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Category: One Thought to Start Your Day

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 of such credentials. Just look at the headline: How Switching to three-year post-secondary degrees could kickstart the Canadian economy, or the claim later down in the paper that “widespread adoption

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January 12, 2026 3 Comments

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 less research-intensive were seeing their numbers slip across all. Today, I want to show why that phenomenon is more about improvements in higher education in other countries than it is

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January 7, 2026 1 Comment

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 come out, Times Higher and QS are numbered like automobiles, one year ahead of the release date). In a bit of a departure from past practice, I am going to

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January 6, 2026 5 Comments

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 article in the last CAUT Bulletin by the University of Regina’s Marc Spooner entitled Not All Calls for Public Funding are Good. Spooner’s ire is directed at the Royal Bank

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January 5, 2026 No Comments

Trust Requires Change Requires Trust

Hi all. Tomorrow will feature my annual interview with Rob Kelchen about the year in US higher education, and Friday is the final Fifteen of the year, so that makes today the final regular blog of the year. And that means time to sum up and look forward. To sum up: the events of the past few months leave me pretty pessimistic. And looking forward: there are grounds for optimism, but they are slim.  The crux of the problem is this: people

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December 10, 2025 3 Comments
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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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