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Category: Canada

Re: University and the Change Imperative

It’s hard for universities to do things differently. Although they are evidently capable of being flexible and doing somersaults in an emergency (see: COVID), their collective desire for ongoing change is pretty small. It’s a very conservative industry, where isomorphism rules and the most important question to be asked of any change is “do prestigious institutions do it that way”? One consequence of this is that even when it comes to times where universities are under financial pressure and the

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June 3, 2026 No Comments

Emerging Global Themes in Defence Research

As you all know, we’ve been keeping an eye on the changing policy environment both in Canada and internationally for university research related to defence, security, and sovereignty in this new post-postwar world. Today, we thought we would share a little bit about the changes we are seeing and how they may end up at least to some extent shaking up some traditional research excellence hierarchies.  One of the keys here, it seems to us, is that whereas traditional defence

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June 2, 2026 No Comments

What I Learned at NAFSA 2026

I spent part of last week in Orlando, Florida at the annual NASFA Conference, which is a treat I get to enjoy every two or three years. But unlike many people, I am not really there for the conference sessions and workshops (though I did participate in a very fun one put on by ApplyBoard) – no, I go for the Expo. The Expo is a kind of higher education fantasyland. Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of people on

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June 1, 2026 2 Comments

Overestimating in the Short Run

Nearly fifty years ago, California futurist Roy Amara coined a widely quoted adage on the subject of technological change. It says: “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” This is a quote very much worth keeping in mind when it comes to thinking about how higher education should react to the growth of artificial intelligence and, in particular, how we grapple with educating students for an

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May 26, 2026 No Comments

Garbage In, Garbage Out: Nova Scotia Edition (Part 2)

Yesterday, I began outlining how the Nova Scotia government is trying to measure university program costs, and got as far as working out how the scheme was capturing certain facts about program income (excluding government grants and fees of students yet to declare a program) and certain facts about expenditures (excluding infrastructure, student services, IT, and roughly 60% of tenured professors’ salaries and benefits) and considered various ways that some assumptions about how to distribute both costs and revenues were

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May 20, 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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