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Category: Blogs

Zombie Universities and the Politics of Survival in South Korean Higher Education

South Korea has one of the world’s liveliest higher education policy scenes. For over a decade now, the country’s been dealing with the challenges of a declining youth population, and hence, declining student numbers. Yet at the same time, it’s continuing to invest heavily in knowledge and education from programs in artificial intelligence, to the upgrading of 10 major regional universities, while all the while seeking to offset population loss through the expansion of international student numbers. And all of

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March 26, 2026 No Comments

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

The Fifteen: March 20, 2026

It’s been a busy couple of weeks in higher education. There are the downstream consequences of the attack on Iran, interesting developments on the left and the right in Latin America, a couple of important global reports and some AI-related developments in China as it approaches adoption of the 15th five-year plan. Let’s go! 1. The American/Israeli attack on Iran (and, secondarily, Lebanon) is having cascading effects across higher education. The first-order consequence is that universities in both Iran and Lebanon have been bombed, causing

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March 20, 2026 No Comments

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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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