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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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Focus Friday: April 17
Hi everyone, Tiffany here. As a reminder, Focus Friday is happening Today! April 17th! 12:30-1:30 EST. This week, we’re turning to another area where institutions are navigating rapid change: the future of online and distance learning. Over the past few years, institutions have been expanding their offerings, invested in digital
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
Four Thoughts from Nairobi
I was in Kenya a couple of weeks ago for the THE Africa Summit on Higher Education. Although I worked a lot in Africa in the 2010s, this was my first trip back since COVID, and wow have things changed. I thought I would remark on four aspects of the trip.
Not the Traveling Wilburys
Late last week, two Ontario colleges—St. Lawrence College ( in Kingston, with a substantial presence in Cornwall and Brockville) and Sir Sandford Fleming (in Peterborough)—announced their intent to “integrate as equal partners.” Many people (including me) at first thought that meant the two schools were merging. However, on closer reading
Boycotts and Antisemitism
A few weeks ago, the McGill Law Students’ Association (LSA) held a referendum to amend its constitution. Among the elements of the changed constitution were clauses which embedded the Association’s opposition to McGill’s having academic relations with institutions in Israel; i.e. it embedded a pro-boycott position. This made a certain segment of McGill’s
The Fifteen: April 10, 2026
A lot has happened in the last three weeks, and there’s a lot that didn’t make it into this edition of the Fifteen, which is a lot heavier on events in Europe and Asia than usual. There’s a lot in here on science and research – from China looming supreme, to
Strategic Planning and System Design in Malaysian Higher Education
Malaysia is one of those countries where higher education is almost always in the news. Partly it’s because Malaysia has for many years sought to use higher education to speed up economic development, but it also has to do with the government’s decision 55 years ago to use a complicated
CAUT Bulletin, 1963
About a month ago, I was doing one of my absolute favourite things in the entire world, which was browsing the shelves of Amy’s Used Books in Amherst, Nova Scotia (IYKYK) for old books on higher education. I picked up a simply ludicrous amount of loot there – the entire back-list of
Trade-offs and Menus
I heard an interesting story this week which I thought I would share with you. About two weeks ago the feds finally decided that they were, in fact, going to renew the $4200 maximum Canada student Grant (see previous blog explaining why they might not do so here) at a cost of something like $600 million
Platforms and Trade-offs
If you go back far enough in the history of higher education, universities consisted of a mix of the humanities and the professions, with the former largely a set of gateway courses to the latter. Then, roughly at the turn of the nineteenth century, something quite momentous happened. It came to the
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