The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Podcast

The Year the Money Ran Out: Global Higher Ed Review

Hello everyone, and welcome to the World of Higher Education podcast. I’m Tiffany MacLennan, and if you’re a faithful listener, you know what it means when I’m the one opening the episode—this week, our guest is AU. We’re doing a year in review, looking at some of the global higher education stories that stood out in 2024—from massification to private higher education, from Trump’s international impact to the most interesting stories overall. But I’ll pass it over to Alex. The World of

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June 12, 2025 No Comments

Cut, Coerce, Control: What Trump Is Doing to U.S. Universities

The single biggest story in higher education for the first six months of this year, without a doubt, has been the Trump administration’s remarkable assault on science and universities. Arguably it’s the largest state-led assault on higher education institutions anywhere in the world since Mao and the cultural revolution. Billions of dollars already legally allocated to institutions have been stripped from them mainly, but not exclusively through the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Billions more are

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June 5, 2025 No Comments

Opening January 2026: Inside One of the Biggest University Mergers in Australia

There’s a huge story going on right now in Australian higher education, one that hasn’t made many ripples outside the country yet, but really should have. In January of 2026, two of the country’s major universities will be merging. The old research intensive University of Adelaide, one of the country’s so-called sandstone — meaning prestigious — universities, will be joining with the newer post Dawkins i.e., created in the early 1990s, University of South Australia, which began its life as

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May 29, 2025 No Comments

Incremental Change or System Overhaul? An Update on Higher Ed Reform in NZ with Roger Smyth

In some countries, higher education policy just seems to sit still for decades. In others, hyperactivity is a more normal state. Today we’re looking at the 2020s poster child for higher education hyperactivity. It’s not the usual suspects, the UK or Australia, it’s little New Zealand where we’re making our fourth stop on this podcast in just over two and a half years. When last we were in Wellington, we talked to Chris Whelan from Universities New Zealand about university

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May 22, 2025 No Comments

Between Excellence and Relevance: The Regional University Dilemma

Hi everyone.  I’m Alex Usher and this is The World of Higher Education podcast. Over the past few decades, Higher Education had taken on a number of new roles.  As we discussed with Ethan Schrum on this podcast over two years, in the years after World War II, universities became obsessed with showing how essential they were with solving society’s problems.  One of these problems – particularly as universities proliferated and started showing up in more and more distant locales – was regional

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May 15, 2025 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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