Category: Hello Goodbye

Five Rules for 2025-26 | HESA
Morning all.

It’s been a busy summer at HESA Towers. We’ve been developing Boardwise, our new suite of governance products with our partners at Balsam Advisory, and exploring new ideas on data governance and analytics with our friends at Plaid Analytics. We’ve also been touring the country with the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) Thought Leadership Office and the Business + Higher Education Roundtable (BHER) to talk about higher education, economic growth and productivity. The “what we heard” document from those sessions will be out in mid-September, and there are several follow-up events scheduled, including a leaders’ summit hosted by RBC later this month. This event will focus mainly on how higher education and business can work together to tackle some of the country’s most pressing challenges, such as clean energy and technology, artificial intelligence, and defence. Further insights from this work will also be explored at the BHER Executive Summit in February 2026.

And, of course, our own Re: University conference – where we will be presenting some of the most interesting ideas out there to improve and inspire the quality, effectiveness and experience of postsecondary education in Canada – is coming up in late January in Ottawa. (Tickets are going fast – reserve your spot!)

A couple of other small programming notes:
- The State of Post-Secondary Education in Canada 2025 will be released tomorrow.
- The World of Higher Educationpodcast will still come out every Thursday, but we’re back to an audio-only format because editing is a hassle and apparently very few of you are videophiles.
- The Fifteen will continue to bring you the top global higher education stories every other week.
- Next Friday will mark the debut of a new biweekly webinar series, Friday Focus, to be hosted by Tiffany MacLennan, surfacing the most interesting shifts and innovations in Canadian higher education – from AI & technology, cutting-edge programming, and the everchanging student experience – through the voices of those leading the change. We hope you can join us.
- Our University Vice Presidents Network (UVPN) is going strong and is scheduled to convene in Victoria in November, Quebec City in February, and then internationally for a May 2026 Study Tour in Germany.
- Finally, we are targeting the first week of December for the launch of the World of Higher Education Annual Review 2025, a new year-in-review publication which tries to document the year’s shifts across the whole of our crazy sector, right around the globe, using statistics, stories and strategic planning documents.
Now, on to the year ahead.

In most places, I think the hard part for colleges is over. 2025-26 isn’t going to be an easy year, by any means, but the big decisions have mostly been made, future directions have been set and the floor on institutional income has either been reached or is in sight.

Universities, on the other hand, are a different story. They have – not everywhere, but in the main – been more hesitant to act. It’s a conservative sector that is resistant to change, be it financial, organizational or cultural. And the financial problems the sector faces – again, not everywhere but in the main – are going to drag on for quite awhile mainly because international student numbers aren’t bouncing back the way they might have (more on that next week) and because an imminent recession is the opposite of helpful when it comes to provincial finances.

So, it’s going to be a tough year ahead. In my mind, I think there are 5 rules for success.

Rule 1 – Act like Universities are a Means to an End, not an End in Themselves. Literally the worst thing universities can say right now is “universities are crucial, give us more money”. It’s an utterly tone-deaf approach, even if you give it an “elbows up” spin. The sector has been saying it for years and it clearly hasn’t worked, so continuing with this approach is the literal definition of insanity. And the reason it doesn’t work is because Canadians (or at least Canadian politicians) simply don’t believe that universities are crucial because they don’t believe that knowledge and science is useful. Rather, they far prefer a Canada where the construction and natural resources industries continue to call the shots (if there is a Deep State in Canada, it is surely comprised of these two sectors and their watercarriers). The case we need to make is not “spend on universities”, it’s “a knowledge-driven Canada is a better Canada”. And more importantly, it’s not a case institutions can make on their own – they need to make it with lots of other actors, particularly from industry. Alliances, people. Form alliances. Downsize your government relations team, build up your community relations efforts.

Rule 2 – Stop with the Tri-Council Fundamentalism. Federal budgets for research are going to get hammered in the coming months. This will make a lot of people argue that we should ditch all research funds except the tri-councils because inquiry-driven research is sacred etc. I understand the instinct here because so many institutions make council success a key part of the tenure/promotion process. But it’s a bad instinct. No one in Ottawa cares about your tenure processes. You can argue all you want about how basic research is more cost-efficient in terms of driving long-term discovery, but i) the public likes some short-term wins mixed in with the long-term ones and b) nobody outside universities is buying that one story about NSERC funding Geoffrey Hinton’s AI research 30 year ago as a business case for science. Like, nobody. Get over it. Understand that if there is to be growth in Canadian research funding in future, it’s going to look a lot more like Horizon Europe or the Biden Administration’s Chips and Science Act, both of which were widely hailed as being good for science despite – or perhaps because – they are largely mission-driven rather than inquiry-driven. If this is the hill the community chooses to die on, God help us all.

Rule 3 – Focus on what you can control, not what you can’t. Yes, things are bad. You can spend time complaining about it – government is short-sighted, we’re always getting shafted by the granting councils, etc. – or you can get busy. Fire up your friend-raising and fund-raising. Ramp up your spend/effort on international recruitment (more on this next week). Make a big bang with some new programs that stand out. Go big on one theme. Stand out. Please.

Rule 4 – Faster Collegiality is a Must. Part of regaining public confidence is going to involve being able to make changes at the institutional level with much more speed and determination than is historically the case. That means being able to deliver on promises and priority in the immediate term, not in some far-off future, to be able to act as an institution and not just as a sack full of cats fighting over research priorities and teaching schedules. The way this normally happens is to concentrate power in the hands of the upper administration. This is how it works in most of Asia, most of the United States, and increasingly in Europe as well (though crucially, senior admin tends to be elected in Europe). But it doesn’t have to be like that. There’s no obvious reason why collegial governance needs to be slow: it’s just custom and practice. I’ve been saying for a while that better, faster governance is key to institutions in rough times and while too few have heeded that advice, it’s never too late to start.

Rule 5 – Do less, but do it better. Universities are ridiculously strung out. Many forces are at work here, but I will single out two. At a system level, we have governance systems that are great at approving new programs and initiatives but absolutely rotten at pruning them once they have outlived their purpose. Result: institutions do too much, but do it badly, thus leading to enshittifcation. But it works at the level of individual faculty too, since departments tend to hire the biggest keeners in the system, the kind of people who won’t say no to more research, or extra teaching, or whatever. Result: burnout. In a normal organization, a manager would come along and try to make workloads manageable. But since Canadian academia long ago decided that the main purpose of department chairs is to protect staff from unwanted Decanal or Provostial schemes rather than to manage academics’ workloads, there is no one in the system who can actually make the problem go away (high-sounding talk about “wellness” doesn’t do the trick either). So, seriously, do less.

It’s going to be a hard year (or let’s face it, a hard few years), but if everyone gets the basics right, we can come out of this better and stronger.

Good luck everyone. Back to work!
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September 2, 2025
Summer 2025 | HESA
So. This is the last blog of the academic year. Service resumes Tuesday, 2 September.

It’s been a long year. I’m pretty tired. How about you?

This was the year it all kind of came crashing down: not just here in Canda, but everywhere else too. It’s too long to go through and my more faithful readers already know the story. It’s not just in Canada. In France, Australia, and the UK, we saw institutions having similar problems: all these fantastic higher education institutions we’ve collectively built and, quite simply, nobody wants to pay for it. Not through public funds, not through private fees. Nobody wants to pay for it.

And then there’s American higher education would probably be going through something similar this year, only a greater catastrophe arrived first. I’ll pass over this in silence.

Here in Canada, the sector is increasingly friendless. Parents and students seem less convinced that universities in particular represent good value. And governments are simply indifferent, not because they dislike universities necessarily, but because they dislike or distrust the knowledge economy universities are built to serve.

Unfortunately, I think it is going to get worse. Not a single government in Canada released a budget this year which took into account the effects of US tariffs. The result? Allegedly healthy federal and provincial balance sheets are going to get pounded this year and next (and the especially unhealthy ones — BC and Quebec in particular — are going to be especially ugly). Deficits as far as they eye can see. As the saying goes, no one is coming to save us.

I have no doubt that community colleges will find ways to get through this, because they have so far through this crisis mostly shown themselves to have the ability to do what it takes to right the ship. They might not look too good after another round or two of cuts, and it’s not impossible that a few rural colleges might disappear or shrink radically because what they get from governments and domestic tuition fees just isn’t enough to properly serve their communities, but on the whole, I think they will be ok.

Universities, on the other hand. Well, that’s a different story.

About a year ago, I said that the biggest change universities were going to have to undergo in this new financial age was shifting from a belief that every problem had a revenue-side solution to one in which every problem has a cost-side solution. Institutions can no longer solve their short-term problems by just recruiting another hundred international students. They actually have to change the way they do business. They have to change processes. They have to think about production functions and work processes in a way they haven’t before. And they have to do it while trying to pivot to new missions that give them more traction with government and the public.

I am here to say that I don’t think it’s going so well.

The message that “there is no one coming to save us” has, thankfully, penetrated fairly deeply in universities. Maybe not quite everywhere (hello, VIU!), but in most places. But what I am not sure has penetrated quite so deeply is the corollary that actual change is necessary. My (admittedly limited) vantage point on the sector is that:
- I still see universities spending inordinate amounts of time trying to come up with new revenue-based solutions. It’s a habit they have a hard time kicking.
- Universities are deeply resistant to doing more than the bare minimum of restructuring to meet immediate financial needs. The idea that deep structural change might be necessary remains pretty much anathema. This bare minimum approach means that when the next round of government cuts come – due to recession, or national re-armament or whatever – they are just going to have to cut again, and again, and again. There is very little sign of anyone trying to get ahead of the curve to make both big cuts and big investments in new areas that will help them survive the turmoil.
- I still hear, distressingly often, senior people in universities utter the worst seven words in all of higher education: “we just gotta tell our story better”. Universities are reluctant to face the possibility that governments and the mass public don’t love them the way they are and that they may need to actually, you know, change.
We need to stop acting like the research university of today – which in Canada is really only a creature of the 1970s or perhaps 1960s — is eternal. Universities can die, and have done so rather frequently across history. Universities are the product of particular configurations of social and economic forces. And now, at the moment when the western world is basically re-considering the entire post-WWII order, the idea that universities are going to be uniquely immune to change is bananas. Past performance — which I think has been pretty good — is not a guarantee of future safety.

I am not saying here that universities shouldn’t fight for their own corner: they should! Often more vigorously than they currently do (see my piece on Bill 33, or on how they need to gear up for a fight with Bay Street over whether temporary residents will be international students or TFWs). But they can’t do it by digging in on the status quo.

And so, I will end the academic year by repeating something I said a few months ago. To survive this coming period, universities are going to need:
1. Ambition. Don’t waste time doing small things.
2. Experimentation. The worst possible thing right now is an addiction to “the way we’ve always done things”
3. Dissemination. No one institution got us into the mess. No one institution is going to get out of it alone, either. Institutions need to commit to sharing the results of their experimentation.
I know every university in Canada can, if it chooses, commit to those three things. I have faith. And I believe that if they do, our university sector will come out as strong or stronger than any system in the world.

But any institution that chooses not to commit to them…well, I think they are going to have some issues in the next three years. Serious ones.

It’s up to us. Rest up this summer. Re-charge. We’re all going to need it in ‘25–’26.
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June 11, 2025
That Was the Quarter That Was

What’s been going on around the world since the end of March, you ask?

Well, unsurprisingly, the biggest stories have come from the United States. There are in effect four fronts to the Trump administration’s attacks on the world of higher education. First of all, the government’s new budget is going to reduce student eligibility for student loans and grants, meaning there will be less opportunity available to American students. Second, the budget also proposes to radically slash the budgets of the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) (the cuts you heard about in the early months of the Trump administration were cuts to existing and in-progress grants – the new budget is about slashing expenditures going forward). Third, it had decided to get itself into an enormous spat with Harvard, starting with issuing a bizarre set of demands on April 11^th, followed by an admission that the letter had been sent in error, followed by enraged bellicosity that Harvard wasn’t submitting to a letter the administration had not meant to send. Things escalated: the Trump administration impounded more billions of dollars, Harvard responded by shrugging and raising a few hundred million on the bond market, and Trump escalated by, eventually, banning Harvard from accepting or hosting any international students. And fourth, shortly after a court granted Harvard an injunction on the international students matter, the Trump administration began delaying all student visas and aggressively cancelling Chinese student visas.

(Whew.)

This is of course a massive own goal with dangerous implications, as commentators such as Holden Thorp and William Kirby have pointed out. But it is not simply about Americans losing scientific/technological supremacy. As the Economist has pointed out, the entire world has a stake in what happens to American science; its hobbling will have consequences not just for global science but for the global economy as well.

It has been fascinating over the past few weeks watching how the American debacle had grabbed the attention of the rest of the world as well. It has been very difficult this past month or so to be somewhere where the papers weren’t obsessing about what was happening to students at Harvard (check out a representative smattering from Ethiopia, Iceland, Vietnam, Malaysia, India and Kazakhstan).   At the policy level, almost every OECD government is revving up plans to poach US-based researchers even in places which genuinely don’t have the scientific infrastructure to poach anyone (Ireland?  Czechia? C’mon). In other words, you have basically the entire world looking at how the American debacle in a massively self-centred way. Basically, it’s all: “Yeah, yeah, death of the American research university, how does this affect me/how can I profit?”

But the world has yet to grapple in any kind of serious way is how to maintain growth and innovation in a world where the largest spender on research is reducing expenditures by 50%. This has implications for absolutely everybody and at the moment there are no serious discussions about how the world gets by without it. Obviously, other countries can’t replace what used to come out of NSF and NIH. But they can, as Billy Beane from Moneyball might say, recreate it “in the aggregate” by working together. Unfortunately, that’s not quite what they are doing. That would require Australia, Canada, Japan and Korea to be working actively with the European Union; not only is that not happening, but these days the EU can’t even get it’s own act together on research.

Meanwhile, in large parts of the world, the main higher education story we hear about is one of “cutbacks”, “austerity” and the like. But there are, I think, some fundamentally different issues at work in different countries. In the rich Anglosphere, which happens to be where most of the big producers of higher education are located, mature higher education systems highly reliant on market fees are being forced into big cuts as governments remove their ability to attract funds, usually by changing their student visa regimes. (An aside here: many people ask: where will international students go if not Canada/US/Australia/wherever? To which the answer is usually: to a great extent, they will just stay home. But a few countries do seem to be doing better on international students as of late, mostly in Asia.  Turkey, Dubai and Uzbekistan in particular seem to be the big winners, though the growth in their intakes is lower than the drop in the intakes of the big anglophone countries).

But in other countries, the fundamental financial tension is that demand for higher education is far outstripping the ability of either public or private funding to keep the system afloat (government could choose not to meet so much demand, but political needs must).   Kenya, with its widespread university financial problems comes into this category, and Nigeria, where funding new universities seems to come at the expense of funding existing ones clearly come under this category. Intermediate cases here include France (increasing demand, flat funding), Brazil (which has done a series of policy U-turns on transfers to federal universities and whose overall policy might best be described as “confused”), and perhaps Colombia (promises of money co-existing with widespread institutional precarity, even in the public sector). What is common here is that a lot of countries seem to have built systems which are too big/expensive for what the public – collectively or individually – is willing to pay.

A common response to the problem of inadequate public funding is the expansion of private higher education. Almost unbelievably, private higher education now makes up about 20% of total provision in Spain, France and Germany (in two of those countries, tuition is free, and in the third it is minimal – under 1000 euros per year in most cases). In many cases, the expansion is in relatively cheap classroom-heavy courses (often in business) but in many cases these universities are moving into other areas such health care provision. This explosion has led to a significant tightening of regulations on private universities in Spain and a “tri” (meaning triage”) on France’s Parcoursup system, meaning that certain types of private college will have a harder time advertising themselves to prospective students. This phenomenon is not constrained to Europe: Tunisia is also currently pre-occupied with how to regulate private institutions. An alternative to letting domestic private universities rip is to invite foreign institutions into the country.  India is the country most in the news for attempting this at the moment but places like Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan and Vietnam are also eagerly heading down this route.

Tuition fees are always an issue, and at public universities we see evidence both for and against the idea that fees are rising. On the one hand, we have Namibia introducing free tuition (though – note – without fully announcing its operational details), and a Labor government in Australian winning on a promise to – in effect – shorten graduate repayment periods by cancelling debt. On the other hand, Korea and Russia – both countries with abysmal youth demographics – are allowing their institutions to raise fees after years of both falling enrolments and largely frozen tuition.  Finland may be introducing fees for certain forms of continuing education. But higher tuition isn’t the only way governments deal with crashing demographics; in Pennsylvania, the solution is outright campus closures.

In terms of student activism, the main story so far this year is Serbia, which is now in the seventh month of student-led anti-government protests. At this point, it’s very hard to see how the students obtain their maximalist demands of regiment change. After six months of protests, students are starting to go back to school and finish their academic year. Recent evidence from North America suggests the movement will have trouble maintaining itself over the summer months and into next year.

War continues to re-shape universities around the world. Ukraine has announced changes to its system of conscription which will lower its university attendance rate (particularly for graduate studies). Something similar has happened in Ethiopia, where new rules have been introduced requiring students to do a year of national service before graduation. Russian universities continue to atrophy in different ways, partly due to government policy but also due to the exodus of many scholars who have fled the regime.

Among other things from this quarter that bear watching going forward: Greece is continuing the modification of its university system at a furious pace both in terms of altering curricula and in terms of changing the post-dictatorship convention that campuses are police-free zones. Algeria is moving its entire university system from French to English instruction, which may not have a huge effect in higher education, but certainly tells you which way global linguistic politics are going. Hong Kong is experimenting with a new institutional type, and a billionaire in China is putting some serious coin behind a new university.

My tip for the story this summer? Watch graduate unemployment rates around the world, particularly in India and China (where the situation is so bad the government has just announced a kind of emergency blitz on graduate hiring which sure seems like it is set up for failure). I think the push to align higher education more with the labour market is about to go into overdrive.

All caught up now! See you back here in September.

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June 10, 2025