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Category: Blogs

Three

Just before Christmas, an interesting blog post appeared on the Canadian conservative website The Hub. It was by Mitch Davidson, late of the Ford Administration in Queen’s Park, and his subject was the topic of three-year bachelor’s degrees. Davidson is pro-, and he advances some fairly spectacular claims on behalf of such credentials. Just look at the headline: How Switching to three-year post-secondary degrees could kickstart the Canadian economy, or the claim later down in the paper that “widespread adoption

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January 12, 2026 3 Comments

Focus Friday: January 9

Hi everyone, Tiffany here. A quick reminder that Focus Friday is happening today (January 9th) from 12:30-1:30pm Eastern. This week’s session is a little different. Rather than a guest presentation, we’re hosting a community conversation about what 2026 might hold for the higher education sector and how institutions are thinking about the year ahead. We’ll use the hour to reflect together on the big questions many of us are already grappling with: AI will almost certainly be part of that

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January 9, 2026 No Comments

What Is UNESCO’s Role in Global Higher Education Today

In the wake of World War II, the nations of the world thought seriously about the relationship between education and peace. One of the outcomes of that thinking was the creation of the United Nations’ Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organizations – UNESCO, for short – whose founding charter states: “since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed”. And, since higher education was part of that mandate, that arguably

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January 8, 2026 No Comments

2026 Rankings Overview (International)

Yesterday we looked at how individual institutions within Canada fared in the last round of international rankings. One of the key phenomena that we saw was that while the eight Canadian institutions in the top two hundred of the major rankings were more or less holding their own, the slightly less research-intensive were seeing their numbers slip across all. Today, I want to show why that phenomenon is more about improvements in higher education in other countries than it is

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January 7, 2026 1 Comment

2026 Rankings Overview (Canada)

Most years, I do a quick overview of the major international rankings and how Canadian institutions have fared in them. Today is the day I do that for the 2026 rankings from the Times Higher and QS, as well as the 2025 Shanghai Ranking (Shanghai is dated the year they come out, Times Higher and QS are numbered like automobiles, one year ahead of the release date). In a bit of a departure from past practice, I am going to

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January 6, 2026 5 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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