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Category: Worldwide PSE

That Yale Report

If you’ve been paying attention to US higher education for the last couple of weeks, you will no doubt have noted a report from Yale University on “Trust in Higher Education”, with much favorable and unfavorable commentary. But what does it really say? And does it make much sense, for Yale or higher education generally, either in the United States or elsewhere? So, one thing that is important to understand about this is that while it contains ten sections, it

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April 28, 2026 2 Comments

You Can’t Kill the U.S. Department of Education (But You Can Break It)

The news from the United States these days, as far as higher education is concerned, sometimes seems uniformly bleak, but US higher education operates in an unbelievably decentralized environment. Not only are there differences across states, across the public-private divide, and to some extent across accreditation zones, but even within the federal system, there’s not necessarily a uniformity of approach, given three branches of government, and even within the executive sphere, different approaches from the major funders of education, including

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April 16, 2026 No Comments

Four Thoughts from Nairobi

I was in Kenya a couple of weeks ago for the THE Africa Summit on Higher Education. Although I worked a lot in Africa in the 2010s, this was my first trip back since COVID, and wow have things changed. I thought I would remark on four aspects of the trip. First, I am glad I read Joe Studwell’s How Africa Works—a book that suggests that Africa is getting close to take-off because of its growing population density—before getting there, because Nairobi

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April 15, 2026 No Comments

The Fifteen: April 10, 2026

A lot has happened in the last three weeks, and there’s a lot that didn’t make it into this edition of the Fifteen, which is a lot heavier on events in Europe and Asia than usual. There’s a lot in here on science and research – from China looming supreme, to America punching itself in the face, to Australia being indecisive – as well as new evidence of a crisis of reproducibility. But politics gets a big place, too, what with

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April 10, 2026 No Comments

Strategic Planning and System Design in Malaysian Higher Education

Malaysia is one of those countries where higher education is almost always in the news. Partly it’s because Malaysia has for many years sought to use higher education to speed up economic development, but it also has to do with the government’s decision 55 years ago to use a complicated matriculation system to reserve a large number of places in public universities for what are known as Bumiputeras — that is, ethnic Malays and other indigenous peoples. On the one

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April 9, 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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