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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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Comparing Student Loan Outcomes
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,
The World’s Worst Student Loan System
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.
A Thought on the Iran War
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
The Fifteen: March 20, 2026
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
Liberty and Zhi: Chinese and Anglo-American Ideas of the University
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.
The Crux
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
The Awkward Phase
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
World Youth Population Projections
I have been thinking a lot lately about the longer-term future of higher education and how demographics will change the nature of the sector. Today I want to share some data and thoughts on this subject. My basic observations are that 1) whatever else it may do, higher education exists
Focus Friday: March 13
Hi all, Tiffany here. A quick reminder that Focus Friday is happening today from 12:30-1:30pm Eastern! In this session, we’ll be joined by colleagues from the University of Alberta to talk about how institutions are beginning to use AI across multiple parts of the university. Rather than focusing on a
Why Iranian Students Keep Protesting
Iran is a country with a lot of higher education stories. Take stories about students: they were a key part of the coalition that overthrew the Shah in 1979, and they were the ones who spearheaded the capture of the US embassy later that year. But since 1999, students have also been
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