The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

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Category: Podcast

The Knowledge Coalition

The Netherlands has one of the most knowledge-intensive economies not just in Europe, but in the entire world. Despite its small size, it has many world-class universities, a remarkably collaborative research culture, deep ties between academia and industry — basically everything you’d want to stay at the forefront of the global economy. And yet, the Netherlands has not been immune to the factors that have hampered the drive for innovation in many other countries, most notably lack of funds and

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May 21, 2026 No Comments

How IDP Sees the Next Era of International Education

Student mobility is big business. Behind the process of getting students to apply to and then attend a university or college thousands of miles away from home is an industry that’s worth billions of dollars a year. And one of the OGs of that industry is a company called IDP, which grew out of an Australian government scheme beginning in 1969, and which for the first 37 years of its existence was owned by a consortium of Australian universities. Over

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May 14, 2026 No Comments

Universities, Colonialism, and Indigenous Knowledge in Australia

Dhoombak Goobgoowana can be translated as “truth-telling” in the Woi Wurrung language of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people from the unceded area now known as Melbourne, Australia. It’s also the name of the recently published two-volume work on Indigenous Australia and the University of Melbourne. The books are an extraordinary read, not at all your usual institutional history. Made up of dozens of essays by different authors, it’s not so much a corporate history as it is a meditation on

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May 7, 2026 No Comments

Chair to Chancellor: Lessons in Leading Modern Universities

Every Christmas, this blog invites the University of Tennessee’s Robert Kelchen on the show to do his top 10 stories of the year in the United States. One story keeps coming up: who, in their right mind, would want to be a university president these days? What with the financial pressure, the relentless politics, both on campus and dealing with state and federal governments, it’s an absolutely thankless job. Well, today our guest is someone who maybe led the way

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April 30, 2026 No Comments

You Can’t Kill the U.S. Department of Education (But You Can Break It)

The news from the United States these days, as far as higher education is concerned, sometimes seems uniformly bleak, but US higher education operates in an unbelievably decentralized environment. Not only are there differences across states, across the public-private divide, and to some extent across accreditation zones, but even within the federal system, there’s not necessarily a uniformity of approach, given three branches of government, and even within the executive sphere, different approaches from the major funders of education, including

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April 16, 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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