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Category: Institutions

Massification and its Unacknowledged Trade-offs

The following is an adaptation of a speech I gave at the Justus Liebig University in Giessen, Germany last week. My thanks to the University’s President Dr. Professor Katherina Lorenz for inviting me to give the talk. Across what we used to call the developed world, there are, at the moment, many things that are driving tensions between universities and society. There’s no single cause but rather a confluence of factors, and the exact mix of factors changes a bit country-by country. I’m

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December 1, 2025 1 Comment

Profit, Education, and Student Grants

One of the less-noticed measures in the November 4 budget had to do with restrictions on student loans. Specifically, it was about banning students attending for-profit institutions from accessing grants provided by the Canada Student Financial Assistance Program (CSFAP). Today, I want to examine the rationale behind this move and its likely effects. But first, some history. CSFAP did not always have a big investment in grants. In fact, it had none at all for the first thirty years of its

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November 18, 2025 1 Comment

Inside the Global Private Higher Education Sector with Dan Levy

If you spend any time around higher education in multiple countries, you’ll know two things. The first is that public higher education tends to look pretty similar from one country to another. And second, the status of private higher education varies enormously. How big the sector is, the ownership forms, the missions, the delivery modes, can all vary quite significantly. Private higher education occupies both the top and the bottom of the global prestige hierarchy. At the one end, you’ve

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November 13, 2025 No Comments

A Strategic Plan Typology

I have spent a few days recently reviewing new strategic plans at global top 200 universities (partly because of some talks I am giving in China and India this month, and partly because, as I mentioned yesterday, there’s a section on “what’s new in strategic plans” in our new World of Higher Education – Year in Review, out December 4th!). As a result of all this pondering, I think I have come up with a typology of sorts, which I

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November 4, 2025 No Comments

Utrecht, Georgetown, Manchester

I’ve been poking around a lot of university websites from around the globe recently – mainly but not exclusively because I’m putting the finishing touches to The World of Higher Education – Year in Review (due out December 4th and it’s going to be great). And, in the course of all this poking around, I have found a few little gems of institutional initiatives which I found particularly intriguing.  The kinds of things that make you wonder: why don’t more

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November 3, 2025 1 Comment

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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