The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Worldwide PSE

Some Notes on Artificial Intelligence in Higher Education, May 2026

Today is just a quick round-up of recent news and trends re: artificial intelligence in higher education – hopefully one which is a bit different from the everything-is-awesome/everything-is-terrible style of think pieces that you often see on this subject. Artificial intelligence is having significant impacts in fields like astronomy and molecular biology, and large language models quite unexpectedly seem to be capable of making significant contributions to mathematics. In other fields, AI does not eliminate any steps in the research

Read More »
May 27, 2026 No Comments

China Update 2026

Hi all. Every couple of years I spend some time going through data on Chinese higher education and, in particular, the finances of the country’s top universities. It’s been two years since the last time I did this, so here goes: Figure 1 shows total expenditures at what I call China’s Big 8 universities (which is actually just the elite C9 League of universities minus the Harbin Institute of Technology, which does not make previous years’ financial data available), in

Read More »
May 25, 2026 No Comments

The Knowledge Coalition

The Netherlands has one of the most knowledge-intensive economies not just in Europe, but in the entire world. Despite its small size, it has many world-class universities, a remarkably collaborative research culture, deep ties between academia and industry — basically everything you’d want to stay at the forefront of the global economy. And yet, the Netherlands has not been immune to the factors that have hampered the drive for innovation in many other countries, most notably lack of funds and

Read More »
May 21, 2026 No Comments

The Fifteen: May 15, 2026

Morning everyone. It’s been a crazy couple of weeks in global higher education, with a lot of countries dealing with very similar issues. I’m not just talking about the canvas hack here: we also have a lot of action on culling academic programs and dealing with issues in student dormitories. But this edition also touches on universities for sale in Finland, student aid disasters in South Africa, spy schools in Russia, fake philology awards in France, a very interesting rector’s

Read More »
May 15, 2026 No Comments

How IDP Sees the Next Era of International Education

Student mobility is big business. Behind the process of getting students to apply to and then attend a university or college thousands of miles away from home is an industry that’s worth billions of dollars a year. And one of the OGs of that industry is a company called IDP, which grew out of an Australian government scheme beginning in 1969, and which for the first 37 years of its existence was owned by a consortium of Australian universities. Over

Read More »
May 14, 2026 No 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.

Subscribe

Search Posts

Search Publications

Social Media

Linkedin Youtube Spotify

Recent Posts

More thoughts on...