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Category: Policy

Comparative Crises

If you pay attention to higher education news from around the anglosphere, you may be under the impression that we are “all in it together”: that is, all suffering, in particular, from the loss of international student funding because of a variety of government policies discouraging them. But is it true? Well, no. We are not all in it together. Canada – thanks to the galactic incompetence of the federal government in general, and former immigration Marc Miller in particular

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March 31, 2026 No Comments

Zombie Universities and the Politics of Survival in South Korean Higher Education

South Korea has one of the world’s liveliest higher education policy scenes. For over a decade now, the country’s been dealing with the challenges of a declining youth population, and hence, declining student numbers. Yet at the same time, it’s continuing to invest heavily in knowledge and education from programs in artificial intelligence, to the upgrading of 10 major regional universities, while all the while seeking to offset population loss through the expansion of international student numbers. And all of

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March 26, 2026 No Comments

Skills, Innovation, Quality, Blindness

One of the many, many frustrating things about Canadian policy over the past couple of decades is the combination of blindness and bad habits that our policy makers have with respect to the role of skills. Let’s start with the blindness, which mostly applies to our policymakers’ understanding of the relationship between skills and innovation. Innovation, to be clear, is not “invention”. It’s not about discovering some new idea or application and then building a world-beating company around. This might be the tech

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March 10, 2026 No Comments

Higher Education in Bulgaria: Rankings, Reform, and Demographic Pressures

It seems hard to believe sometimes, but after 110 or so episodes of this show, there are still a few countries we haven’t been to. One of them is today’s destination of Bulgaria. It’s not a place which is often top of mind as far as higher education goes, but maybe it should be. Among European countries, Bulgaria has been one of the leaders in dealing with a question of sharply declining youth populations. In recent months, it’s had an

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March 5, 2026 No Comments

Tenure and Promotion Criteria: You Get What You Ask For

Incentives matter. And all the major extrinsic incentives of university life can be found in documents known as “tenure and promotion criteria” (hereafter TPC). Every institution has a set of these (or indeed often multiple versions of them, since the criteria often vary from one faculty to another. Here’s McGill’s policy. Here is Waterloo’s. Here’s an extremely detailed one produced by the University of British Columbia. They are not exactly the same, but they rhyme. And what’s fascinating is what is not in any of them. Let’s start with research, or as

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February 4, 2026 3 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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