Blog
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.
Search the blog
How Program Closure Decisions Get Made
A lot of institutions, in reaction to recent changes are going through program closure (or in politer terms “program suspensions” which in theory means they might get resurrected at some point be revived or saved, but don’t bet the house on it). So, it’s worth going through how these decisions
The Fifteen: February 21, 2025
Good morning and welcome to the 11th edition of The Fifteen. This week we try to avoid the chaos in the United States to visit spots to look at a wide range of stories from Tashkent to Tokyo, Singapore to South Africa, Cairo to Canberra and a whole bunch of points
Students on the Frontlines: The Ongoing Protests in Serbia with Jim Dickinson
If I say the word “Serbia”, chances are your mind goes to things like the NATO air attacks of 1999 and the associated Kosovo War, to the breakup of Yugoslavia and to Marshal Tito and maybe – if you’re more historically-minded – to the origins of World War I. It
Ontario Election Manifestos 2025
Y’all know I do one of these for every provincial election. This one is going to be a bit different because this time out E-Day is eight days away, and next week is a scheduled off-week for the blog. As of the moment I am writing this on Tuesday afternoon,
How We Choose to Respond to Crises
I was thinking the other day that next Thursday (27/02/25) is not only going to be the Ontario election—about which, more tomorrow—but also because it will be the 30th anniversary of the legendary 1995 federal budget. If you’re under 45, a lot of what I am about to tell you
Data, Decisions, and Disruptions: Inside the World of University Rankings
University rankings are pretty much everywhere. Though the earliest university rankings in the U. S. date back to the early 1900s and the modern ones from the 1983 debut of the U. S. News and World Report rankings. The kind of rankings we tend to talk about now, international or
Fun with Participation Rate Data
Just a quick one today, mostly charts. Back in the fall, StatsCan released a mess of data from the Labour Force Survey looking at education participation rates—that is, the percentage of any given age cohort that is attending education—over the past 25 years. So, let’s go see what it says.
That NIH Thing You’re Hearing About
If you’re in the higher education field, you have probably heard a lot in the last four days about the Trump regime reducing funding to the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—roughly the equivalent of our Canadian Institutes of Health Research, only with a budget four times larger even after adjusting
Retrenchment Watch Newsletter
This is the first edition of Retrenchment Watch, a new initiative tracking how Canadian post-secondary institutions are reacting to current financial challenges. The Retrenchment Watch monitors the most recent developments, highlighting key trends and institutional responses across the country. Future editions will provide ongoing updates, analysis, and institutional case studies
For and Against Differentiation
I have had a few interesting chats over the past couple of months about the issue of institutional differentiation and its desirability. You will recall perhaps that I spoke favourably about it back in the fall as a means of bringing greater focus to institutional strategy. From these conversations, I
Subscribe
One Thought. Once a Day. Get clear, sharp perspectives on higher education sent straight to your inbox.
Categories
More thoughts on...
-
Academia
-
Access
-
Administration
-
Admissions
-
Apprenticeships, Skills & Trades
-
Artificial Intelligence
-
Budgets
-
Canada
-
Colleges and Polytechnics
-
Data
-
Funding and Finances
-
Governance
-
Government
-
Hello Goodbye
-
History Lesson
-
Humour
-
Indigenous PSE
-
Innovation
-
Institutions
-
Internationalization
-
Media
-
Now Reading
-
Podcast
-
Policy
-
Politics
-
PSE Outcomes
-
Rankings
-
Research
-
Retrenchment Watch
-
Student Aid
-
Students
-
The Fifteen
-
Tuition
-
Universities
-
Worldwide PSE
Enjoy reading?
Subscribe and have Alex Usher’s One Thought to Start Your Day blog sent straight to your email.