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Tag: United States

Chair to Chancellor: Lessons in Leading Modern Universities

Every Christmas, this blog invites the University of Tennessee’s Robert Kelchen on the show to do his top 10 stories of the year in the United States. One story keeps coming up: who, in their right mind, would want to be a university president these days? What with the financial pressure, the relentless politics, both on campus and dealing with state and federal governments, it’s an absolutely thankless job. Well, today our guest is someone who maybe led the way

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April 30, 2026 No Comments

You Can’t Kill the U.S. Department of Education (But You Can Break It)

The news from the United States these days, as far as higher education is concerned, sometimes seems uniformly bleak, but US higher education operates in an unbelievably decentralized environment. Not only are there differences across states, across the public-private divide, and to some extent across accreditation zones, but even within the federal system, there’s not necessarily a uniformity of approach, given three branches of government, and even within the executive sphere, different approaches from the major funders of education, including

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April 16, 2026 No Comments

The Annual Kelchen Review: The Top 10 U.S. Higher Ed Stories in 2025

Hi everyone. I’m Alex Usher, and this is the World of Higher Education Podcast. This is our last podcast for 2025, and as usual, our Christmas edition comes from the University of Tennessee with Robert Kelchen, our favourite guest from the United States. He’s here to talk about the top 10 issues in higher education in the U.S. over the past 12 months. He needs no introduction; this episode needs no introduction. It’s a great annual favourite. Robert, welcome. The

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December 11, 2025 2 Comments

The Widening Gap: Income, College, and Opportunity with Zachary Bleemer

One of the great promises of higher education is that it acts as a social ladder—one that allows students from low-income backgrounds to climb up and reach a higher social and economic status. No one, I think, ever believed it was a guaranteed social leveler, or that children from wealthier families didn’t have an easier time succeeding after college because of their own, and their family’s, social and cultural capital. But most people, in America at least, believed that on

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September 25, 2025 No Comments

To Poach or Not to Poach

Hi all. Welcome back to nine whole uninterrupted weeks of the blog. Let’s get to it. A couple of weeks ago, I mused about the possibility of individual universities using philanthropic dollars to start poaching some talented researchers wanting out from the United States. Now comes news that the University Health Network—the super-hospital network that in research functions as a massive force multiplier to the University of Toronto’s medical school—is trying to hire 100 top early career researchers from around the

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April 14, 2025 3 Comments

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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