Category: Worldwide PSE

Higher Education After Its Peak

Ever since World War II, higher education has been a growth industry. Maybe student numbers haven’t risen every year, or funding hasn’t always gone up, but the general trend has been positive. But right across the world, that upward trend has come under threat over the last decade or so. In Korea or Taiwan, for instance, youth numbers have collapsed, and with them enrolments have fallen and universities have closed. In the rest of the OECD, public funding for higher

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Rays of Optimism, Paths Forward

Last Thursday and Friday, HESA held our Re: University conference in Ottawa. It achieved what we wanted it to achieve – to get people to have hard, tough conversations about what’s ahead and how to deal with the still-growing threat to Canadian universities. Today, I want to clue everyone in on a couple of highlights and meditate on a way forward. The opening session, with RBC’s John Stackhouse and two former Ontario premiers, Dalton McGuinty and Bob Rae, was in

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The Fifteen: January 30, 2026

Hi all. The Fifteen is back with the choicest higher education stories from around the world over the past two weeks.    That’s all for now: see you back here in two weeks.

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Uzbekistan’s Higher Education Boom

Uzbekistan is not a country that intrudes on western consciousness very much. If people think of Uzbekistan at all, they tend to think of it for its past glories. Perhaps they know a little bit about for the Silk Road cities of Tashkent and Bokhara, or the brilliant city of Samarkand, whose Registan and grand Observatory, built by the Scientist-King Ulugh Beg, briefly made the region the world’s centre of astronomy and mathematics in the early fifteenth-century. But since the silk road

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Transnational Strategy Now

The world of transnational education – that is, the provision of education in one country by universities based abroad – is getting very interesting these days. In particular, branch campuses have returned to the centre of the industry’s activities in a way they have not been for well over a decade. Canada’s post-secondary system – which has always been a laggard in this area – risks getting left even further behind, unless institutions up their game substantially in the next

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