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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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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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Liberty and Zhi: Chinese and Anglo-American Ideas of the University

Alex Usher March 19, 2026 No Comments

While the world has a lot of higher education systems, two traditions in particular dominate. One is the Anglo-American tradition, including possibly its cousins in central and northern Europe, and the other is the one we see in China. The latter way is, in many ways, rooted in the former.

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The Crux

Alex Usher March 18, 2026 3 Comments

One of my favourite authors on strategy is Richard Rummelt, author of Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, which I highly recommend to anyone. He has a newish book (2022) out called The Crux which I read a few weeks ago. Today, I want to talk about it in relation to higher education. The thesis of this

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The Awkward Phase

Alex Usher and Alex Petit-Thorne March 17, 2026 No Comments

It’s been interesting for us sitting around the edges of the new relationship between the federal government and the post-secondary community around security issues and watching two sides size each other up. Today, some thoughts on the matter and suggestions to speed up the process. So, let’s start with the

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