The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Author: Alex Usher

Trust Requires Change Requires Trust

Hi all. Tomorrow will feature my annual interview with Rob Kelchen about the year in US higher education, and Friday is the final Fifteen of the year, so that makes today the final regular blog of the year. And that means time to sum up and look forward. To sum up: the events of the past few months leave me pretty pessimistic. And looking forward: there are grounds for optimism, but they are slim.  The crux of the problem is this: people

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December 10, 2025 3 Comments

Books of the Year 2025

Exams have started, it’s getting cold, so that means the blog is winding down soon and I have to tell you about all the higher education books I’ve read since summer. Books from January to mid-June can be reviewed here. Buckle up. (Digression: if you want some good non-fiction, I can recommend Dan Wang’s Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future and Jacques Menard’s The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War, which is a bit of a

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December 9, 2025 No Comments

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

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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