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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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Skills, Innovation, Quality, Blindness

Alex Usher March 10, 2026 No Comments

One of the many, many frustrating things about Canadian policy over the past couple of decades is the combination of blindness and bad habits that our policy makers have with respect to the role of skills. Let’s start with the blindness, which mostly applies to our policymakers’ understanding of the

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The Fifteen: March 6, 2026

Alex Usher March 6, 2026 No Comments

Gather ‘round, all! This edition, we have absurd policy proposals from Australia and the UK, deceptive military recruitment practices in Russia, a battle over a rectorship in Colombia, and free McDonald’s meals for students in Malaysia. Let’s get started. That’s it for now, everyone.  See you back here on March

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Higher Education Diplomacy

Alex Usher March 4, 2026 No Comments

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

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AI-cademy 2026: Making Artificial Intelligence Work for Higher Education

Alex Usher March 3, 2026 No Comments

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

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There Is Such A Thing As A Dumb Question

Alex Usher and Maïca Murphy March 2, 2026 2 Comments

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

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Skills for Sovereignty

Alex Usher February 24, 2026 No Comments

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

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Focus Friday: February 20

Tiffany MacLennan February 20, 2026 No Comments

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,

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Generation Z and the New Politics of Protest

Alex Usher February 19, 2026 No Comments

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

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