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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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Strategic Planning and System Design in Malaysian Higher Education

Alex Usher April 9, 2026 No Comments

Malaysia is one of those countries where higher education is almost always in the news. Partly it’s because Malaysia has for many years sought to use higher education to speed up economic development, but it also has to do with the government’s decision 55 years ago to use a complicated

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CAUT Bulletin, 1963

Alex Usher April 8, 2026 3 Comments

About a month ago, I was doing one of my absolute favourite things in the entire world, which was browsing the shelves of Amy’s Used Books in Amherst, Nova Scotia (IYKYK) for old books on higher education. I picked up a simply ludicrous amount of loot there – the entire back-list of

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Trade-offs and Menus

Alex Usher April 7, 2026 1 Comment

I heard an interesting story this week which I thought I would share with you. About two weeks ago the feds finally decided that they were, in fact, going to renew the $4200 maximum Canada student Grant (see previous blog explaining why they might not do so here) at a cost of something like $600 million

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Platforms and Trade-offs

Alex Usher April 6, 2026 2 Comments

If you go back far enough in the history of higher education, universities consisted of a mix of the humanities and the professions, with the former largely a set of gateway courses to the latter. Then, roughly at the turn of the nineteenth century, something quite momentous happened. It came to the

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Branch Campuses, Fake Research, and the Future of Indian Universities

Alex Usher April 2, 2026 No Comments

India’s higher education sector is in a permanent state of flux. There’s constant friction between the federal government and the states, as well as ongoing rivalry between a centralized public system and a dynamic private one. In the background, there’s a society that is deeply unequal and riven with discrimination,

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That Was the Quarter that Was – Winter 2026

Alex Usher April 1, 2026 No Comments

Morning, all. It being the first of April, it’s time for a quick look at the past three months of higher education stories from around the world. Let’s take a brief look at the issues that preoccupied the sector worldwide. The most important story of the last few months, obviously,

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Comparative Crises

Alex Usher March 31, 2026 No Comments

If you pay attention to higher education news from around the anglosphere, you may be under the impression that we are “all in it together”: that is, all suffering, in particular, from the loss of international student funding because of a variety of government policies discouraging them. But is it

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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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