The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

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Category: Podcast

Strategic Planning and System Design in Malaysian Higher Education

Malaysia is one of those countries where higher education is almost always in the news. Partly it’s because Malaysia has for many years sought to use higher education to speed up economic development, but it also has to do with the government’s decision 55 years ago to use a complicated matriculation system to reserve a large number of places in public universities for what are known as Bumiputeras — that is, ethnic Malays and other indigenous peoples. On the one

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April 9, 2026 No Comments

Branch Campuses, Fake Research, and the Future of Indian Universities

India’s higher education sector is in a permanent state of flux. There’s constant friction between the federal government and the states, as well as ongoing rivalry between a centralized public system and a dynamic private one. In the background, there’s a society that is deeply unequal and riven with discrimination, especially on the basis of caste. And all of this is happening in a country which, despite healthy growth since the turn of the century, is still poor, and where

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April 2, 2026 No Comments

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

Liberty and Zhi: Chinese and Anglo-American Ideas of the University

While the world has a lot of higher education systems, two traditions in particular dominate. One is the Anglo-American tradition, including possibly its cousins in central and northern Europe, and the other is the one we see in China. The latter way is, in many ways, rooted in the former. Tsinghua University famously is a product of a US philanthropic gesture, albeit one funded by Boxer Rebellion Indemnities. And yet, its two sets of operating principles are very different, and

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March 19, 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
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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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