Welcome to the final edition of Fifteen before our summer break. Today’s voyages take us from Harvard (where else?) to Tashkent, Paris to Moscow, Dubai to Fez with a very brief stop in North Mitrovica. Too much is Trump-related, too much of it is about financial ills, but there are also some good news stories with respect to increased access to higher education as well.
The single biggest story in higher education for the first six months of this year, without a doubt, has been the Trump administration’s remarkable assault on science and universities. Arguably it’s the largest state-led assault on higher education institutions anywhere in the world since Mao and the cultural revolution. Billions of dollars already legally allocated to institutions have been stripped from them mainly, but not exclusively through the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Billions more are
There’s a huge story going on right now in Australian higher education, one that hasn’t made many ripples outside the country yet, but really should have. In January of 2026, two of the country’s major universities will be merging. The old research intensive University of Adelaide, one of the country’s so-called sandstone — meaning prestigious — universities, will be joining with the newer post Dawkins i.e., created in the early 1990s, University of South Australia, which began its life as
I’ve been working on a project recently, looking at current university strategic plans around the world, and particularly those of leading “world-class” universities. One of the key things I am looking at is what you might call “strategic horizons”— how long do institutions see or plan ahead? My sample for this is the Top 100 universities from the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), done by the Shanghai Rankings organization (minus the MD Anderson Cancer Centre in Houston, which is
Welcome to the seventeenth edition of The Fifteen. This week, we chart the shifting currents in global higher education—from mass firings in Afghanistan to a national support staff strike in Ghana to some odd collateral damage from recent Indo-Pakistani tensions. Lots of disappointing news about funding cuts, stories of governments trying to deal with issues of security, program length and the regulation of private sector universities, and the arrival of a truly eye-rolling set of rankings. Enjoy! That’s our bi-weekly
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.
