit unfair, but it’s unquestionable that the sector isn’t famed for welcoming change, in particular radical change. One particular aspect is what is
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