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Category: Blogs

The Fifteen: February 13, 2026

Just a quick reminder before we move into the one thought of the day: we’ve officially launched HESA’s Transnational Education (TNE) Strategy Project and are now looking to finalize our founding cohort of member institutions. If your institution is exploring (or re-examining) transnational education as part of its future strategy, we’re inviting expressions of interest by February 23. You can learn more about the project here. Good morning. Not much of a unifying theme to this issue of The Fifteen:

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February 13, 2026 1 Comment

Higher Education Beyond the Public Good

The last decade or so has seen enormous changes in world politics. It’s also seen some major changes the way governments relate to higher education, particularly in the anglosphere. For many, it’s been a polycrisis on top of a polycrisis – a multi-directional series of attacks on and challenges to the public standing of higher education at the exact moment when the socio-political underpinnings of the entire post-war settlement seems to be crumbling. Sounds like a pretty good subject for a book,

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February 12, 2026 No Comments

Canadian Higher Education’s Sacred Scaffolding

There is a whole bunch of policy areas in higher education which are what I might call “scaffolding” (others might use the term plumbing). That is, the basic building blocks of how education actually gets done: how classes get scheduled, how credits are defined, awarded and scored, then thrown into buckets and turned into degrees, etc. The lack of logic and consistency behind the existing system(s) frankly boggles the imagination: it’s absolutely an area where a little innovation could go a

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February 11, 2026 5 Comments

Change Challenge

Roughly 93 years ago, Franklin D. Rosevelt began his inaugural address thus: “Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself–nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory.”   Increasingly, I am coming to believe something pretty similar

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February 10, 2026 1 Comment

Merit Wars

Canada has never really had much of an explicit debate about what constitutes academic merit. But we’re about to, thanks to the Ford Government in Ontario. And some of the battle lines will look very close to the ones we have been seeing in the United States since the Supreme Court’s decision on Student for Fair Admissions v. Harvard three years ago. This fall, the Ontario legislature passed Bill 33. I examined this piece of legislation when it was introduced

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February 9, 2026 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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