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Category: Policy

New Zealand’s Higher Education Crossroads

As I think I’ve mentioned before, New Zealand has one of the most fascinating higher education policy scenes anywhere in the world. Hardly a year goes by where they aren’t making huge changes to research policy, tuition fees, student aid, or international student rules. Must be exhausting to live there. In any event, all this policy hyperactivity means this podcast often returns to New Zealand to see exactly what’s going on. And with the election coming up next month, we

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October 15, 2026 No Comments

That Was the Quarter That Was, Summer 2026

Hi, all. Time for a quarterly recap of what’s been going on in higher education. You might think summer would be a quiet time for developments in higher education but a) “summer” is a geographically relative term and b) “back to school” is usually when things go bananas in the higher education world. This year was no exception. Let’s get to it. Therewas drama, as there always is, with respect to funding for higher education. In Argentina, Javier Milei continues

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September 30, 2026 No Comments

Associate EU Membership and Labour Mobility

Yesterday, I sketched out the likelihood of Canada joining the Erasmus program; now I wanted to address the issue of labour mobility. As a couple of news outlets breathlessly reported during the whole EU thing last week, a new agreement might allow Canadians to “live and work visa-free” in Europe (and vice-versa, although no one seemed to want to dwell on that). But how likely is this? So, we can’t know exactly until something is negotiated. But precedent is pretty

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September 22, 2026 No Comments

Erasmus for Canada? Not so Fast.

Everyone seems very excited about the prospect of Canada becoming an associate member of the European Union (even though “associate member” is not an actual thing in any EU statute, but whatever), and in particular are talking about the value of greater student mobility since apparently Prime Minister Carney would like Canada to join the EU’s Erasmus scheme. In the words of the world’s greatest living cartoonist, Aislin…”everybody take a valium”. Sure, everybody loves Erasmus in theory. Who could be

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September 21, 2026 2 Comments

Canada AI Strategy and Higher Education

Morning all. Today is a special blog to cover an important Ottawa policy development. Back in June, the Government of Canada released its National Artificial Intelligence Strategy, with the somewhat awkward subhead “AI for All”. Due to a packed blog schedule, I didn’t have time to really get to it. But now I can! So here goes: First, it’s not a real strategy, obviously. Ottawa-drafted strategies never are. Real strategies have a reasonably-well sketched out desired end-state and a theory

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August 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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