October 2026
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At 7:15 AM on a Tuesday, step onto Line 1 of the Santiago Metro at Los Héroes. Amid the crush of commuters hurtling eastward toward Providencia and Las Condes, you will inevitably spot them: men and women in their thirties and forties, clutching beat-up messenger bags heavy with laptops, paperbacks, and stacks of ungraded midterms.…
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To better understand the desperation coursing through higher education, look past the gothic quads of Britain and the sunlit sandstones of Australia, and look instead at the skyline of Gandhinagar, Gujarat. There, inside the glass-and-steel canyons of Gujarat International Finance Tec-City (GIFT City)—a deregulated, multi-currency Special Economic Zone (SEZ) designed for offshore banking, financial derivatives,…
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Turn Off the Hallway Lights: What Javier Milei’s Chainsaw Proves About “Free” State Higher Education
To witness the physical death of an ideological illusion, walk through the Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) after sundown. In the corridors of Latin America’s most decorated public institution—the cradle of five Nobel laureates—the elevators sit dead in their shafts. The common-area lightbulbs have been unscrewed. In…
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400,000 Hopefuls, 140,000 Desks: Why Constitutional “Gratuidad” Is an Underfunded Lottery in Ecuador
Every admission cycle in Ecuador, a cruel digital ritual plays out across living rooms from the hills of Quito to the esteros of Guayaquil and the plazas of Cuenca. Hundreds of thousands of eighteen-year-olds sit in front of computer monitors, refreshing the SENESCYT platform, their futures hanging on a centralized algorithm. Within seconds of the…
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In the early 2010s, elite Western university leadership entered a state of euphoric corporate hallucination. University presidents—most visibly John Sexton of New York University, flanked by executive teams from Duke, the University of Nottingham, and Liverpool—embarked on an aggressive global roadshow to announce the dawn of the “Global Network University.” The pitch was breathless, messianic,…
