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Book Report Summer 2025

Morning everyone.  The days are getting long, so that means it’s getting close to the time when I need to wrap up this blog for the (northern hemisphere) summer.  And that, in turn, means book report time, where I round up everything I’ve read on higher education for the past six months. (If you’re looking for non-higher education recommendations: Terry David Martin’s The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union 1923-1939 will re-wire your thinking about what the early

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June 9, 2025 1 Comment

The Fifteen: June 6, 2025

Welcome to the final edition of Fifteen before our summer break. Today’s voyages take us from Harvard (where else?) to Tashkent, Paris to Moscow, Dubai to Fez with a very brief stop in North Mitrovica.  Too much is Trump-related, too much of it is about financial ills, but there are also some good news stories with respect to increased access to higher education as well.

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June 6, 2025 No Comments

Cut, Coerce, Control: What Trump Is Doing to U.S. Universities

The single biggest story in higher education for the first six months of this year, without a doubt, has been the Trump administration’s remarkable assault on science and universities. Arguably it’s the largest state-led assault on higher education institutions anywhere in the world since Mao and the cultural revolution. Billions of dollars already legally allocated to institutions have been stripped from them mainly, but not exclusively through the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Billions more are

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June 5, 2025 No Comments

Effective Graduates

One of the most tiresome debates in post-secondary education is about whether or not students emerge from their studies “job ready”.  To which the answer, of course, is that for the most part they do not. Education – including vocational education – is meant to prepare you for a long career rather than an immediate job.  Training for specific jobs?  That’s usually a job for companies themselves, and the fact that they underinvest in this area – notably by cutting

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June 4, 2025 3 Comments

Code Red on University Autonomy

There is no aspect of university autonomy that is more fundamental – in the British Commonwealth at least — than the right of each institution to select which students it chooses to admit. Along with financial autonomy, staffing autonomy, and financial autonomy (that last one being under increasing pressure these days), the right of institutions to choose which students to teach is fundamental to the Canadian higher education system. At no time in Canadian history has a government ever tried

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June 3, 2025 1 Comment

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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