The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Admissions

Responding to Online Entrance Exam Cheating at UNAM

Higher education dominated the front pages of Mexico’s media for most of this past summer. The reason? Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, the country’s largest, most prestigious, and selective institution, better known as UNAM, put its entrance exam online for the first time. 158,000 students took the exam, and the results, well, they weren’t good. As the exams were marked, it became evident that there were an unusual number of extremely high, near-perfect scores. Suspicions of cheating were naturally aroused.

Read More »
September 24, 2026 No Comments

Merit Wars

Canada has never really had much of an explicit debate about what constitutes academic merit. But we’re about to, thanks to the Ford Government in Ontario. And some of the battle lines will look very close to the ones we have been seeing in the United States since the Supreme Court’s decision on Student for Fair Admissions v. Harvard three years ago. This fall, the Ontario legislature passed Bill 33. I examined this piece of legislation when it was introduced

Read More »
February 9, 2026 No Comments

Inside the Gaokao: China’s Defining Test with Ruixue Jia

Every year, over 13 million students in China spend two full days taking the country’s university entrance exam, the Gaokao. It’s an event that most take years preparing for, starting in primary school, and the results determine not only where students will end up spending their university years, to a large extent it determines their entire life course. Today my guest is Dr. Ruixue Jia, a professor of economics at UC San Diego, whose co-author of a new book called The

Read More »
October 30, 2025 No Comments

Access and Aftermath: What Racial Quotas Changed in Brazil’s Universities with Luiz Augusto Campos

Brazil exited the age of slavery 135 years ago. It remains a multi-racial society today. But for much of the twentieth century, Brazil suffered an enormous bout of amnesia. From being one of the last societies on earth to give up slavery, it immediately began touting itself as a place where colour did not matter, that it was a post-racial society. But then about 30 years ago, things changed. Race — or more accurately race and inequality — became a much more prominent subject

Read More »
October 16, 2025 No Comments

Code Red on University Autonomy

There is no aspect of university autonomy that is more fundamental – in the British Commonwealth at least — than the right of each institution to select which students it chooses to admit. Along with financial autonomy, staffing autonomy, and financial autonomy (that last one being under increasing pressure these days), the right of institutions to choose which students to teach is fundamental to the Canadian higher education system. At no time in Canadian history has a government ever tried

Read More »
June 3, 2025 1 Comment
Load More

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.

Subscribe

Search Posts

Search Publications

Social Media

Linkedin Youtube Spotify

Recent Posts

More thoughts on...