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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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Higher Education Diplomacy
I had been noodling for a couple of weeks about how nation states use higher education as a soft power tool, when all of a sudden last Saturday morning stuff starts popping up in my feed about how Canada and India have just announced a joint “Talent Strategy” as part
AI-cademy 2026: Making Artificial Intelligence Work for Higher Education
This blog also doubles as an invitation to a national conversation we’re convening later this year. See the end for details. There have been some quite amazing developments in AI in higher education recently. Ethiopia announced plans to open Africa’s first AI University. South Korea widened its network of universities providing “AI
There Is Such A Thing As A Dumb Question
You may have seen a story last week from CBC about the New Brunswick provincial government wanting to slash $35-50M from post-secondary funding this year. The story was actually about four days old when the CBC ran it – l’Acadie Nouvelle had all the goods the previous Friday based on
Skills for Sovereignty
Hi everyone. The blog is off this week, but given the release of the Defence Industrial Strategy, it seems worth flagging a few early observations – and providing an update on how this is shaping the agenda for our upcoming session of the National Defence Research Roundtable, which is focused
Focus Friday: February 20
Hi everyone, Tiffany here. A quick reminder that Focus Friday is happening today, from 12:30-1:30pm Eastern. Coming out of several recent conversations, whether on institutional recovery, sustainability, or governance, one theme keeps surfacing: institutions are being asked to make difficult academic decisions in an increasingly constrained financial environment. And yet,
Generation Z and the New Politics of Protest
Historically, students have played an outsized role in politics. They were key to overthrowing regimes in places like South Korea in the 1960s, Ghana in the 1970s, and Serbia in 2000. And even in the recent past, we’ve seen students oust a regime in Bangladesh. But things seem to be
Higher Education, 90210
Just a quick reminder before we move into the one thought of the day: we’ve officially launched HESA’s Transnational Education (TNE) Strategy Project and are now looking to finalize our founding cohort of member institutions. If your institution is exploring (or re-examining) transnational education as part of its future strategy,
Ontario Status Quo Ante
Thursday morning, Ontario’s Minister of Colleges and Universities made a very big funding announcement: $6.4 billion in new funding over four years. It was certainly a welcome announcement, but as my analysis below shows, it’s not a magic cure by any means, and there is a big sting in the
The Fifteen: February 13, 2026
Just a quick reminder before we move into the one thought of the day: we’ve officially launched HESA’s Transnational Education (TNE) Strategy Project and are now looking to finalize our founding cohort of member institutions. If your institution is exploring (or re-examining) transnational education as part of its future strategy,
Higher Education Beyond the Public Good
The last decade or so has seen enormous changes in world politics. It’s also seen some major changes the way governments relate to higher education, particularly in the anglosphere. For many, it’s been a polycrisis on top of a polycrisis – a multi-directional series of attacks on and challenges to the public
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