Author: Alex Usher

The State of Postsecondary Education in Canada, 2025

Hi all. Today, HESA is releasing the eighth edition of The State of Postsecondary Education in Canada, co-authored by myself and HESA’s Jiwoo Jeon and Janet Balfour. Many thanks to our partners – Pearson, Studiosity, Duolingo, Capio, Element451 and Riipen – for supporting this year’s edition. You probably don’t need to actually read this year’s edition to know that the state of postsecondary education in Canada is a bit perilous. And the reason for this, quite simply, is that public

Read More »

Five Rules for 2025-26

Morning all.  It’s been a busy summer at HESA Towers. We’ve been developing Boardwise, our new suite of governance products with our partners at Balsam Advisory, and exploring new ideas on data governance and analytics with our friends at Plaid Analytics. We’ve also been touring the country with the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) Thought Leadership Office and the Business +  Higher Education Roundtable (BHER) to talk about higher education, economic growth and productivity. The “what we heard” document from

Read More »

Re: University is on. Are you in?

Hi everyone — pardon the summer interruption, but we’ve got news worth breaking the quiet for. You may recall that earlier this year, we announced something new: a national conference dedicated to helping Canadian universities rethink what they are and what they could be. We called it Re:University. We said it would be the conference that couldn’t have been an email. We meant it. Re:University will take place January 29–30, 2026, in downtown Ottawa. Two full days, bringing together hundreds

Read More »

The Year the Money Ran Out: Global Higher Ed Review

Hello everyone, and welcome to the World of Higher Education podcast. I’m Tiffany MacLennan, and if you’re a faithful listener, you know what it means when I’m the one opening the episode—this week, our guest is AU. We’re doing a year in review, looking at some of the global higher education stories that stood out in 2024—from massification to private higher education, from Trump’s international impact to the most interesting stories overall. But I’ll pass it over to Alex. The World of

Read More »

Summer 2025

So. This is the last blog of the academic year. Service resumes Tuesday, 2 September. It’s been a long year. I’m pretty tired. How about you? This was the year it all kind of came crashing down: not just here in Canda, but everywhere else too. It’s too long to go through and my more faithful readers already know the story. It’s not just in Canada. In France, Australia, and the UK, we saw institutions having similar problems: all these

Read More »