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Category: One Thought to Start Your Day

World Youth Population Projections

I have been thinking a lot lately about the longer-term future of higher education and how demographics will change the nature of the sector. Today I want to share some data and thoughts on this subject.  My basic observations are that 1) whatever else it may do, higher education exists mainly for young adults, and 2) the world’s complement of young people has already more or less topped out. We might be able to increase participation rates, but “peak 18-21”

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March 16, 2026 No Comments

Coalition-Building

I spent last weekend reading Joe Studwell’s new book How Africa Works, the sequel (of a sort) to his earlier, simply brilliant, book How Asia Works. Both are works of political and economic history, trying to work out how various countries (Japan, Korea, Taiwan in one case; Botswana, Mauritius, Ethiopia and Rwanda in the other) came to be regional leaders in development. According to Studwell, examining the keys to success through the lens of democracy vs. dictatorship is not particularly helpful. What tends to matter,

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March 11, 2026 No Comments

Skills, Innovation, Quality, Blindness

One of the many, many frustrating things about Canadian policy over the past couple of decades is the combination of blindness and bad habits that our policy makers have with respect to the role of skills. Let’s start with the blindness, which mostly applies to our policymakers’ understanding of the relationship between skills and innovation. Innovation, to be clear, is not “invention”. It’s not about discovering some new idea or application and then building a world-beating company around. This might be the tech

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March 10, 2026 No Comments

First-Generation Students, Graduate Migration, and AI’s Effect on the Labour Market

The above is a banger of a title but, unfortunately, I am not weaving those three topics into a single master narrative. Rather, today I’d like to catch everyone up on some Statistics Canada releases from the last couple of weeks which I think deserve wider attention. Canadian First-Generation Students Fare Pretty Well. First up is a paper by Landry Kuate, Amélie Lafrance-Cooke, and Jenny Watt entitled The educational pathways of first-generation students. “First generation” students – that is, students

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March 9, 2026 No Comments

Higher Education Diplomacy

I had been noodling for a couple of weeks about how nation states use higher education as a soft power tool, when all of a sudden last Saturday morning stuff starts popping up in my feed about how Canada and India have just announced a joint “Talent Strategy” as part of Prime Minister Carney’s visit to India over the weekend. This announcement was so weak and superficial, I thought I should write a little bit about it, just to show how

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March 4, 2026 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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