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The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now ā†’

Category: One Thought to Start Your Day

The World of Higher Education ā€“ Year in Review 2025

Morning all. Today, HESA is releasing The World of Higher Education ā€“ Year in Review 2025, the first in our to-be-annual series chronicling how the worldā€™s higher education systems have fared over the past twelve months. You can download it here. Despite taking up something on the order of 1% of global GDP and educating 3-4% of the worldā€™s population in any given year, higher education is, perhaps surprisingly, a field where most of the analytical work is resoundingly national

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December 3, 2025 No Comments

That BC Post-Secondary Review

Last week, the Government of British Columbia announced it was going to hold a post-secondary review.  Hereā€™s the announcement. And hereā€™s the terms of reference (ToR) for the review, possibly the longest ToR in Canadian history, including ā€“ get this ā€“ a bunch of blacked-out text indicating censoring, which was made even more hilarious because the censored bits quite clearly donā€™t say anything incriminating. Figure 1: The Hilarious Bits of the BC ToR The basics of the announcement are that

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December 2, 2025 4 Comments

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 Universityā€™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. Thereā€™s no single cause but rather a confluence of factors, and the exact mix of factors changes a bit country-by country. Iā€™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 ā€“ Year in Review 2025, which is our new global equivalent to The State of Post-Secondary Education in Canada. As a document, itā€™s less data-driven and somewhat more narrative-driven than what you might be used to from HESA, but we think that youā€™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 JosĆ©, 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 ā€“ and some media outlets out there ā€“ who think itā€™s possible to predict these flows, but

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November 25, 2025 1 Comment
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One Thought to Start Your Day

One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usherā€™s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on todayā€™s higher education industry.

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