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Category: Blogs

The Fifteen: October 31, 2025

Welcome to The Fifteen, a global round-up of the stories animating higher education institutions and systems around the globe. Let’s get to it. 1. From the US, an update on the Compact: of the nine original invitees, there are now seven “no”s, one “we’re not not saying no” (Vanderbilt) and one radio silence (UT Austin). In the face of near-universal rejection, Trump issued an open invitation to all institutions to sign the deal but none have yet done so, not even deep red-state public universities (yet, anyway). This

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October 31, 2025 No Comments

Inside the Gaokao: China’s Defining Test with Ruixue Jia

Every year, over 13 million students in China spend two full days taking the country’s university entrance exam, the Gaokao. It’s an event that most take years preparing for, starting in primary school, and the results determine not only where students will end up spending their university years, to a large extent it determines their entire life course. Today my guest is Dr. Ruixue Jia, a professor of economics at UC San Diego, whose co-author of a new book called The

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October 30, 2025 No Comments

Some Thoughts on the Use of AI in Teaching

I spent part of last week in Tempe at Arizona State University’s conference on Agentic AI and the Student Experience, which was a pretty interesting event. It made me think awhile about AI in higher education, which I thought I’d share with y’all. My POV on this basically comes down to six things: That last one is the most important. I’ll expand on it.  Higher education, being as near to eternal as any institution can be, constantly lives with technological changes. In

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October 29, 2025 2 Comments

Quebec’s Private Student Loan Moment

Although we tend to think of student loans as either being something done by banks for profit or by governments to correct for market failures, there is a third type of student loan: namely, private, not-for-profit companies using a mix of private and public funds for charitable reasons. Probably the most globally significant institution pursuing this path is the Dominican Republic’s FUNDAPEC, which has its origins in a private sector effort to establish higher education in that country during a

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October 28, 2025 1 Comment

Fees Up and Fees Down, 2025

One perennial topic – maybe the most perennial topic – in higher education is that of tuition fees. There have been quite a number of developments with respect to tuition fees around the world this year and I thought it was worth recapping some of them for y’all. So here goes. In the category of countries lowering student fees, the action is almost all in Africa. Namibia has taken the bold step of announcing a completely free tuition system in

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October 27, 2025 1 Comment

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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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