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Category: One Thought to Start Your Day

Massification and its Unacknowledged Trade-offs

The following is an adaptation of a speech I gave at the Justus Liebig University in Giessen, Germany last week. My thanks to the University’s President Dr. Professor Katherina Lorenz for inviting me to give the talk. Across what we used to call the developed world, there are, at the moment, many things that are driving tensions between universities and society. There’s no single cause but rather a confluence of factors, and the exact mix of factors changes a bit country-by country. I’m

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December 1, 2025 1 Comment

The New Decliners

Morning all. Next week, we will be launching The World of Higher Education – Year in Review 2025, which is our new global equivalent to The State of Post-Secondary Education in Canada. As a document, it’s less data-driven and somewhat more narrative-driven than what you might be used to from HESA, but we think that you’ll enjoy it. And, as a treat today, I wanted to show you some of the data, specifically on enrolment, which suggests that big changes

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November 26, 2025 No Comments

Factors Changing the Face of Global Student Mobility

The following is an adaptation of a talk I gave at the Conference of the Americas on International Education (CAEI), sponsored by the Inter-American Organization for Higher Education (IOHE), in San José, Costa Rica last month. My thanks to David Julien and the organizers for the invitation. There is a lot of armchair quarterbacking when it comes to international student flows. There are some consultants – and some media outlets out there – who think it’s possible to predict these flows, but

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November 25, 2025 1 Comment

What We Do and Why We Do It

After fifteen years of writing this blog, I pause and look back every now and then at those first posts. Back then, it was just me writing about a sector I had already spent much of my career working in, sharing whatever I thought might help people stay informed, provoked, or at least amused before their first coffee of the day. Over time, I have come to realise that a surprising number of people assume my job is simply writing

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November 24, 2025 1 Comment

Letter from China

A quick reminder before we get to our regularly scheduled programming: Last week, I told you about the National Defence Research Roundtable HESA is hosting on December 15 in Ottawa. Some of you missed the expression of interest window, so we’re reopening the form until 12pm on Thursday. You can expect to hear from us about registration later this week.  I just spent the last week visiting China. It’s been a trip in more ways than one. My first couple

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November 19, 2025 No 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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