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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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Royal Roads University: A Canadian University Without Tenure or Senate
One way in which Canada is a big outlier in global higher education is the lack of standardization of university forms. Most countries have national or sub-national framework legislation that apply to all institutions’ operation and governance. Not Canada. Our provinces tend to prefer creating new bespoke legislation for every new institution that
Report Back on the National Defence Research Roundtable
You may recall that back in mid-November – on the back of some discussions that took place at the University Vice-President’s Network meeting in Victoria – HESA launched a call for a meeting in Ottawa focused on: i) how to coordinate and advance defence research in Canada, and ii) developing sector-wide
How Canada Discusses Post-Secondary Education
We have an exciting little announcement for our BC and ON subscribers today – see the bottom of this blog for more details on ways we are supporting discussions and convening in the Canadian PSE sector. One of the things that distinguishes Canadian post-secondary education from those in other anglophone
Three
Just before Christmas, an interesting blog post appeared on the Canadian conservative website The Hub. It was by Mitch Davidson, late of the Ford Administration in Queen’s Park, and his subject was the topic of three-year bachelor’s degrees. Davidson is pro-, and he advances some fairly spectacular claims on behalf
Focus Friday: January 9
Hi everyone, Tiffany here. A quick reminder that Focus Friday is happening today (January 9th) from 12:30-1:30pm Eastern. This week’s session is a little different. Rather than a guest presentation, we’re hosting a community conversation about what 2026 might hold for the higher education sector and how institutions are thinking
What Is UNESCO’s Role in Global Higher Education Today
In the wake of World War II, the nations of the world thought seriously about the relationship between education and peace. One of the outcomes of that thinking was the creation of the United Nations’ Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organizations – UNESCO, for short – whose founding charter states: “since wars
2026 Rankings Overview (International)
Yesterday we looked at how individual institutions within Canada fared in the last round of international rankings. One of the key phenomena that we saw was that while the eight Canadian institutions in the top two hundred of the major rankings were more or less holding their own, the slightly
2026 Rankings Overview (Canada)
Most years, I do a quick overview of the major international rankings and how Canadian institutions have fared in them. Today is the day I do that for the 2026 rankings from the Times Higher and QS, as well as the 2025 Shanghai Ranking (Shanghai is dated the year they
The Small-Tent Path to Disaster
Morning all. Back to the grind. One of the surprising things I discovered over the break was that the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) seems to think that the sector is in good enough shape that it can afford to apply purity tests to external support. See specifically the
The Fifteen: December 12, 2025
Welcome to The Fifteen, a global round-up of the stories animating higher education institutions and systems around the globe. Let’s get to it. That’s it for now. The next Fifteen will return on January 9. See you then.
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