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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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Focus Friday: March 13

Tiffany MacLennan March 13, 2026 No Comments

Hi all, Tiffany here. A quick reminder that Focus Friday is happening today from 12:30-1:30pm Eastern! In this session, we’ll be joined by colleagues from the University of Alberta to talk about how institutions are beginning to use AI across multiple parts of the university. Rather than focusing on a

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Why Iranian Students Keep Protesting

Alex Usher March 12, 2026 No Comments

Iran is a country with a lot of higher education stories. Take stories about students: they were a key part of the coalition that overthrew the Shah in 1979, and they were the ones who spearheaded the capture of the US embassy later that year. But since 1999, students have also been

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Coalition-Building

Alex Usher March 11, 2026 No Comments

I spent last weekend reading Joe Studwell’s new book How Africa Works, the sequel (of a sort) to his earlier, simply brilliant, book How Asia Works. Both are works of political and economic history, trying to work out how various countries (Japan, Korea, Taiwan in one case; Botswana, Mauritius, Ethiopia and Rwanda in

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Skills, Innovation, Quality, Blindness

Alex Usher March 10, 2026 No Comments

One of the many, many frustrating things about Canadian policy over the past couple of decades is the combination of blindness and bad habits that our policy makers have with respect to the role of skills. Let’s start with the blindness, which mostly applies to our policymakers’ understanding of the

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The Fifteen: March 6, 2026

Alex Usher March 6, 2026 No Comments

Gather ‘round, all! This edition, we have absurd policy proposals from Australia and the UK, deceptive military recruitment practices in Russia, a battle over a rectorship in Colombia, and free McDonald’s meals for students in Malaysia. Let’s get started. That’s it for now, everyone.  See you back here on March

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Higher Education Diplomacy

Alex Usher March 4, 2026 No Comments

I had been noodling for a couple of weeks about how nation states use higher education as a soft power tool, when all of a sudden last Saturday morning stuff starts popping up in my feed about how Canada and India have just announced a joint “Talent Strategy” as part

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AI-cademy 2026: Making Artificial Intelligence Work for Higher Education

Alex Usher March 3, 2026 No Comments

This blog also doubles as an invitation to a national conversation we’re convening later this year. See the end for details. There have been some quite amazing developments in AI in higher education recently. Ethiopia announced plans to open Africa’s first AI University.  South Korea widened its network of universities providing “AI

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There Is Such A Thing As A Dumb Question

Alex Usher and Maïca Murphy March 2, 2026 2 Comments

You may have seen a story last week from CBC about the New Brunswick provincial government wanting to slash $35-50M from post-secondary funding this year. The story was actually about four days old when the CBC ran it – l’Acadie Nouvelle had all the goods the previous Friday based on

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