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Category: Blogs

World Youth Population Projections

I have been thinking a lot lately about the longer-term future of higher education and how demographics will change the nature of the sector. Today I want to share some data and thoughts on this subject.  My basic observations are that 1) whatever else it may do, higher education exists mainly for young adults, and 2) the world’s complement of young people has already more or less topped out. We might be able to increase participation rates, but “peak 18-21”

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March 16, 2026 No Comments

Focus Friday: March 13

Hi all, Tiffany here. A quick reminder that Focus Friday is happening today from 12:30-1:30pm Eastern! In this session, we’ll be joined by colleagues from the University of Alberta to talk about how institutions are beginning to use AI across multiple parts of the university. Rather than focusing on a single initiative, the conversation will explore how AI is being integrated across teaching and learning, research, IT, the library, and graduate programming. One of the challenges many institutions are facing

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March 13, 2026 No Comments

Why Iranian Students Keep Protesting

Iran is a country with a lot of higher education stories. Take stories about students: they were a key part of the coalition that overthrew the Shah in 1979, and they were the ones who spearheaded the capture of the US embassy later that year. But since 1999, students have also been consistently and reliably at the head of anti-government protests. Iranian universities are as a result the centre of a great deal of physical confrontation at moments of national rebellion, such as

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March 12, 2026 No Comments

Coalition-Building

I spent last weekend reading Joe Studwell’s new book How Africa Works, the sequel (of a sort) to his earlier, simply brilliant, book How Asia Works. Both are works of political and economic history, trying to work out how various countries (Japan, Korea, Taiwan in one case; Botswana, Mauritius, Ethiopia and Rwanda in the other) came to be regional leaders in development. According to Studwell, examining the keys to success through the lens of democracy vs. dictatorship is not particularly helpful. What tends to matter,

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March 11, 2026 No Comments

Skills, Innovation, Quality, Blindness

One of the many, many frustrating things about Canadian policy over the past couple of decades is the combination of blindness and bad habits that our policy makers have with respect to the role of skills. Let’s start with the blindness, which mostly applies to our policymakers’ understanding of the relationship between skills and innovation. Innovation, to be clear, is not “invention”. It’s not about discovering some new idea or application and then building a world-beating company around. This might be the tech

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March 10, 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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