HE News Brief 17.5.11
by Abby Chau
IN THIS EDITION
- ENGLAND: Universities Minister David Willetts continues to draw fire for his HE proposals
- UK: The Guardian has just released its list of top UK universities, with Cambridge topping the league table
- GERMANY: Universities are overcrowded and many are calling for the reforms
- FRENCH: New internationalisation strategy to target mobile students
- AUSTRALIA: Losing its grip on mobile students
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HE News Brief 12.4.11
by Abby Chau
IN THIS EDITION
- AUSTRALIA: Leadership at top institutions are targeting indigenous students’ leadership and participation rates
- SOUTH KOREA: Series of suicides on the KAIST campus has forced a change in student scholarship policies
- POLAND: Private and public institutions jostle for students and supremacy
- KENYA: Brain drain affecting professors and students
- GLOBAL: New QS Subject Rankings – Engineering & Technology has recently been released
HE News Brief 29.3.11
by Abby Chau
IN THIS EDITION
- UNITED KINGDOM: British Government backtracks on proposed policies to curtail immigration
- CHINA: Peking University introduces controversial student screening
- AUSTRALIA: Australian business leaders call for dergulation of student fees
- UNITED STATES: US News & World Report produce MBA ranking based on student yield
- UNITED KINGDOM: University of Wales under review by Quality Assurance Agency
HE News Brief 7.3.11
by Abby Chau
- Statistics recently released by the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada shows that a growing amount of young people are now entering into higher education. 32,000 more students are enrolled in 2010 which represents a 3.7% increase from 2009. Ontario universities has seen a 49% increase in applications since 2000. Some are warning that the increase in students will be a drain on government funds as numbers continue to expand.
Full Story: Macleans
- Sir Howard Davies, director of the London School of Economics since 2003, resigned recently over allegations of acceptance of a £1.5 million donation from a charity foundation run by one of the sons of the controversial and eccentric Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. Wikileaks cables show that LSE may not be the only institution connected to the Libyan government and this is just the beginning of a series of revelations concerning universities’ role in legitimizing the government. LSE, for its part, said that it would donate the funds to promote higher education in North Africa.
Full Story: Chronicle of Higher Education
- Academic and deputy director of research at Kent Business School Dennis Tourish recently laid claim that journal lists are detrimental to innovative research, particularly pointing out that the Q index used by some institutions such as the University of Queensland is flawed. The Q index measures research income, higher degree completions, research publication, and advisory loads, among others. Tourish says that the emphasis on journal lists is encouraging conformity and academic malaise. Queensland’s deputy vice-chancellor has reputed the claims saying that the Q index is a good tool to assess academic quality but other factors are taken into account such as teaching loads and performance.
Full Story: The Australian
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Influence of age on university “performance”
by Ben Sowter
The world is changing. And fast.
Higher education is no exception. In Saudi Arabia there are 28 universities, 22 of which were founded after the turn of the millenia. Economies worldwide are turning to the ever enticing notion of creating a “knowledge economy”. I read somewhere that we have generated more written content since 2003 than the in the whole of human history until that point.
In that environment – whilst rankings such as ours may treat all institutions equally – the reality is that date of establishment clearly has a part to play in the current success profile of universities. In broad terms, universities over 100 years old, and perhaps those over 50, have already reached their “terminal velocity” – the combination of reputation, government funding, scale of operation, organisational culture, international mix and alumni profile have reached a degree of equilibrium which makes radical shifts in performance – as measured by rankings or otherwise – exceedingly difficult to impose.
HE News Brief 01.2.11
by Abby Chau
- The Ukraine Education Minister Dmitriy Tabachnyk recently criticised the higher education system as inefficient and that the 1000 universities in the country are too many for a population of 45 million. Tabachnyk said that institutions should be more regulated and mergers of smaller universities would help alleviate the problem. This announcement comes as students protested a new higher education law which would reduce the number of places at universities as well as a planned reduction of funding for student government.
Full Story: RIA Novosti
More: Interfax
- Despite budget cuts and tuition fee hikes, the UK government is pressing on with their policy of tighter visa restrictions. Business schools are reacting to a plan that would disallow graduates from working in the country. Previously graduates were able to apply for a post-study visa which would allow them to work in the UK for up to two years. The government is planning to cancel the post-study visa in April 2011. In 2009, 38,000 visas were issued under this category. At the moment, the UK is the second most popular destination for international students. Policy makers in Europe are looking at positioning itself as a higher education destination as the UK falls out of favour with international students, and particularly, MBA graduates.
Full Story: FT
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HE News Brief 6.12.10
by Abby Chau
- The Bologna Process, a declaration of higher education cooperation between 47 countries, is still chugging along despite the controversies surrounding implementation and overall efficacy. Now on course to feel the brunt of new reforms are business schools, particularly those that previously offered five-year business degrees. 10,000 new programmes in economics and business are to be implemented and positioned as competition for an emerging Asian higher education market. Some are saying that countries like the US must start accepting three-year bachelor programmes in order to adjust to Bologna’s new three-year standardisation plan for an undergraduate degree, or they may be left behind as other countries like Australia are quickly adjusting their educational system to a changing European standard.
Full Story: FT
- As the UK economy has taken a substantial hit, many people, particularly in parliament are reiterating the need for universities to produce the next generation of entrepreneurs. Statistics from the Destinations of Leavers of Higher Education produced by HESA show that the percentage of graduates who categorise themselves as self-employed or entrepreneurs has jumped from 4,190 in 2002-03, to 6,120, in 2008-09. Buckinghamshire New University Vice chancellor Ruth Farwell says that league tables should include this statistic in their indicators as it would give students a clearer picture of which institution promotes enterprise and business acuity. UCL Professor Tim Barnes concurs and says that if the government was serious about developing students for the job market, then statistics such as this should be measured and recorded.
Full Story: the Guardian
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Influence of rankings on student choice
by Ben Sowter
We received a comment to my post a few days ago regarding the general reality that the validity of rankings are assessed by most against the alignment of the results with the observers expectations. The comment expressed that rankings were “for academics” and that prospective students don’t pay a great deal of attention. IDP conduct annual research into the motivations of prospective international students. The detailed results of their research can be found on the following links:
2009: www.idp.com/pdf/AIEC_research_09.pdf
2010: www.idp.com/pdf/IDP%20Research%20AIEC.pdf
The 2009 work polled over 6000 prospective, current and recently graduated international students and found international ranking to be the most significant factor influencing choice of institution, with reputation in field, reputation of institution and employer recognition all featuring highly. The slide below is an excerpt from the 2009 presentation made at the AIEC Conference.
Trends in student mobility
by Ina Chiriliuc
There has been a significant shift in the preference for study destinations. Students planning to pursue their courses abroad have started to consider new locations and this is only natural since the rather popular study destinations are very competitive, expensive and for many, a great distance away from home. The once obvious foreign destinations such as: United Kingdom, Germany and France have been losing inbound students in the last period, according to data in the “Education at a glance” 2010 Report, published by the Organisation for Economic and Co-Operation Development (OECD).
Considering that globally the number of foreign students has in the mean time increased, it is only obvious that there appeared a whole new range of booming destinations for studies. In a comparison of OECD’s “Education at a glance” reports for 2009 and 2010, there has been a remarkable growth in the number of inbound students to New Zealand, Czech Republic, Netherlands, Slovak Republic and the Russian Federation.
HE News Brief 21.9.10
by Abby Chau
Here are this week’s news stories:
- Up until a few years ago, Dubai appeared to be financially invincible, it boasted the tallest building in the world and even the SATC girls were paying homage to the city. But fast-forward a few years later, and the economic recession has hit the real estate sector and now many are worried that it will also affect Higher Education. George Mason University of Virginia in the UAE closed a few years ago and recently Michigan State University’s foreign branch in Dubai also shut down its operations. However the executive director of Higher Education Warren Fox, says that the forecast is actually encouraging – in 2004, four foreign campuses operated in the free zone and now the number is close to 30. Fox remains optimistic, saying that it can take a few years before foreign campuses can find an audience.
Full Story: New York Times
- Portugal is looking to revamp their higher education system, much in the same way vein as Asia’s institutions. Secretary of State for Higher Education Manuel Heitor says that in order for a country to compete in the economic realm, they must invest in HE. In the 80s, Portugal invested .4 percent of gdp in education, and in 2008, that figure jumped to 1.55 percent. After years of oppression, Portugal has slowly been rebuilding its infrastructure but now it has partnerships with Harvard Medical, MIT, University of Texas at Austin, and Carnegie Mellon.
Full Story: Chronicle of Higher Education
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