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Category: Blogs

Budget Commentary 2025

Hi all. Budget Day was yesterday, and it was a doozy. The HESA Towers team worked late into the night putting together our usual Budget Commentary for you to peruse at your leisure. We hope you enjoy it. But if you haven’t the time to read it in full, here are the five big takeaways. First, although large spending cuts were previewed, the cuts that occurred could not prevent the government from racking up a budget which in real terms was similar to the

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November 5, 2025 4 Comments

A Strategic Plan Typology

I have spent a few days recently reviewing new strategic plans at global top 200 universities (partly because of some talks I am giving in China and India this month, and partly because, as I mentioned yesterday, there’s a section on “what’s new in strategic plans” in our new World of Higher Education – Year in Review, out December 4th!). As a result of all this pondering, I think I have come up with a typology of sorts, which I

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November 4, 2025 No Comments

Utrecht, Georgetown, Manchester

I’ve been poking around a lot of university websites from around the globe recently – mainly but not exclusively because I’m putting the finishing touches to The World of Higher Education – Year in Review (due out December 4th and it’s going to be great). And, in the course of all this poking around, I have found a few little gems of institutional initiatives which I found particularly intriguing.  The kinds of things that make you wonder: why don’t more

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November 3, 2025 1 Comment

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

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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