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Host Tiffany MacLennan speaks with Alex Usher for a mid-year review of the major trends shaping higher education around the world in 2026. Revisiting themes from HESA’s World of Higher Education Year in Review report, Usher reflects on the growing influence of political interference, financial pressures, artificial intelligence, and shifting global centres of research and innovation.
The conversation explores funding crises in countries including the United Kingdom, South Africa, and Kenya, the rise of private universities in emerging economies, and the challenges facing Canadian institutions as they adapt to declining international student revenues. Usher also offers his predictions for the months ahead and highlights the stories higher education watchers should be following as the new academic year approaches.
👉 Episode Links:
👉 Episode Links:
- The World of Higher Education — Year in Review 2025: Read the free report
Creators and Guests
What is The World of Higher Education?
The World of Higher Education is dedicated to exploring developments in higher education from a global perspective. Join host, Alex Usher of Higher Education Strategy Associates, as he speaks with new guests each week from different countries discussing developments in their regions.
Produced by Tiffany MacLennan and Samantha Pufek.
Tiffany MacLennan: Hello, and welcome to the World of Higher Education podcast. I'm Tiffany MacLennan, and I'm your host for today's episode.
At the end of last year, HESA released the first ever World of Higher Education year in review report, taking stock of the biggest stories and trends shaping higher education around the globe. Now we're six months into 2026, and we're checking back in.
Joining me today is Alex Usher for a midyear halftime show on global higher education. We'll look at the stories that have defined the first half of the year, the trends that are gaining momentum, and what we think universities and colleges around the world should be watching as we head into the 2026/2027 academic year.
It's also our final episode of the season, so it's a fitting opportunity to take stock of where we've been and where higher education might be heading in the next year. Let's hear from Alex.
Alex, back in December, you released The World of Higher Education Year in Review, and at that point, you identified four big global themes: universities operating under an authoritarian or even fascist conditions, big technology changes, financial constraint, and neglect overall, and demography.
We're halfway through 2026. Are these still the big stories, or has the global higher education picture shifted in some notable way?
Alex Usher: Well, the demography hadn't changed. I think the financial neglect maybe you've got one or two new countries who you would put in that category, but you know, maybe there's a couple others that are going in the other direction. That one, so that was kind of a wash. I would say this, how things have changed in the first half of 2026 has really been an interplay of the authoritarian and frankly fascist stuff, which I see mainly in the United States. Hungary came back over into the, the good guy side this, this last six months, so that's good news. And the tech stuff.
So it's how those two are interacting, right? Because the way that you know, I think it's been pretty clear for about, mm, at least six years now, probably since the, since COVID, that the American distrust of government group has also been a distrust in science group, right? Like, that wasn't true 10 years ago, it is true now.
And so one of the most lasting things I think MAGA is going to achieve is the destruction of American science. Like, it's just, it is astonishing what's going on in the United States, and it's happening exactly the same time that China in particular is moving to create a much more high-tech, STEM-focused university system.
And there are some, there are some countries in Asia like Kazakhstan and like Indonesia who seem pretty intent on copying that model. And it's happening in a moment where AI is becoming uh, you know, a bigger deal. And I, I just... It's, you open the newspaper every day and it's just like watching the future head further and further east, or I guess west from here, but you know what I mean, right?
Like, it's, it's the f- the frontier of technology is not necessarily in the United States anymore. It's, it's increasingly in China, and that has all sorts of geopolitical ramifications for higher education
Tiffany MacLennan: What would you say has been the most interesting global higher education story of the year so far?
Alex Usher: I don't know. I mean, there's some crazy ones, particularly in Central America. You know, the, the, the whole way that the University of San Carlos elections have been rigged so that the ruling party can get their guy into being the rector. I mean, this is b- because the rector has a role in appointing government officials. It's just wild, the whole story.
But I think if we're looking consequentially the financial collapse of UK higher education is, it's interesting because it's happening in such an unplanned kind of way, right? It's like a merger here, a takeover there, and you never know what's gonna happen next week. So that's pretty interesting.
I think the collapse of the national student financial aid scheme in South Africa is pretty consequential. I think the, what looks like maybe an impending collapse of the equivalent, the Higher Education Loans Board in Kenya, like it's just... And they're both, you know, they're both products of people thinking student loans could do too much.
You know, "We, we don't have the money right now. We'll lend students the money and they'll give it back to universities." And then, oops, we haven't figured out how to reclaim those loans, right? Or, or it just wasn't big enough, the tuition alone wasn't big enough to expand the system the way those two countries wanted.
So it's not, you know, these are two countries who are very ambitious in higher education. I mean, Lord, you know, Korea just opened another two universities last week. And I think you know, so the, the, the collapse of the financial foundations, that's a big deal.
The last one, again, like just for sheer craziness, it's Costa Rica and the negotiation of their, what they call fees, and I've forgotten what that stands for. But it's basically, it's their grant. The government in, in Costa Rica, they do something very strange, which is the government just hands money to the institutions and says, "You figure out how to distribute it." There's no funding formula, right? They just say, "There's five public universities. You guys get to discuss, figure out what happened."
And this year they couldn't agree, right? Over the last five or six triennial negotiation periods the University of Costa Rica's agreed to give up a little bit of its share of the money to keep the peace. This year they said, "Forget it. We're not doing it." And you know, this caused, this threw the system into chaos, right?
The government basically said, "Okay, you guys can't decide. We're deciding." And nobody liked what the government decided either. So, you know, that's been fun to watch. It's just, it's a very strange I don't know how consequential it is, but it has certainly been an interesting example of how to you know, try and get around the problem of government being too directive in its funding formula. And unfortunately it doesn't work, so.
Tiffany MacLennan: What global higher education stories do you think are getting too much attention right now? And the flip side of that, what do you think people should be talking about more that they're not?
Alex Usher: Well, I mean, I think one... So there's a lot of talk about international students. And it's partly because the international student industry is a fairly influential one, and it has a lot of money, and so it's got, you know, it's got its own press, The Pie. Times Higher devotes a lot of space to it.
You know, one of the big stories they were touting earlier this year was, you know, the, the Big Four have become the Big 14. I mean, who cares? I mean, I, I, like, genuinely, who cares? Like, I don't, I don't, I don't find this particularly interesting. It's all these countries, you know, Turkey and South Korea and Germany and France, they're all following a fairly similar playbook to what Australia and the UK and Canada did.
It will all fall apart fairly shortly when they realize they, this, you know, either these students cost too much money or they cost too much money to house, and the housing market... I mean, that's just, it's such a predictable cycle and I find that not particularly interesting.
What are people not talking enough about? I don't know. I mean, I think the big one is that AI in many ways puts into question what a university is, like the purpose of a university. And I think, you know, right now AI is still such an amorphous beast that it's all, you know, it's like the blind men feeling the elephant and each of them feel, you know, "This, this part's really... it's..." They look at the... One guy feels the trunk and he says, "This is really solid," and some- one guy feels the trunk and he said, "No, it's really long and loose." Nobody really knows what this technology's gonna do. And I think this is big. Like, I think, you know, the, the AI, broadly speaking, Asia's taking a very different view about how AI and the university are gonna interact than, say, the Americas do, or Europe does.
This is a big deal. And it is partly because of the, you know, what do you think the purpose of the university is? I don't think we've come to grips with that particularly, and we probably should.
Tiffany MacLennan: You talked about this a little bit earlier, but what role this year has politics been playing in global higher education? Are universities becoming more vulnerable to political interference as some headlines would suggest, or is that a little bit overstated?
Alex Usher: I don't know if it's a huge change from last year or previous years. I mean, I think one of the things that, Trump did last year is he went after individual universities, right? Harvard most famously, but you know, a, a dozen or so others, some of whom settled with him and some of whom f- fought back.
And in some cases it's the faculty union that fought back rather than the university itself, like in, at the University of California, which is, you know, good on them. I think that normalizes the idea that a, a chief executive or a, you know, or the government can single out individual institutions.
I mean, in Turkey, for instance uh, you know, the government just said Yeah, there's this opposition guy who runs a university. Let's close the university." You know, 20,000 students, we're just gonna throw them out in the street. Yeah, I mean, interestingly, they ba- that's Bilgi University in Istanbul, and that one interestingly got reversed within about four days.
You know, but you're seeing the Kosovo government go after North Mitrovica or, you know, University of Pristina in North Mitrovica. They're going after it. The Belarusian g- the Belarus government still weirdly is going after the European University of the Humanities, like they're, which, you know, moved years ago to Lithuania, still attracting Belarusian students. Now the government in Belarus is hauling their families. Like, if you're a student there, they'll haul your f- the KGB or whatever the Belarusian equivalent of that is you know, will haul in your family for questioning. Like, it's wild. So I do think although the Americans' government seems to have backed off that picking off individual institutions a little bit we are seeing it elsewhere still, and I wonder if we will still see it.
And then there's, you know, there's a couple of countries where the issue of Israel and boycotts has become a, a big deal and, and, you know, if you say something that's anti-Israel, it's actually antisemitic, so that's a big i- issue in Germany. I think, you know, there's certainly the definition of antisemitism that they're trying to get universities to adopt in Australia is pretty aggressive.
So those are some countries you know, France, which, I mean, genuinely does have a problem with antisemitism. So, you know, there are a few countries where that is, is coming in. And interestingly, I saw last week that the Israeli Rectors' Conference has said the effects of the boycott are now strategic in their dimensions, right?
Like univer- Israeli universities are actually being shut off from the rest of the world to the extent that it really makes a difference to the kind of science they can provide, which is interesting, right? Like, I think that's, that you know, is a lot of success to the, the anti-Israel boycott movement, that they're sh- clearly showing that they can get their act in order.
And that's a big political story too, that I think everyone needs to keep watching.
Tiffany MacLennan: Speaking of keeping on watching, what country or region should higher education watchers be paying the most attention to this year, either because something's going really well or because something's about to go very, very bad?
Alex Usher: Oh, I, the number of places where things could go bad is almost without limit, right? Like, Germany, they had to shut down the Technical University of Berlin recently because it was so decrepit they couldn't you know, they couldn't keep it up. I think France is, you know, is gonna be another year where almost every institution runs a deficit.
UK is clearly in a form of slow-mo you know, collapse. Argentina, for reasons we know, we've you know, we've had guests talk about Argentina. There's a bunch of countries like that. Pakistan is in a, a terrible state. So there's financial problems, you know, big financial problems in a whole bunch of countries that I think are pretty desperate.
I think the Georgian government has been doing some pretty I, I can't tell if they're ambitious or demented things to try and control universities. And, and so it's, you know, an, an interesting case this year.
Greece, they're moving quickly to a much more dynamic higher education system. Like, you couldn't fi- ... It was hard to find a more ossified higher education system than Greece five years ago, and that's really changing for the better. And I would say, I mean, the, the other thing is, you know, the places to look at, I think is it's not so much countries as it is types of institutions.
I think one of the things that developed countries are learning in this decade is that developing countries are learning, is that this model of a, of a s- a university system which is mostly public and mostly publicly funded is vulnerable. And so it's interesting the extent to which private universities, particularly in India and Vietnam, which are rising countries, that it's private universities to some extent that are leading the pack.
There was an Economist article on, on India. There's been ... I, I've highlighted a couple from Vietnam. It's really interesting. Really interesting. And I think that'll be one to watch for a while.
Tiffany MacLennan: One of the countries you did not really mention on that list was Canada, but let's flip over to our part of the globe. What's the story of the year so far been in Canada? Has anything been shocking or anything not shocking at all?
Alex Usher: Well, I mean, look, so one of the reasons I r- I do The World, The Globe, is to keep Canada in perspective. And I know, you know, Canadians like, they like looking inwards. And so when they, you know, it's like, "Oh my God, this is the worst thing ever," I'm like, "What, what? No. Have you heard of Argentina?" You know, I mean, keep, it keeps things in perspective.
Look, the most shocking thing that happened this year in Canada was the government of Ontario's announcement to put billions of dollars back into post-secondary, right? And mean, in typical Ford fashion, they did it in such a clumsy way they didn't get credit for it, and they did it by lying about you know, what's going on in private institutions as far as student aid is concerned.
And, and it's a... that, the story of, of how private colleges are ripping off the OSAP system is a story that has still not entirely come out. It will. And I, you know, I can't wait for the day where these guys get nailed. You know, the Tory government gets nailed for covering it up for so long.
But at the same time, they put money into universities. And they can say this is the most public money universities and colleges in Ontario have ever received, ever. Right? They undid almost 20 years of underfunding. You know, 'cause they put, what was it, one billion, one and a half billion back into the system.
It's amazing. It still leaves Ontario 10th out of 10 provinces in per student financing. Like, that's how far back they were. Like, a billion and a half dollars doesn't even get you to ninth place. And you know, and Ontario institutions will kind of shrug and say, "Well, that doesn't matter 'cause we lost $4 or $5 billion in international student funds."
But I think, and so yeah, I get it. People say we're still worse off, but you know what? Actually, that was a big deal for Ontario to do that. This is a really big deal, and I'm I'm hoping other provinces will learn from it and, and do something similar.
Tiffany MacLennan: One of the things that we've chatted a lot about over the past few years really at this point has been, you know, colleges and universities reacting to the chronic underfunding and loss of international student revenue. that's really been kind of the story headlines for the past years in higher education news in Canada. How would you characterize college and university decision-making this year compared to previous years? Are institutions getting more proactive in kind of their strategy in moving forward, or are we still taking primarily reactive steps to decision-making?
Alex Usher: I'm not sure I would describe it as proactive or reactive. I would say I'm a little disappointed that universities, most universities don't seem to have found a way to talk internally about their futures in a way that is honest and a- and that creates more space for movement. I mean, the institutions...
Tiffany MacLennan: we're for
Alex Usher: I know that's what we're for. I mean, so at a certain level, you know, m- maybe I have a market interest in not, not seeing that happen. But, you know, take a, take a look at what happened at, at Vancouver Island University, right? Like, that's a university that was in trouble, and certainly, if you would, if you'd told me two years ago that that was an institute that might go under, I would say, yeah, that's a plausible case.
But you know what? They balanced their budget this year. They managed to do some big things like, you know, get their number of faculty down from eight to four. That's pretty impressive. And, you know, obviously, you know, near-death experiences will get people to be, you know, a lot of things, to be flexible, and I don't, and I don't know the ins and outs of that particular case, but it does seem to me that they have managed to have a pretty impressive turnaround.
And, you know, I think institutions are getting market smarter. I think they are, yeah, I think the one thing that worries me a little bit is that everybody's still got their mind in the old world where every problem had a revenue solution. Oh, we'll just, you know, we'll open up a TNE thing overseas, which I-- Great, we should do that.
I'm not... But it doesn't solve your problems the way that necessarily you know, the way that international students used to. There's, there's less... There's some money at stake there, but there's less, generally speaking. And that's a challenge, right? I s- I still think we haven't really got to the point where we can say universities are getting better at the process stuff. Universities are getting better at doing less. Colleges are getting better ... Well, colleges I would say probably are d- getting better at doing less.
But just this notion that we need to ... There's a lot of process re-engineering. There's a lot of program re-engineering that has to happen, and I would say the pace of change on ... And I don't think, you know, I think what happened at VIU shows you that if the professoriate faculty trust institution that the problem is serious, and that they understand the cost and opportunity cost of various alternatives, they'll be sensible about this, right?
Like, I think, I think we gotta get past this idea that the collective bargaining agreement will never let us do what we wanna do. I don't think that's true. I actually think the problem is, is that there's too many institutions that don't have enough space for collective discussions about what kind of institution they wanna be.
And if we had more of that, I think we'd probably find easier answers to our questions about finances.
Tiffany MacLennan: If you were to make a prediction for global higher education over the next six months, what would it be? And what would be one prediction for Canadian higher education?
Alex Usher: So listen, I mean, the great thing about being a futurist in higher education, I think the one bold prediction I can make is that the cost of higher education will rise, right? Like I can, fearlessly tell you that the cost of higher education will rise. I'm not sure anyone will pay it, right?
I mean, I think that's the global moment we- we're in, which is that we built higher education systems that, you know, too many countries just don't wanna pay for anymore.
You know, I know what stories I'm, uh, keeping an eye on. You know, I mean, in Argentina, the question is, will Milei ever pay attention to the law and, you know, enact the law that he's, has been ignoring for the last eight months?
Could there be a big crazy resolution there? Yeah, maybe. Who knows? You know, Colombia, could you have the, a new right-wing government come in and start slashing at everything that Gustavo Petro has done over the last four years? Yes, you could. Those would b- those would both be big stories in Latin America.
In Africa, you could certainly see institutions going under. You know, I think UK is the place where you're most likely to have a big blowup just 'cause it's not very coordinated, but I think, you know, there are lots of places, particularly in France and maybe Spain, where you c- continue to see financial problems.
And then there's the question of what happens in the Gulf War, right? Like, I think the place of Dubai and UAE generally as a home for transnational education, I don't know if it's gonna come back in September, right? Like they managed to get through this last semester online, but that would be a big deal in transnational education if suddenly the Gulf were wiped out as a, as a market.
Like, I just... That, that would be the craziest thing I could imagine happening in the next six months. But we'll see. Oh, wait, you asked about Canada. Oh In Canada, it's still possible that one institution could go under in the next six months. I don't think that's impossible. We may not hear about it, right? Like, it may be that there'll be a lot of quiet bailouts like there was at Acadia at least once. You know, I mean, we do...
That does happen, where just, you know, they can't pay their bills one month, and the government steps in and, floats them some money very, very quietly, and you know, those things happen. I don't know. I don't know. But, but certainly the, situation is serious enough in Canada that it's possible that one or two institutions will see that happen to them.
And now they can't go into bankruptcy anymore, right? 'Cause the liberals banned p- institutions from using CCA. Who knows what'll happen then? Like, if they... They could just run out of money, and, you know, we'll see how that goes.
Tiffany MacLennan: On that positive note,
Alex Usher: On that positive note, I am, no, professionally, professionally I am optimistic about what's coming. I, I do think we've hit bottom. I do think we're heading upwards. But there are potholes on the way up, let's put it that way.
Tiffany MacLennan: Fantastic. Alex, thank you for joining us. And everyone, thank you for joining us for season four of the World of Higher Education podcast. We are out for the summer and we'll be back for season five in September, so if you have any topics or questions you'd like us to be chatting about on this podcast, shoot us a note at podcast@higheredstrategy.com.
We'll see you in September.