The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Author: Alex Usher

Mid-term Book Reviews 2023

Hi all.  You know the drill.  Every six months I tell you about the higher education books I’ve read this year so you can go to the beach armed with the best in higher education reading. But first, I hear you are interested in some non-higher-ed reading?  That sounds a bit weird to me, but I’ll oblige: My fiction pics for this last few months are The Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio by Amara Lakhous, and The Stolen Bicycle by

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June 13, 2023 1 Comment

Higher Education in Saudi Arabia

In most of the world, you can count on certain features being present in higher education systems: co-education by gender, educating your best students at home, institutions complaining about funding, students complaining about funding, but one country defies most of these expectations. In Saudi Arabia, students are still, for the most part, taught in gender segregated classes. Nearly all students receive free tuition and generous maintenance grants, and tens of thousands of top students leave the country every year at

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June 12, 2023 No Comments

Counting the Previously Uncounted

Morning all.  No podcast today: we had some scheduling difficulties that require us to switch up Monday’s blog to today, and the interview on Saudi Arabia with Annalisa Pavan to Monday.  Our apologies. Earlier this week, the good folks at Statscan released i) a pretty cool infographic about students in private post-secondary education in Canada and ii) a remarkably nerdy piece, technically a report on a “pilot project,” about how they came up with the numbers in the infographic.  Strangely, it didn’t publish

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June 8, 2023 1 Comment

The Far Future

Occasionally, I get asked about why higher education will look like in forty or fifty years.  I usually beg off this kind of thing because predictions over that length of time aren’t very meaningful.  I mean, will AI have an effect?  Of course it will.  Can I predict what it is?  Of course not.  Don’t be ridiculous. And yet.  There are a couple of important things that we can say, with little fear of contradiction, about the future environment in

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June 7, 2023 4 Comments

The Alberta Problem

Last week, the good folks of Alberta elected a United Conservative Party government for the next four years.  What does that mean for post-secondary education?  First, I think it’s a pretty good bet that – on the university side at least – we will continue to see more episodes of culture war nonsense along the lines of what we saw in Lethbridge last year.  Universities are kind of the epitome of the “effete lefty” culture that UCP likes to believe

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June 6, 2023 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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