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Category: One Thought to Start Your Day

Comparative Crises

If you pay attention to higher education news from around the anglosphere, you may be under the impression that we are “all in it together”: that is, all suffering, in particular, from the loss of international student funding because of a variety of government policies discouraging them. But is it true? Well, no. We are not all in it together. Canada – thanks to the galactic incompetence of the federal government in general, and former immigration Marc Miller in particular

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March 31, 2026 No Comments

Throwback

Jambo! From Nairobi, where I’m spending the next couple of days. I’ve had some long plane flights to get here, and Lufthansa inexplicably hasn’t worked out how to put power chargers in economy seats, so I’ve been doing some re-reading of obscure texts. I want to tell you today about one piece, called Universities Under Scrutiny. Published by the OECD in 1987 it’s very, well…familiar. Let’s start with this quote from the OECD’s Intergovernmental Conference on Policies for Higher Education

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March 30, 2026 1 Comment

Comparing Student Loan Outcomes

Yesterday, I said that the system of English student loans were the worst in the world. And I know the skeptical among you probably thought “how can he say that? Where is the comparative data?” So, today, some data on student loans programs around the world which will show, definitively, how awful the English system is. Let’s start with a basic piece of contextual data, which is that there are huge differences between countries when it comes to the percentage

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March 25, 2026 1 Comment

The World’s Worst Student Loan System

If you read the UK education press at all, you’ll have noticed a serious uptick recently in the number of stories describing the current student loan system as “a scam” by  Government back-bench MPs and “a mess” by a former Deputy PM who played a large role in designing it. What’s going on, you ask? How bad is it? Well.. The problem with student finance in the UK is that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, in their haste to modernize

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March 24, 2026 1 Comment

A Thought on the Iran War

So, somehow, President Prince of Peace has got the United States into a shooting war with Iran, and, in a development NO ONE COULD HAVE POSSIBLY FORESEEN, Iran has retaliated in part by attacking American allies around the Persian Gulf. Although it is about an eight-tier priority right now, one of the questions the war is raising right now: what is the fate of the United Arab Emirates’ international education industry? Can Dubai, and the region as a whole, regain a reputation

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March 23, 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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