The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Author: Alex Usher

New Statscan Data on Students and Academic Staff

Over the last few weeks – while I have been busy obsessing about Year in Review 2025 – a couple of big Statscan releases came out. One was about students in 2023/2024 and one was about academic staff in 2024/25. Time to catch up. The student data is the slightly more interesting of the two, because it (finally) shows the system essentially at the height of the international student boom in the late fall of 2023 (Statscan student data is

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December 8, 2025 1 Comment

Monsters in the System: Alex Usher on the Forces Transforming Higher Ed

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

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December 4, 2025 No Comments

The World of Higher Education – Year in Review 2025

Morning all. Today, HESA is releasing The World of Higher Education – Year in Review 2025, the first in our to-be-annual series chronicling how the world’s higher education systems have fared over the past twelve months. You can download it here. Despite taking up something on the order of 1% of global GDP and educating 3-4% of the world’s population in any given year, higher education is, perhaps surprisingly, a field where most of the analytical work is resoundingly national

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December 3, 2025 No Comments

That BC Post-Secondary Review

Last week, the Government of British Columbia announced it was going to hold a post-secondary review.  Here’s the announcement. And here’s the terms of reference (ToR) for the review, possibly the longest ToR in Canadian history, including – get this – a bunch of blacked-out text indicating censoring, which was made even more hilarious because the censored bits quite clearly don’t say anything incriminating. Figure 1: The Hilarious Bits of the BC ToR The basics of the announcement are that

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December 2, 2025 4 Comments

Massification and its Unacknowledged Trade-offs

The following is an adaptation of a speech I gave at the Justus Liebig University in Giessen, Germany last week. My thanks to the University’s President Dr. Professor Katherina Lorenz for inviting me to give the talk. Across what we used to call the developed world, there are, at the moment, many things that are driving tensions between universities and society. There’s no single cause but rather a confluence of factors, and the exact mix of factors changes a bit country-by country. I’m

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December 1, 2025 1 Comment

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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