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Author: Alex Usher

Higher Education, 90210

Just a quick reminder before we move into the one thought of the day: we’ve officially launched HESA’s Transnational Education (TNE) Strategy Project and are now looking to finalize our founding cohort of member institutions. If your institution is exploring (or re-examining) transnational education as part of its future strategy, we’re inviting expressions of interest by February 23. You can learn more about the project here. One of the great guilty pleasures of Wednesday nights in North America in the

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February 18, 2026 No Comments

Ontario Status Quo Ante

Thursday morning, Ontario’s Minister of Colleges and Universities made a very big funding announcement: $6.4 billion in new funding over four years. It was certainly a welcome announcement, but as my analysis below shows, it’s not a magic cure by any means, and there is a big sting in the tail of the announcement for students. The fundamentals of the announcement are that the provincial government announced that it was going to provide universities and colleges with three big new

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February 17, 2026 No Comments

The Fifteen: February 13, 2026

Just a quick reminder before we move into the one thought of the day: we’ve officially launched HESA’s Transnational Education (TNE) Strategy Project and are now looking to finalize our founding cohort of member institutions. If your institution is exploring (or re-examining) transnational education as part of its future strategy, we’re inviting expressions of interest by February 23. You can learn more about the project here. Good morning. Not much of a unifying theme to this issue of The Fifteen:

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February 13, 2026 1 Comment

Higher Education Beyond the Public Good

The last decade or so has seen enormous changes in world politics. It’s also seen some major changes the way governments relate to higher education, particularly in the anglosphere. For many, it’s been a polycrisis on top of a polycrisis – a multi-directional series of attacks on and challenges to the public standing of higher education at the exact moment when the socio-political underpinnings of the entire post-war settlement seems to be crumbling. Sounds like a pretty good subject for a book,

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February 12, 2026 No Comments

Canadian Higher Education’s Sacred Scaffolding

There is a whole bunch of policy areas in higher education which are what I might call “scaffolding” (others might use the term plumbing). That is, the basic building blocks of how education actually gets done: how classes get scheduled, how credits are defined, awarded and scored, then thrown into buckets and turned into degrees, etc. The lack of logic and consistency behind the existing system(s) frankly boggles the imagination: it’s absolutely an area where a little innovation could go a

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February 11, 2026 5 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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