Category: Artificial Intelligence

First-Generation Students, Graduate Migration, and AI’s Effect on the Labour Market

The above is a banger of a title but, unfortunately, I am not weaving those three topics into a single master narrative. Rather, today I’d like to catch everyone up on some Statistics Canada releases from the last couple of weeks which I think deserve wider attention. Canadian First-Generation Students Fare Pretty Well. First up is a paper by Landry Kuate, Amélie Lafrance-Cooke, and Jenny Watt entitled The educational pathways of first-generation students. “First generation” students – that is, students

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

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 digital intensive programs for employees” to 38. It also announced a competition to establish 10 AI Innovation Graduate Schools. In Pakistan, the Higher Education Commission has told all universities that they need to change

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A Global Observatory for Higher Education Change: What We’re Learning

As you know, this show is dedicated to a global perspective on higher education; one that tries to encompass the entire globe. But covering the entire planet is difficult. There are a lot of countries out there, and there are very few trends which are truly universal. That means you need to track lots of developments and policies that are overlapping, complicated and contradictory — and that’s hard! I know — I’ve been writing our World Higher Education, Year in Review publication (out on

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Some Thoughts on the Use of AI in Teaching

I spent part of last week in Tempe at Arizona State University’s conference on Agentic AI and the Student Experience, which was a pretty interesting event. It made me think awhile about AI in higher education, which I thought I’d share with y’all. My POV on this basically comes down to six things: That last one is the most important. I’ll expand on it.  Higher education, being as near to eternal as any institution can be, constantly lives with technological changes. In

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Data Flourishing for Universities and Colleges (Governance Edition)

Yesterday, we wrote about how to make institutions flourish through better use of data…for management. But just as important as management is governance, and here, we would argue, a very different set of issues is at play. Let’s start at the top, with Boards of Governors. As Alex has previously argued, Board members are fundamentally part-timers. They spend maybe 5-8 days worth of time a year doing their Boardly duties. They need to be kept focused. Giving Board members reams

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