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Author: Alex Usher

Fall and Rise

Fall and Rise The question I am getting more often than any other these days is: “what are you hearing about cuts at colleges and universities?” And my answer for the most part has been: “damned if I know.” The reason for my confusion is that publicly available details are few and far between. The HESA Towers team has been scouring the public record for details on institutional budget announcements; by our count, only 34 universities or colleges have so

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December 10, 2024 1 Comment

Late 2024 Book Reviews

Morning all. You know it’s getting towards XMAS when I start writing about the higher education books I’ve read recently. So, yes, those are Christmas bells ringing you can hear as you open this email and perusing my takes on the stuff I’ve read since Canada Day (I’ve already posted my January-June takes). Hopefully you can find a stocking stuffer or two in here for your own higher education nerd. To start with the non-higher ed stuff. On the fiction

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December 9, 2024 No Comments

Skilled for the Future: How China is Transforming Vocational Education with Gerard Postiglione

If there’s one thing we know for sure about Confucian societies, it’s the value they place on scholarship.  Being a student doesn’t just connote future financial success; the very act of studying itself carries an important element of moral virtue.  It’s one of the things that has driven university participation rates to extraordinarily high levels in East Asia, and also among diaspora populations in countries around the world.  Here in Canada, 25 years ago, Statistics Canada polled parents across Canada

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December 5, 2024 1 Comment

Money and Vibes

As I mentioned yesterday, I recently spent some time at the International Association of Universities’ (IAU) annual meeting in Tokyo earlier this month. It’s tough to organize a meaningful international meeting about what you might call the “hard” issues in university management (resources, budget allocations, management styles) because these vary so much from one part of the world to another, and so the program tends to be taken up with more universalist themes like “values.”  The interesting thing about values

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December 4, 2024 2 Comments

From Jazz to Symphony

I spent all last week in Asia, at events put on by the International Association of Universities (IAU) in Tokyo and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Jakarta. As usual, these meetings were interesting for me not so much because I can discover secrets of “how they do things better elsewhere” (they don’t, by and large, we’re all screwed for roughly the same reasons, which is that the public does not want to pay for the kind

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December 3, 2024 4 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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