Hello and welcome back to the World of Higher Education Podcast. I’m your host this week, Tiffany MacLennan. Today, we’re doing something a little bit different. With this podcast, as you know, we look at some of the major stories shaping the higher education sector around the world. This year, that reflection has also taken form, not just as a podcast, but as a written report as well. A global year-end review that examines how politics, demography, finance, and technology have reshaped the sector in 2025.
If you’re a loyal listener to the podcast, you know that if I’m your host, our guest is Alex Usher, President and CEO of Higher Education Strategy Associates, and also the author of this report.
The full document can be found on the website but the themes are already very clear. From the political upheavals in the United States, to the growing effects of demographic decline, to the quiet, but dangerous rise of policy neglect in many countries, 2025 was the year in which global higher education felt unusually fragile, and in some places on the edge of quite a reckoning.
We’re gonna unpack some of those themes over the next 25 minutes and explore some of the stories that you may not have heard about. So I’m gonna pass it over to Alex.
The World of Higher Education Podcast
Episode 4.13 | Monsters in the System: Alex Usher on the Forces Transforming Higher Ed
Transcript
Tiffany MacLennan (TM): Alex, you opened the report by saying 2025 was a year of monsters. Can you walk us through why that metaphor felt right for this moment in global higher education?
Alex Usher (AU): So, I have a bad answer and a good answer. The bad answer is that “the year of monsters” is a riff from Antonio Gramsci, who wrote in the mid-1920s: “The old world is dying and the new cannot yet be born. Now is the time of monsters.” I’m an old Antonio Gramsci fan. He was a communist and a social theorist, I guess. And I actually named my first ever blog after him. I used to blog about soccer — not many people know that about me — but I did have a football blog, and it was called Gramsci’s Kingdom. So I’ve always had an affinity for that term.
But I think the Gramsci quote is true in the sense that higher education, like a lot of institutions in modern life, is largely a post–World War II response that made sense at the time. The way we organized higher education made sense in the sixties and seventies and eighties. I’m not sure it makes sense the way we’re organizing it anymore. We’re facing a very different world. And like a lot of institutions in Western society, we’re having trouble getting rid of the old and bringing in the new.
And so it does feel like a time of monsters. It feels like we’re caught, trapped between an old system and a new system. It seemed like a useful way to think about the situation we’re in. So I talked about the main areas — the forces impacting higher education. I think I said it was fascism, neglect, demographics, and technological change.
Those four areas really do sum up the megaforces we see impacting the sector right now. Fascism is mostly the United States, but not entirely. Neglect is widespread in the West. Demographics affect both the East and the West. And technological change is pretty universal as well.
You put those four together — those are the things higher education is wrestling with.
TM: On the train of fascism, you call the United States the story of the year — maybe the decade — for higher education. We have Rob Kelchen coming in next week to talk about his top ten American higher education stories, and I’m sure we could probably do a hundred this year easily. But when you look across global reactions, what struck you most about how other countries interpreted what was happening in the United States?
AU: I thought there were a couple of interesting things. Number one, I would say there were a lot of countries in Asia who assumed that Trump had a policy in mind. They didn’t interpret the many things that happened in the US as separate manifestations of a diseased mind, which I think is how a lot of people in both the United States and the rest of the West understood it. They thought there was a policy behind it. They didn’t necessarily understand it, but they didn’t assume it was just the actions of an autocrat trying to bring a sector to heel.
What I found disappointing in most of the world was that, in those first few months when it was clear that Trump and Musk and, to an extent, Kennedy were really trying to wreck American science — that there were huge data sets that were just not going to get collected anymore in areas like health, global measles monitoring, climate data — the emphasis was less on how do we save global science? Because the US… and I think you can give Trump his due here: many countries were, and do, free-ride off American science and the big investments they make.
The emphasis was less on how to save global science and much more on how do we exploit the situation for our own benefit? At least a dozen countries set up some kind of fund to attract American researchers, and it just portrayed a profound ignorance of how American science works and how powerful American science really is. The amount of money that the National Institutes of Health throw at health researchers in the US is absolutely unmatched. There’s no other country in the world that can match that — maybe China in mathematics, and there have been a lot of Chinese scientists going back from China to the US this year, for sure.
I think a successful country has been one like Austria, which threw, you know, 50 million euros at the problem and got twelve scientists out of it. You just can’t expect universities or academics in the United States to move on the basis of one year or two. Things would need to get a lot worse before there was a genuine exodus — like what you saw out of the Soviet Union in the nineties or Nazi Germany in the thirties.
It’s just not happening.
TM: Another one of the themes in the introduction is neglect, or the idea that many governments have drifted into the assumption that universities can kind of run themselves indefinitely. How widely did you see this pattern across the 25 systems you were examining?
AU: I don’t think it’s so much that they can run themselves indefinitely; it’s that they can be run with no new money. The policy neglect is largely just, “Yeah, we’ll tell them to keep doing the same thing, but with 5% less.” And where that’s been expressed most arrogantly, I think, is Mexico, where Claudia Sheinbaum, the President, just told institutions, “Well, you’re just going to have to work with republican austerity.” She meant public-spirited in this case.
I think this is an issue higher education shares with many institutions in Western society — democracy being one of them. People just think democracy will take care of itself, and we don’t need to worry about its threats from people like the Make America Great Again crew, or AfD in Germany, or Reform in the UK. These are profoundly anti-democratic forces we’re seeing across the world — fascism in many cases — and we just assume we don’t need to upgrade how we protect democracies.
And it’s the same with universities. People just assume, “Oh yeah, they’ll continue producing science, they’ll continue educating people. We don’t need to care about their upkeep.” I wouldn’t say I saw it everywhere, but I think it’s pretty prevalent in developed economies. Higher education has been there, producing such great things for so long, that we can’t imagine them not doing it — and therefore it feels safe to ignore them.
And I see that pattern repeating itself over and over across the OECD, with very few exceptions.
TM: If you had to identify one country right now that illustrates some of the financial pressures universities are facing, which would it be?
AU: There’s definitely not one, because I think there are different kinds of financial pressures. The neglect episode—where governments say, “We can cut 2% here, we can cut three or four percent there”—we’re seeing that in a lot of countries: France, Canada, Australia, the UK. That’s pretty common in the developed world.
You have some countries where the government is actively working to destroy higher education, which would be the United States, and possibly the previous government in the Netherlands, although they were voted out in October.
I think there are a number of countries where governments are having trouble keeping up with very high inflation. Argentina is one of those; Pakistan is one of those.
And then I think you have countries where the governments aren’t necessarily spending less, but demand is so far outstripping higher education capacity that we’re seeing crunches. Kenya is the obvious example there. Institutions have had a lot of difficulty paying their staff; we saw a nine-week strike in the fall. Nigeria is a little bit like that as well.
But again, those are not a single type of financial crisis. There are multiple types.
TM: Another theme that shows up quite prevalently in this report is demography. With nearly half of the large systems seeing really stagnant or even declining enrolments, how much of the decline is actually due to demography versus something else?
AU: Well, again, I think there are a few different categories here. I think the most interesting stories are the places where the declines are not based in demography. Turkey and Pakistan, in particular, have seen some pretty abrupt drops in student numbers in the last five years that aren’t driven by demography. These are countries that probably reached their demographic peak four or five years ago, but the drop in student numbers far outstrips the drop in youth population.
Iran is another one. Iran has had a much bigger demographic transition in the last few years, but even there the drop is bigger than what you would expect given demography. That’s a big deal, because I don’t think we’ve seen that in higher education history. Participation rates have always increased—that’s been the story for 60 or 70 years. And now we’re starting to see examples where that’s not the case.
Then there are what I would call “normal” demographic disasters—the ones we’ve been seeing for a long time. South Korea is one; the government had to pass a law to close what they call zombie universities in the private sector. Taiwan is declining fairly steadily. Russia is starting to stabilize after a very long demographic decline.
The interesting numbers, I think, are in Poland, which has seen a very big demographic decline, but numbers are starting to come back up—and they’re coming back up specifically because private higher education is doing such a good job. That’s a really interesting story, and it’s one of the reasons people need to watch Poland. There’s something different going on there.
Other than that, what you’re seeing are places like Colombia, maybe Malaysia, certainly Canada, Australia, the UK—places where even local demographics are flat. We’re not seeing an increase in domestic enrolments. And what’s interesting is that this is starting to spread outside the PHE: people are saying, “Hey, what about getting international students in to backfill those slightly declining domestic numbers?”
We’ll see how that goes. But I think there were at least a dozen countries that declared record highs in international students. And I would say it’s not largely because demand is increasing—maybe that’s part of it—but because they are increasing the supply of spaces for international students. And the prime mover is domestic demographics.
TM: Alex, beyond the monsters, the report also highlights places that do actually continue to invest in and expand their higher education systems. Which countries emerged as genuine bright spots this year?
AU: I think there are some long-term bright spots. India is one. The excitement Indians have for higher education, and the belief that they can copy China’s science-driven route out of poverty, is pretty impressive.
China itself, although it’s not necessarily investing a lot of new money right now, has a very ambitious roadmap to 2035. It lays out what kind of system they want to build, what values they want to embed in it, and it shows a real commitment to data-driven improvement in higher education. The China report is full of experimentation. They’re trying new fields of study, they’re trying to build new types of institutions — and you just don’t see anybody else doing that.
We’ve got one page in the document that talks about what we call “outstanding policy movers,” places that did something really important. The three I like to highlight are Uzbekistan, Greece, and Vietnam.
Uzbekistan has done some really interesting stuff around international education and expanding their higher education system. This is a system that has quintupled in size in the last ten years or so. They’re trying everything, and they’re willing to do that because, like India, they think they can pull off a Chinese-style transformation of their society and economy.
Greece is really interesting. Greece has finally made moves toward the European norm. They’ve gotten rid of a quarter million what they call “permanent students” — people who stay registered to get student benefits but don’t actually take courses. A quarter million people. Greece is not that big a country. They’re bringing in private universities, they’re changing security laws so universities are not, in effect, havens for anarchists. These are big changes, and they matter.
And then there’s Vietnam. It’s not just more big statements about wanting five more universities in the top 100 — lots of countries do that. What’s interesting is the policy work they’re actually doing: paying attention to admission systems, figuring out how to partner with institutions from other countries, talking about institutional mergers. There’s a lot going on. It’s one of the most hyperactive policy environments in the world, and I think it’s really exciting.
So those three in particular — Greece, Vietnam, Uzbekistan — are places that are really showing up in the higher education field right now, and I think it’s promising.
TM: I think that leads well into this next question, but was there a particular region or even country where the higher education story diverged pretty sharply from what you would’ve expected when you started this report?
AU: I would say the most surprising thing I learned in the process of this was around private higher education. We just had Dan Levy on the show a couple of weeks ago, and I think I referenced this: the extent to which Western European systems are now host to growing private higher education sectors.
And I think back to our discussion with Nicolas Badré a few months ago. Nicolas was telling us about how private-sector systems are moving in France and in Europe. We always think of the American system as having all these big, bad privates, but the American system is 70% public and 30% private — and France and Spain could pass that 30% number in the next couple of years. Those are really big systems. They’re growing fast. Are they taking advantage of loose regulation? Maybe a bit. But I think what you have in those countries — and to a lesser extent in Italy and Germany as well, and in Poland where private is about 35% — is a demand for a very different type of higher education.
It’s not classical three- or four-year undergraduate degrees. There’s a lot more demand for professional master’s degrees, a lot more demand for mid-career learning. And the public sectors in these countries are not equipped to do that. They’re not incentivized to do it. If you look at the way their funding systems work, they have no incentive to do it — but the privates do.
That’s really interesting. And I would argue it’s very different from what Dan talks about — that mass private higher education that was demand-absorbing in rapidly expanding systems. That’s not what’s going on here. What we’re seeing in European private higher education is something qualitatively different. And there aren’t many people looking at it. Christine in France is doing so right now, but not many others.
And yet, arguably, it’s one of the most interesting things in global higher education right now.
TM: If you take a step back from the global view of the report — take the thousand-foot step here — what do you see as the biggest lessons for Canadian higher education? The Canadian higher education sector or Canadian higher education institutions to take away from what’s in this report this year?
AU: Well, I think the threat from private institutions is important. I don’t think it’ll happen here — our institutions are usually incentivized to go after some of these markets — but it’s worth remembering that there are countries with very dominant public sectors where the public sector is losing its dominance. And it can do that if it doesn’t change fast enough. So I think that’s one lesson.
The second lesson is that there are countries that believe skills and education can make a difference in national competitiveness. Again, I would point to China, I would point to Vietnam, and I would ask Canadian policymakers why they don’t feel the same way about Canada. Because it’s quite clear that they don’t. If we look at the last few budgets, both provincially and federally, Canadians just like to dig stuff out of the ground. The idea that we’re going to have a service-driven export economy is just not on anybody’s radar screen. And so why bother investing in higher education? I think we need to look around the world, see what other countries are doing, and ask why we don’t have as future-oriented a value system when it comes to education as others.
And I think the last one is the comeback of branch campuses. It’s really interesting how many countries are experimenting with importing educational institutions from abroad. India, for the first time, has decided to allow branch campuses, and I think they’ve approved, if I’m not mistaken, 15 or 16 in the last year. The number of Canadian institutions was zero. Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan are now the third and fourth largest importers of educational institutions — number of Canadian institutions: zero.
The UK and Australia, and increasingly some other countries, have decided that if you can’t grow at home, you have to move to the people who need education. And where do we need education? It’s where populations are still growing — and that’s not Canada. So how do you create lasting institutions in these countries? We have to start thinking about that.
I know Canadians dislike it when I say this, but we’ve been very lazy for a very long time because we could just assume that people would come here and come to us. We didn’t need to bother with relationships in foreign countries or developing new institutions. Those days are over. And there are clearly other countries that can do this — and we need to catch up.
TM: You end the introduction of this report by saying nothing is cracked yet, but parts of the system are close to a reckoning. What do you think are the fault lines that you’ll be watching most closely in ’26?
AU: Well, I mean, there are a few systems where literally the finances might break, and you’d have institutions going bust or you’d have large-scale exoduses out of higher education. Argentina is one of them. Kenya is another. I think the UK will be very lucky if one or more institutions does not go bust. That’s the obvious stuff.
Second, I think science as a whole is in trouble. Quite apart from the attacks on science in the United States — which will probably continue in a slightly different manner than we saw this year — the role of scientific fraud, particularly in India, is significant. Eventually these things start damaging the cause of science generally. So I think research fraud, science fraud, and rankings fraud are all things that could end up damaging the system quite a bit next year. Those are the key areas I’d be watching.
Demography isn’t going to kill anyone overnight — that’s the nature of demography. But I do think financing will cause some issues. I think the collapse of an AI bubble might actually take some pressure off universities. I firmly believe AI will change society and higher education enormously over 20 years. But a lot of the short-term pressures our industry is undergoing — the whole schlock Gartner hype cycle for AI — are profoundly damaging. So in some ways, an AI bust can’t come soon enough for higher education, just to take the pressure off a little bit and let us think more clearly about how to use and integrate that technology.
We’ll see how that happens. Technological change, changes in the labour market, and people’s faith — as citizens — in higher education to continue giving graduates a boost in the labour market… we’re seeing cracks in that all over the world. And that is something higher education really has to move hard on. We’ll see what happens in the next 12 months. Again, it’s not going to be a 12-month thing, but those are the areas where the fracturing is happening and will continue to happen for at least the next half decade.
TM: Thanks for the report.
AU: Hey, fun as always to be on the other side of the interview.
TM: And it just remains for me to thank, this time, Alex Usher, Sam Pufek, and Alex Petit-Thorne for getting this report out into the public. You can check it out at higheredstrategy.com, on our newly formatted website — which is gorgeous — so make sure to check it out regardless. Next week, as mentioned at the very start, Rob Kelchen from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville will be joining us to talk about American top ten higher education stories. We have the list in advance, and you don’t want to miss that episode. So, we will see you next week. Bye for now.
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