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Category: One Thought to Start Your Day

Overestimating in the Short Run

Nearly fifty years ago, California futurist Roy Amara coined a widely quoted adage on the subject of technological change. It says: “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” This is a quote very much worth keeping in mind when it comes to thinking about how higher education should react to the growth of artificial intelligence and, in particular, how we grapple with educating students for an

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May 26, 2026 No Comments

China Update 2026

Hi all. Every couple of years I spend some time going through data on Chinese higher education and, in particular, the finances of the country’s top universities. It’s been two years since the last time I did this, so here goes: Figure 1 shows total expenditures at what I call China’s Big 8 universities (which is actually just the elite C9 League of universities minus the Harbin Institute of Technology, which does not make previous years’ financial data available), in

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May 25, 2026 No Comments

Garbage In, Garbage Out: Nova Scotia Edition (Part 2)

Yesterday, I began outlining how the Nova Scotia government is trying to measure university program costs, and got as far as working out how the scheme was capturing certain facts about program income (excluding government grants and fees of students yet to declare a program) and certain facts about expenditures (excluding infrastructure, student services, IT, and roughly 60% of tenured professors’ salaries and benefits) and considered various ways that some assumptions about how to distribute both costs and revenues were

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May 20, 2026 No Comments

Garbage In, Garbage Out: Nova Scotia Edition (Part 1)

You may have heard of the program costing exercise (as part of an Academic Program Review) that the government of Nova Scotia has foisted on the institutions in that province. Today, I am going to go through how the exercise is being conducted as well as a few ways in which I find it lacking. Before I start, two nota benes (notas bene?). First, no one has paid HESA to do this analysis. This is a labour of…well, not love,

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May 19, 2026 1 Comment

Lectures, Essays, Genies, and Bottles

A couple of weeks ago, the Times Higher Education printed a kind of farewell interview with the University of Waterloo’s outgoing President Vivek Goel. Like many THE interviews of this nature, it’s a bit of an odd duck, spending half the time explaining to a global audience who this person is and why they and their institution are important and leaving only a couple of hundred words for the subject to say anything useful about their own legacy and the future. But what Goel did say

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May 13, 2026 1 Comment
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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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