The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Institutions

Lampedusianism at the University of Waterloo

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a finance and governance experiment at Concordia. Today I want to talk about one that caught some headlines over the summer; namely, the re-organization of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Waterloo. The full details of the re-organization can be found here, but the basics of it are that where the Faculty used to have fifteen departments and two “schools”, it will now just have six schools. That sounds like a

Read More »
October 6, 2026 1 Comment

Concordia’s Quiet Revolution

Okay, so Canadian higher education is pretty cautious and risk-averse, and so perhaps the bar for calling something a ‘revolution” is pretty low. But everyone needs to take a look at what has been going on at Concordia this year, because if what has been happening there were to spread widely, I think you genuinely could call it a revolution. It’s big, bold, and has the potential to alter for the better some of the basic underpinnings of universities’ financial models. Concordia

Read More »
September 23, 2026 2 Comments

Defence R&D: The Long Game

Over the past year, we at HESA towers have been thinking about how post-secondary institutions fit into Canada’s national defence, security, and sovereignty priorities, and the implications for research and skills/training. We’ve also been looking at how other countries have structured their defence R&D ecosystems and sharing some of the lessons those systems can teach Canadian institutions. We’re building on that work this year – stay tuned for an announcement on that at the end of this blog. For the

Read More »
September 16, 2026 No Comments

Bad Summer Essays

Back in the early days of this blog – lo, fifteen years ago now – I used to offer an annual award for “worst back-to-school article” in which I would excoriate whichever columnist had chosen to write something incredibly lazy, cliché-ridden and wrong. I eventually stopped giving out the award because the genre went into decline (I like to think it was because of HESA’s encouragement of data-enriched discourse) but this year, unfortunately, the bad takes have returned, albeit with

Read More »
September 15, 2026 1 Comment

The Half-Time Show: Six Months of Global Higher Education

Hello, and welcome to the World of Higher Education podcast. I’m Tiffany MacLennan, and I’m your host for today’s episode. At the end of last year, HESA released the first ever World of Higher Education — Year in Review report, taking stock of the biggest stories and trends shaping higher education around the globe. Now we’re six months into 2026, and we’re checking back in. Joining me today is Alex Usher for a midyear halftime show on global higher education.

Read More »
June 11, 2026 No Comments
Load More

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.

Subscribe

Search Posts

Search Publications

Social Media

Linkedin Youtube Spotify

Recent Posts

More thoughts on...