Hello, and welcome to the World of Higher Education podcast. I’m Tiffany MacLennan, and I’m your host for today’s episode.
At the end of last year, HESA released the first ever World of Higher Education — Year in Review report, taking stock of the biggest stories and trends shaping higher education around the globe. Now we’re six months into 2026, and we’re checking back in.
Joining me today is Alex Usher for a midyear halftime show on global higher education. We’ll look at the stories that have defined the first half of the year, the trends that are gaining momentum, and what we think universities and colleges around the world should be watching as we head into the 2026/2027 academic year.
It’s also our final episode of the season, so it’s a fitting opportunity to take stock of where we’ve been and where higher education might be heading in the next year. Let’s hear from Alex.
The World of Higher Education Podcast
Episode 4.35 | The Half-Time Show: Six Months of Global Higher Education
Transcript
Tiffany MacLennan (TM): Alex, back in December, you released The World of Higher Education Year in Review, and at that point you identified four big global themes: universities operating under authoritarian or even fascist conditions, major technological change, financial constraint and neglect, and demography. Are these still the big stories six months later, or has the global higher education picture shifted in some notable way?
Alex Usher (AU): The demography hasn’t changed. I think with financial neglect, maybe you’ve got one or two new countries you would put in that category, but maybe there are a couple of others going in the other direction. So that one’s kind of a wash.
I would say the biggest change in the first half of 2026 has been the interplay between the authoritarian—and frankly fascist—stuff, which I see mainly in the United States, and the technology story. Hungary came back over to the good-guy side over the last six months, so that’s good news.
What’s interesting is how those two trends are interacting. I think it’s been pretty clear for at least six years now, probably since COVID, that the American distrust-of-government group has also become a distrust-of-science group. That wasn’t true 10 years ago, but it is true now.
One of the most lasting things I think MAGA is going to achieve is the destruction of American science. It’s astonishing what’s going on in the United States, and it’s happening at exactly the same time that China is moving to create a much more high-tech, STEM-focused university system. There are also countries in Asia, like Kazakhstan and Indonesia, that seem pretty intent on copying that model. And it’s all happening at a moment when AI is becoming a bigger deal.
You open the newspaper every day and it’s like watching the future move further and further east—or I guess west from here, but you know what I mean. The frontier of technology is not necessarily in the United States anymore. It’s increasingly in China, and that has all sorts of geopolitical ramifications for higher education.
TM: What would you say has been the most interesting global higher education story of the year so far?
AU: I don’t know. I mean, there are some crazy ones, particularly in Central America. The whole way the University of San Carlos elections have been rigged so that the ruling party can get their guy in as rector. This is because the rector has a role in appointing government officials. It’s just wild, the whole story.
But if we’re looking at what’s most consequential, the financial collapse of UK higher education is fascinating because it’s happening in such an unplanned way. It’s a merger here, a takeover there, and you never know what’s going to happen next week.
I think the collapse of the National Student Financial Aid Scheme in South Africa is pretty consequential. I think what looks like an impending collapse of the equivalent organization in Kenya, the Higher Education Loans Board, is also significant. They’re both products of people thinking student loans could do too much. The idea was, “We don’t have the money right now. We’ll lend students the money, they’ll give it to universities, and everything will work out.” Then, oops, we haven’t figured out how to reclaim those loans. Or it turns out tuition alone wasn’t enough to expand the system the way those two countries wanted. These are two countries that have been very ambitious in higher education. Kenya just opened another two universities last week. So the collapse of those financial foundations is a big deal.
The last one, just for sheer craziness, is Costa Rica and the negotiation of what they call FEES – Fondo Especial para la Educación Superior (Special Fund for Higher Education) – it’s basically their operating grant. The government in Costa Rica does something very unusual. It hands money to the institutions and says, “You figure out how to distribute it.” There’s no funding formula. They just say, “There are five public universities. You discuss it and decide.” This year, they couldn’t agree. Over the last five or six negotiation periods, the University of Costa Rica had agreed to give up a little of its share to keep the peace. This year they said, “Forget it. We’re not doing it.” That threw the whole system into chaos. The government basically said, “Okay, if you can’t decide, we’ll decide.” And nobody liked what the government decided either.
So that’s been fun to watch. I don’t know how consequential it is, but it’s certainly been an interesting example of trying to get around the problem of the government being too directive in its funding formula. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work.
TM: What global higher education stories do you think are getting too much attention right now? And on the flip side, what do you think people should be talking about more that they’re not?
AU: Well, I think there’s a lot of talk about international students. It’s partly because the international student industry is fairly influential and has a lot of money, so it’s got its own press. Times Higher Education devotes a lot of space to it.
One of the big stories they were touting earlier this year was that the Big Four have become the Big 14. I mean, who cares? Genuinely, who cares? I don’t find that particularly interesting. It’s all these countries—Turkey, South Korea, Germany, France—following a fairly similar playbook to what Australia, the UK, and Canada did. It will all fall apart fairly shortly when they realize either these students cost too much money or they cost too much money to house. Then the housing market becomes an issue. It’s such a predictable cycle, and I don’t find it particularly interesting.
What are people not talking about enough? I think the big one is that AI, in many ways, puts into question what a university is—what the purpose of a university is. Right now, AI is still such an amorphous beast that it’s like the blind men feeling the elephant. One person feels the trunk and says, “This thing is really solid.” Another feels the trunk and says, “No, it’s really long and loose.” Nobody really knows what this technology is going to do. I think this is big. Broadly speaking, Asia is taking a very different view about how AI and universities are going to interact than the Americas or Europe are. This is a big deal, and it’s partly because it forces the question: what do you think the purpose of the university is? I don’t think we’ve come to grips with that yet, and we probably should.
TM: You touched on this a little earlier, but what role has politics played in global higher education this year? Are universities becoming more vulnerable to political interference, as some headlines would suggest, or is that a bit overstated?
AU: I don’t know if it’s a huge change from last year or previous years. One of the things Trump did last year was go after individual universities—Harvard most famously, but a dozen or so others as well. Some settled with him and some fought back. In some cases, it was the faculty union that fought back rather than the university itself, as happened in the University of California system. Good on them. What worries me is that it normalizes the idea that a chief executive—or a government more broadly—can single out individual institutions.
We’re seeing that elsewhere, too. In Turkey, for instance, the government basically said, “There’s this opposition guy who runs a university. Let’s close the university.” Twenty thousand students were effectively going to be thrown out on the street.
Interestingly, that was Bilgi University in Istanbul, and the decision was reversed within about four days. But you’re also seeing the Kosovo government going after the University of Pristina in North Mitrovica. The Belarusian government is still, somewhat bizarrely, targeting the European Humanities University, even though it moved to Lithuania years ago and continues to attract Belarusian students. If you’re a student there, the KGB—or whatever the Belarusian equivalent is—may haul your family in for questioning. It’s wild.
So, although the American government seems to have backed off somewhat from targeting individual institutions, we’re still seeing it elsewhere, and I suspect we may continue to see it.
Then there are a number of countries where the issue of Israel and academic boycotts has become a major concern. In Germany, for example, there are ongoing debates about when anti-Israel speech crosses into antisemitism. In Australia, the definition of antisemitism that some are trying to get universities to adopt is quite expansive. France, meanwhile, genuinely does have a problem with antisemitism, so the issue is playing out there as well.
Interestingly, I saw last week that the Israeli Rectors’ Conference said the effects of the boycott movement are now strategic in scale. Israeli universities are being cut off from parts of the global academic community to an extent that is beginning to affect the science they can produce.
That’s interesting because it suggests the boycott movement has achieved a level of coordination and impact that is having measurable effects. That’s a significant political story, too, and one that I think everyone should continue watching.
TM: Speaking of things to keep watching, what country or region should higher education watchers be paying the most attention to this year, either because something is going really well or because something is about to go very, very badly?
AU: The number of places where things could go badly is almost without limit.
Germany recently had to shut down the Technical University of Berlin because the infrastructure had become so decrepit that they couldn’t keep operating it. France looks set for another year in which almost every institution runs a deficit. The UK is clearly in a form of slow-motion collapse. Argentina, for reasons we’ve discussed before and have had guests talk about on the podcast, continues to face significant challenges. Pakistan is in a terrible state as well. There are big financial problems in a whole bunch of countries, and some of them are pretty desperate.
I think the Georgian government has been doing some things that I genuinely can’t tell are ambitious or demented in terms of trying to control universities. So Georgia is an interesting case to watch this year.
On the positive side, Greece is moving fairly quickly toward a much more dynamic higher education system. Five years ago, it was hard to find a more ossified higher education system than Greece’s, and that’s really changing for the better.
The other thing I’d say is that the places to watch aren’t necessarily countries. They’re types of institutions.
One of the things both developed and developing countries are learning this decade is that a university system that is mostly public and mostly publicly funded can be quite vulnerable. What’s interesting is the extent to which private universities are leading the pack in places like India and Vietnam. In a number of rising economies, it’s the private institutions that seem to be driving innovation and growth. There was an Economist article recently on India, and I’ve highlighted a couple of examples from Vietnam as well. It’s really interesting.
I think that’s a trend we’ll be watching for quite a while.
TM: One of the countries you didn’t really mention on that list was Canada. Let’s flip over to our part of the globe. What’s been the story of the year so far in Canada? Has anything been shocking, or perhaps not shocking at all?
AU: One of the reasons I do The World of Higher Education is to keep Canada in perspective. Canadians like looking inward, and so when something happens here, the reaction is often, “Oh my God, this is the worst thing ever.” And my response is, “What? Have you heard of Argentina?” It helps keep things in perspective.
The most shocking thing that happened this year in Canada was the Ontario government’s decision to put billions of dollars back into post-secondary education. Now, in typical Ford fashion, they did it in such a clumsy way that they didn’t really get credit for it. They also did it while making some questionable claims about what’s happening with student aid and private institutions.
The story of how some private colleges have been exploiting the OSAP system is one that still hasn’t fully come out. It will eventually. I can’t wait for the day when some of those operators get nailed, and when people start asking tougher questions about why governments let it go on for so long.
But at the same time, the province put money back into universities and colleges. The government can legitimately say that Ontario’s post-secondary institutions are now receiving more public funding in absolute dollars than ever before. They effectively reversed almost 20 years of underfunding. They put something like a billion to a billion and a half dollars back into the system. That’s remarkable.
What’s equally remarkable is that it still leaves Ontario tenth out of ten provinces in per-student funding. That’s how far behind Ontario had fallen. A billion and a half dollars doesn’t even get you to ninth place. Ontario institutions will understandably shrug and say, “Well, that’s nice, but we lost four or five billion dollars in international student revenue.” And I get that. I understand why people say the sector is still worse off overall.
But, it was still a very big deal. For Ontario to make that kind of investment was significant, and I’m hopeful that other provinces will look at it and decide to do something similar.
TM: One of the things we’ve talked a lot about over the past few years has been colleges and universities reacting to chronic underfunding and the loss of international student revenue. That’s really been the dominant headline in Canadian higher education.
How would you characterize college and university decision-making this year compared to previous years? Are institutions becoming more proactive in their strategies, or are we still seeing primarily reactive decision-making?
AU: I’m not sure I’d describe it as proactive or reactive. What disappoints me a little is that most universities still don’t seem to have found a way to talk internally about their futures in a way that’s honest and creates more space for movement.
TM: That’s what we’re for.
AU: I know, that’s what we’re for. At a certain level, maybe I have a market interest in not seeing that happen.
But take a look at what happened at Vancouver Island University. That’s a university that was in trouble. If you’d told me two years ago that it might be an institution that could go under, I would have said, “Yeah, that’s plausible.” But they balanced their budget this year. They managed to do some big things, like reducing their number of faculties from eight to four. That’s pretty impressive.
Obviously, a near-death experience can make people more flexible, and I don’t know all the details of that particular case. But it does seem to me that they’ve managed a pretty impressive turnaround. I think institutions are getting smarter about the market.
The thing that worries me is that a lot of people still have their minds in the old world, where every problem had a revenue solution. The thinking is still, “We’ll just open a TNE operation overseas.” And great—we should do that. I’m not against it. But it doesn’t solve problems in quite the same way that international student revenue used to. There’s money there, but generally speaking, there’s less of it.
I still don’t think we’ve reached the point where universities are getting significantly better at the process side of things. Universities are getting better at doing less. Colleges, I would say, are probably getting better at doing less as well. But there’s still a lot of process re-engineering and program re-engineering that needs to happen, and I think the pace of change there remains fairly slow.
What happened at VIU shows that if faculty trust that the problem is serious, and if they understand the costs and opportunity costs associated with different options, they’ll be sensible about it.
We’ve got to get past this idea that collective agreements make meaningful change impossible. I don’t think that’s true. I actually think the problem is that too many institutions don’t have enough space for collective discussions about what kind of institution they want to be. If we had more of those conversations, I think we’d find much easier answers to some of our financial questions.
TM: If you were to make a prediction for global higher education over the next six months, what would it be? And what would be one prediction for Canadian higher education?
AU: The great thing about being a futurist in higher education is that there’s one prediction I can make with absolute confidence: the cost of higher education will rise. Now, whether anyone will pay those costs is another question. I think that’s the global moment we’re in. We’ve built higher education systems that too many countries simply don’t want to pay for anymore.
I know which stories I’m watching:
In Argentina, the question is whether Milei will ever pay attention to the law and implement the legislation he’s been ignoring for the last eight months. Could there be some big, dramatic resolution there? Maybe.
In Colombia, could a new right-wing government come in and start dismantling what Gustavo Petro has done over the last four years? Absolutely. Both of those would be major stories in Latin America.
In Africa, I think you could certainly see institutions going under.
The UK is probably the place where you’re most likely to see a major blowup, simply because the situation isn’t very coordinated. But there are plenty of other places—particularly France and maybe Spain—where financial problems are likely to continue.
There’s also the question of what happens in the Gulf. The role of Dubai and the UAE as centres for transnational education is something I’m watching closely.
They managed to get through the last semester online, but I don’t know whether things fully bounce back in September. If the Gulf suddenly ceased to function as a major transnational education hub, that would be a huge story.
Honestly, that might be the craziest thing I can imagine happening in the next six months.
You asked about Canada, too. In Canada, I think it’s still possible that an institution could effectively go under in the next six months. I don’t think that’s impossible. The thing is, we might not hear about it. There could be quiet bailouts, the way we’ve seen in the past. Sometimes an institution can’t pay its bills for a month, the government quietly steps in, provides some financing, and everyone moves on without much public discussion. That does happen.
I don’t know if that’s what we’ll see, but the situation is serious enough that one or two institutions could find themselves in that position. And now institutions can’t use creditor protection the way they once could. So who knows what happens if one of them genuinely runs out of money? We’ll see.
On that positive note, professionally speaking, I am optimistic about what’s coming. I do think we’ve hit bottom. I do think we’re heading upward. There are just a few potholes on the way up.
TM: Fantastic. Alex, thank you for joining us. Thank you to everyone who joined us for Season 4 of The World of Higher Education Podcast. We’re taking a break for the summer and will be back for Season 5 in September. If there are topics or questions you’d like us to cover on the podcast, send us a note at podcast@higheredstrategy.com. We’ll see you in September.
*This podcast transcript was generated using an AI transcription service with limited editing. Please forgive any errors made through this service. Please note, the views and opinions expressed in each episode are those of the individual contributors, and do not necessarily reflect those of the podcast host and team, or our sponsors.
