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Category: Worldwide PSE

The World’s Worst Student Loan System

If you read the UK education press at all, you’ll have noticed a serious uptick recently in the number of stories describing the current student loan system as “a scam” by  Government back-bench MPs and “a mess” by a former Deputy PM who played a large role in designing it. What’s going on, you ask? How bad is it? Well.. The problem with student finance in the UK is that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, in their haste to modernize

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March 24, 2026 1 Comment

A Thought on the Iran War

So, somehow, President Prince of Peace has got the United States into a shooting war with Iran, and, in a development NO ONE COULD HAVE POSSIBLY FORESEEN, Iran has retaliated in part by attacking American allies around the Persian Gulf. Although it is about an eight-tier priority right now, one of the questions the war is raising right now: what is the fate of the United Arab Emirates’ international education industry? Can Dubai, and the region as a whole, regain a reputation

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March 23, 2026 1 Comment

The Fifteen: March 20, 2026

It’s been a busy couple of weeks in higher education. There are the downstream consequences of the attack on Iran, interesting developments on the left and the right in Latin America, a couple of important global reports and some AI-related developments in China as it approaches adoption of the 15th five-year plan. Let’s go! 1. The American/Israeli attack on Iran (and, secondarily, Lebanon) is having cascading effects across higher education. The first-order consequence is that universities in both Iran and Lebanon have been bombed, causing

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March 20, 2026 No Comments

Liberty and Zhi: Chinese and Anglo-American Ideas of the University

While the world has a lot of higher education systems, two traditions in particular dominate. One is the Anglo-American tradition, including possibly its cousins in central and northern Europe, and the other is the one we see in China. The latter way is, in many ways, rooted in the former. Tsinghua University famously is a product of a US philanthropic gesture, albeit one funded by Boxer Rebellion Indemnities. And yet, its two sets of operating principles are very different, and

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March 19, 2026 No Comments

World Youth Population Projections

I have been thinking a lot lately about the longer-term future of higher education and how demographics will change the nature of the sector. Today I want to share some data and thoughts on this subject.  My basic observations are that 1) whatever else it may do, higher education exists mainly for young adults, and 2) the world’s complement of young people has already more or less topped out. We might be able to increase participation rates, but “peak 18-21”

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March 16, 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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