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Category: One Thought to Start Your Day

The Free World Higher Education Area

The world is changing.  The goal of the Trump Administration, fairly clearly, is to create a world where “rules” are set by the Three Bullies (itself, Russia and China) with all other countries basically left at the mercy of these three major nuclear powers.  It is a terrifying prospect, with more than a little of echo of Orwell’s Oceania/Eurasia/Eastasia trio with their boots “stamping on the face of humanity, forever” But the thing about all those other countries?  They have

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April 1, 2025 No Comments

That Was The Quarter That Was, Winter 2025

 I’m trying something new today.  Every second Friday since last September, HESA’s Matt Doyle and I have been putting together the Fifteen – a list of interesting stories on higher education from around the world.  I am hoping to turn the results of this little project, along with some data analysis on student enrolments and university finances, into an annual almanac – a little bit like State of Post-Secondary Education in Canada only a bit more narrative and a lot more global.  As a

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March 31, 2025 1 Comment

Check-in on Administrative Bloat, 2025 Edition

Check-in on Administrative Bloat, 2025 Edition It’s been a little over five years since I took a serious dive into the question of “administrative bloat,” which apparently exists everywhere but in the statistics. Still, always good to check assumptions every once in a while, and I thought five years was long enough to make a new look at the data worthwhile. So here goes: Let’s start by reviewing what we can and cannot know about staffing at Canadian universities. StatsCan

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March 26, 2025 2 Comments

EDI and the Measurement of Merit

Across most of the world, the concept of academic merit tends to get operationalized as “best at passing a certain test taken by a limited group of people at a certain point in time.” A competition, in other words. For young people, it tends to involve passing an exam or set of exams, be they the American SAT, the Chinese gaokao, the Indian JEET, the French baccalauréat, etc. For aspiring professors, the competition is a little more subjective in the sense that

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March 25, 2025 2 Comments

Observations and Suggestions about Boards of Governors

 Today, a few random observations about University and College Boards of Governors, based on some thinking prompted by a class talk I gave at OISE last week and some noodling about Bill 12 in Nova Scotia. I have three thoughts and three propositions.  1) Boards of Governors Have Complicated Job Descriptions  Formally, the role of Boards is pretty clear. They choose institutional leadership, set (or at least approve) institutional priorities and—this one is the most important—they oversee institutional finances to make

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March 24, 2025 No Comments

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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