HE News Brief 20.2.12
- India: Distance learning institutions are widening participation
- UK: Universities are fined record amounts for accepting too many students
- UK: British government have implemented stricter rules for student visas
- Rankings: Kenyan government to produce rankings
HE News Brief 6.2.12
- United States: Online education given a boost by ex-tenured professor at Stanford
- Middle East: Increased participation in higher education has not translated to equality for women
- Rankings: Musings on global rankings as they enter their ninth year
- Global: FT releases its Global MBA rankings
Japanese universities move towards new era
By Martin Ince, convener of the QS Academic Advisory Board
Japan is a safe, developed country whose culture has global appeal, an international centre for design and style. Just the place that students might flock to from around the world.
Except that they don’t. As Japan’s university profile shows, Japanese universities do well on four of the six criteria we use to compile the World University Rankings, but fare miserably on the other two, attractiveness to international students and faculty.
There are deep-seated reasons for Japan’s inability to attract foreign academics, and indeed foreign labour in general. But universities are now doing something about their low appeal to overseas students. For while there are many reasons for Japan’s lack of allure foreign students, one of the big ones is within the universities’ own control.
It is simply that they start their academic year in April. That means that foreign students wanting to go to a Japanese university face a gap of almost a year before they can get started. And when they leave, they are again out of sync with other nations. While some Japanese universities already offer a limited autumn intake, moves for more radical change are gaining pace.
Now Tokyo University, 25 in the World University Rankings and standard-bearer for the nation’s higher education sector, has taken charge by proposing a move to autumn admissions. Continue Reading
UK universities challenged to rank in QS top 100
By John O’Leary, QS Academic Advisory Board
Ministers in the UK have become the latest to use QS rankings as a measure of universities’ performance. David Willetts, who is responsible for higher education in England, has challenged the country’s universities to win more places in the top 100 of the QS, Times Higher Education and Shanghai Jiao Tong rankings.
The initiative is intended to boost innovation, another part of the minister’s brief. The UK government is using QS rankings alone to illustrate the excellence of its universities in a poster campaign to promote the country ahead of the London Olympics, quoting the UK’s four representatives in the world’s top ten. Mr Willetts acknowledged in his speech that the three main rankings used different methodologies, but set a target for UK representation in the top 100 to grow.
The minister said all the rating agencies agreed that the UK university system was second only to the United States. He endorsed the view of Professor Eric Thomas, President of Universities UK, that “if the British economy has been a stagecoach stuck in the mud then our universities are one of the horses that can pull it out.”
As part of his innovation drive, Mr Willetts invited leading overseas universities to set up in the UK in partnership with domestic universities to conduct research in science and technology and offer postgraduate courses. The proposal mirrors the establishment in New York of a graduate school focused on science and technology by Cornell University and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, which is based in Haifa. Unlike the New York development, any equivalent in the UK will not receive public funding.
Mr Willetts said private finance would be required, possibly with sponsorship from businesses that were keen to recruit more British graduates, although he hoped local councils might donate land in an effort to attract a graduate school. Mr Willetts has also been trying to mitigate the damage done to international student recruitment by tougher visa regulations introduced by his own government. His department has published new research demonstrating the labour market successes of overseas graduates educated in the UK. A survey conducted by i-graduate 30 months after graduation showed those who had studied in the UK earning substantially more than those who took degrees in their home country.
The report is consistent with the QS Global Employer Survey Report last year, which showed employers in most countries putting a premium on an international student experience.
HE News Brief 30.1.12
by Abby Chau
- SOUTH KOREA: A third of universities have announced the intention of dropping tuition fees by at least 5%
- SAUDI ARABIA: The government has announced that it hopes to have 50,000 graduates from the world’s top 500 universities by 2020
- UK: Application rates projected to fall by 10% for the autumn 2012 term amidst tuition fee hikes and budget cuts
- GERMANY: A different take on foreign students?
Classifying higher education institutions in the MENA region
By John O’Leary, executive member of the QS Global Academic Advisory Board
Universities in seven Arab countries have been classified as part of an international project that is intended to lead to a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of higher education across the Middle East and North Africa.
The Institute of International Education (IIE) and the Lebanese Association for Educational Studies launched their findings at last month’s World Innovation Summit on Education, in Qatar.
Research for the classification was carried out at the height of the Arab Spring, which restricted its scope. Egypt would have been the largest higher education system to be surveyed, but the researchers eventually settled for a classification of universities in Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and the United Arab Emirates.
The draft report stressed the rapid development of higher education in the seven countries, where the number of students grew from 2.9 million in 1998-9 to 7.6 million in 2007-8. The number of universities had grown from 174 to 467 in a decade, supplemented by countless other higher education institutions, many of them privately owned. Dr Rajika Bhandari, deputy vice president of research and evaluation at the IIE, outlined some of the challenges. “It was difficult to get education ministries to cooperate, even before recent political events in the region,” she said. “There needs to be more complete data before we can say this is reliable and valid.” However, the research underlines the diversity of higher education provision in the region.
Universities are classified according to 11 different dimensions, from the student and faculty profiles to their cultural and religious orientation, and regional and international engagement. The report suggests growing use of English throughout the Middle East and North Africa. In the countries surveyed, 23 per cent of universities were using the language for administration, 36 per cent to teach the humanities and nearly 47 per cent to teach the sciences.
This trend reflects an increasingly international outlook. Some 35 per cent of universities had international offices, although 42 per cent were considered to have no or only a low level of international engagement.
The authors do not claim that their research is yet representative of the region as a whole. In particular, they found it difficult to extract complete data from private institutions, many of which were relatively new. Classifying Higher Educations in the Middle East and North Africa: a Pilot Study is available on the IIE website. A full report is also available.
Public spending and university quality: is there a link?
by Martin Juno
Broadly speaking, higher education systems range from those relaying almost entirely on public funding to those mainly supported by private sources. Of course, there are a variety of options between those extreme points and most countries try mixed schemes.
Which system provides the better outcomes in terms of university teaching and research quality?
An interesting exercise that may provide a general answer to this question is to compare the relative performance of institutions operating in different funding environments. In order to conduct this analysis we used the higher education finance indicators provided by UNESCO (available here) , establishing four range groups (or quartiles) of public spending on tertiary education as a proportion of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the countries . Then the top 400 QS World University Rankings (QSWUR) institutions – available on topuniversities.com- were distributed among each spending level quartile and the average scores for every group were calculated.
Continue Reading
HE News Brief 29.11.11
by Abby Chau
- SOUTH KOREA: Recognition of foreign diplomas paves the way for Asia-Pacific higher ed collaboration
- UK: Initial figures show that applications for 2012 sees a 15% shortfall
- CANADA: Positioning itself as a popular destination for international students
- RUSSIA: Recognition of foreign degrees in 2012 Continue Reading
HE News Brief 21.11.11
by Abby Chau
- AUSTRALIA: Internalisation activities are entering a third stage
- MIDDLE EAST: Foreign branches in Qatar and Dubai are faring well
- INTERNATIONAL: A new Autonomy Scorecard produced by the EUA
- CHILE: Students are going to the table after six-months of protests Continue Reading
International student enrolment at US universities goes up by nearly 5%
The US has always been popular with overseas students, perpetually leading international student population tables. The world sat up and paid attention, therefore, when it was revealed that, though total enrolment went up by 3%, new international student numbers increased by only a worrying 1% in 2009-10. This year’s Open Doors report, from the International Institute of Education (IIE), however, indicates that the system is well on the way to recovery, with new international student numbers increasing by 6% and total enrolment by 4.7% in 2010-11. “Students and families from all over the world continue to choose the US over other countries because of the high quality of education, which stresses interdisciplinary approaches, student participation and critical thinking,” says Allan E. Goodman, President and CEO of the IIE.
The 2011 report, released on November 14th, shows that 723,277 overseas students were studying in the US in 2010-2011 – an increase of 32,354 over the 2009-2010 figure. This increase in numbers is largely courtesy of China, which sent 157,558 students to the US, 23.3% (or 29,736 students) more than the preceding year. India is in second place, sending just over 100,000 students – a figure which is, however, down 1% as compared to the previous year – and South Korea is third, with its 75,000 students representing an increase of 1.7%.
Although this top three remains unchanged, some interesting patterns have also emerged, among them as the increase of traffic from countries experiencing political unrest. Also noteworthy was the 22,704 students from Saudi Arabia studying in the US – an increase of 46.3%, which no other country can match. Though it only accounts for 0.8% of the total, Iran sent a significantly higher number of students too (18.9%).
Traffic from Japan, on the other hand, dropped off significantly. In 2009-2010, there were 24,842 Japanese students studying in the US, but a year later the figure was 21,290. This decline of 14.3%, was the sharpest recorded by any country this year. Kenya followed Japan with its student numbers declining by 13.3%.
Business and management (21.5%), engineering (18.7%) and life sciences (8.8%) lead the pack when it comes to the most popular subject areas. Other in-demand areas of study were maths and computer science (8.9% between them), social sciences (8.8%) and fine and applied arts (5.1%). Although only accounting for a relatively small number of students (4.5%), demand for intensive English language courses went up by massive 24%, with Saudi Arabia (29.1%), Japan (10.8%) and Venezuela (11.9%) sending the greatest numbers of students for these courses.
As has consistently been the case, graduate programs were more in demand than bachelor’s degrees. 219,853 overseas students, constituting 34%, of the total, were enrolled on Bachelors programs in 2010-2011, an increase of 6.8% over the previous year. Enrolment on graduate programs—including master’s, doctoral and professional degrees—nearly touched 300,000 and accounted for 45.8% of the total international student enrolments.
The University of Southern California (8,615), University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign (7,991) and New York University (7,988) hosted the most doctoral students. For Masters programs, the University of Bridgeport (2,582), California State University-Northridge (2,579) and San Jose University (2,566) lead the way, and Brigham Young University-Hawaii Campus (1,000), Mount Holyoke College (595) and Utah Valley State College’s (466) professional graduate courses attracted the highest numbers. Continue Reading
← Older posts-
Recent articles
