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Author: Alex Usher

Campus Unrest and Public Funding: Then and Now

If you’ve been watching the American higher education scene for the last couple of years, you will no doubt have noticed a spate of bills wending their way through various state legislatures that are widely understood as attacks on higher education.  These include bills weakening tenure, bills making it effectively illegal to teach American history (lest White students feel guilty about the actions of their ancestors), or the defunding of courses on programs on gender or women’s studies.  The narrative

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April 5, 2022 1 Comment

The Dog That Didn’t Bark

For the last few weeks, I’ve been giving you little snippets from World Higher Education: Institutions, Students and Funding.  Today, I want to address a topic that came up in the document’s webinar launch (available at the University World News’ YouTube channel). It’s something I haven’t really been able to talk about because it’s something that didn’t appear in the report for the simple reason that it didn’t happen. It is, to some extent, the dog that didn’t bark.  But

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April 4, 2022 No Comments

World Higher Education: Institutions, Students and Funding

Good morning, all.  Today – FINALLY – marks the release of World Higher Education: Institutions, Students, Funding, which I have been co-authoring with HESA’s Jonathan Williams for the better part of three years now (Jonathan did most of the heavy lifting).  You can find the full report, as well as national profiles for each of the 56 countries included in the analysis, right here.  If you are a regular reader, you know a lot of the narratives.  In previous blog

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March 31, 2022 No Comments

Innovations in Engineering Education

Alex Usher and Jonathan McQuarrie Today HESA is releasing the fifth edition of our publication Monitoring Trends in Academic Programs, written by Jonathan McQuarrie.   This issue is a bit of a departure for MTAP.  Unlike previous editions which have focused largely on innovations that occur at the intersections between different fields of study, this one focuses squarely on a single domain of study which is undergoing some serious re-invention; namely, Engineering.  What is happening right now in Engineering education is

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March 30, 2022 No Comments

Breaking the Discipline/Degree Nexus

Just a quick one today because the expanded HESA Towers opened yesterday and there’s been a lot going on.  It’s about an experiment that I wish more institutions would undertake, upon building a new university (it has to be a new university, for reasons which I think will be obvious): that is, to allow the institution to offer degrees on any basis it wishes except that of disciplinarity.  No history degrees.  No physics degrees.  Kill disciplinarity, at least as it

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March 29, 2022 7 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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