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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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Canadian Higher Education’s Sacred Scaffolding
There is a whole bunch of policy areas in higher education which are what I might call “scaffolding” (others might use the term plumbing). That is, the basic building blocks of how education actually gets done: how classes get scheduled, how credits are defined, awarded and scored, then thrown into buckets
Change Challenge
Roughly 93 years ago, Franklin D. Rosevelt began his inaugural address thus: “Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself–nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a
Merit Wars
Canada has never really had much of an explicit debate about what constitutes academic merit. But we’re about to, thanks to the Ford Government in Ontario. And some of the battle lines will look very close to the ones we have been seeing in the United States since the Supreme
Focus Friday: February 6, 2026
Hi everyone, Tiffany here. A quick reminder that Focus Friday is happening today, February 6th, from 12:30-1:30pm Eastern. Over the past few Focus Friday sessions, we’ve spent a lot of time sitting with the pressures facing postsecondary institutions: financial constraint, political intervention, governance challenges, and the sense that many institutions
Higher Education After Its Peak
Ever since World War II, higher education has been a growth industry. Maybe student numbers haven’t risen every year, or funding hasn’t always gone up, but the general trend has been positive. But right across the world, that upward trend has come under threat over the last decade or so.
Tenure and Promotion Criteria: You Get What You Ask For
Incentives matter. And all the major extrinsic incentives of university life can be found in documents known as “tenure and promotion criteria” (hereafter TPC). Every institution has a set of these (or indeed often multiple versions of them, since the criteria often vary from one faculty to another. Here’s McGill’s policy. Here is Waterloo’s. Here’s an extremely detailed
Rays of Optimism, Paths Forward
Last Thursday and Friday, HESA held our Re: University conference in Ottawa. It achieved what we wanted it to achieve – to get people to have hard, tough conversations about what’s ahead and how to deal with the still-growing threat to Canadian universities. Today, I want to clue everyone in
Application Frustration
It’s application season. Time used to be, I could give y’all some really good insight into application trends by using data from the Ontario University Application Centre as I did here, in 2018. And here, in 2021. All thanks to a modicum of data transparency Until three years ago, OUAC
The Fifteen: January 30, 2026
Hi all. The Fifteen is back with the choicest higher education stories from around the world over the past two weeks. That’s all for now: see you back here in two weeks.
Uzbekistan’s Higher Education Boom
Uzbekistan is not a country that intrudes on western consciousness very much. If people think of Uzbekistan at all, they tend to think of it for its past glories. Perhaps they know a little bit about for the Silk Road cities of Tashkent and Bokhara, or the brilliant city of Samarkand, whose
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