Open universities are proliferating in India. The Indira Gandhi National Open University has four million students, and an open university in Bihar which is one of the country’s most under educated regions, has seen an increase in enrolment of over 38,000 students in the last ten years. Many are saying that this is the answer to the country’s accessibility problems, where the population is growing by a rapid rate but there is a lack of universities to accommodate the growing number of students. Open universities educate approximately 15% of students, with many from poorer backgrounds. Some however are saying that open universities do not track drop-out rates and that the quality of courses should be carefully tracked so that outcomes can be closely examined.

Universities are receiving hefty fines for recruiting more students than is allotted by the government. The Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce) have fined between 20-25 universities, including the London Metropolitan University for almost six million pounds. The university recruited 1,550 students beyond the target. Applications for university grew in previous years because students are looking to avoid paying higher fees this autumn.

The British government announced stricter rules on visas today. Graduates used to be able to stay in the country for two years under the post-work study visa, however the government has scrapped that scheme and instead is implementing restrictions that will allow, they say, for the best graduates to remain in the country. Under the new rules, graduates will be able to stay in the country after they have received an offer of employment with a minimum salary and from an employer who has been accredited by the border agency. The amount students must hold in funds to support themselves has also increased. Universities are concerned that these restrictions will harm the sector’s ability to attract international students, a scenario that some top destination countries had to face this year. The British government says that the move is intended to curb abuses which saw a record number of students remaining in the country in recent years.

The Kenyan government announced it will rank its universities in a scheme to commence in April. The Higher Education Permanent Secretary Professor Crispus Kiamba says that the initiative will hopefully spark competition and the auditing will help to identify poor performing institutions. The rankings, the government hopes, will also help attract foreign students. A survey was sent to higher education experts, administrators, parents, and students to help them identify appropriate indicators to be utilised for the rankings exercise.

Paris also offers a student concentration that belies its status as a major global capital. With 16 universities in the QS World University Rankings, Paris has an unrivalled variety and concentration of globally recognised institutions, contributing to its famed student scene. The city’s Latin Quarter in particular is a hub of student activity, with a cluster of famous institutions including the Sorbonne, École Normal Supérieure and École des Mines de Paris. This means that while Paris is a large and diverse capital it also has the sort of student-dominated core that one would expect to find in a smaller university town.

Another aspect in which the French capital excels is in the number of domestic and international employers seeking to recruit its graduates. Parisian graduates are identified as priority targets by employers both in France and all across Europe, reflecting the solid graduate skills gained through its teaching-intensive undergraduate system, and the internationally-minded nature of Parisian graduates. Despite the continent’s current financial uncertainties, Paris offers a wealth of graduate opportunities due to its position at the heart of the EU.

Another feature of the top-ranked European cities is their high score for quality of living, based on the annual Mercer Quality of Living Index, which takes into account factors such as safety, public services and infrastructure, recreation and environment. Vienna, ranked fifth overall here, was the top city in the world for quality of living in 2011, and other major European student cities to feature near the top of the table include Munich, Zurich, Berlin, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Dublin and Paris.

City rankings based exclusively on cost or quality of living are already in existence, but QS Best Student Cities 2012 is unique in employing a range of criteria tailored to the needs and priorities of students. Based on 12 indicators, the ranking looks at the quality and number of internationally recognized universities, alongside factors such as affordability, student population, job prospects and quality of living, to compare the all-round study environments provided by the world’s top student destinations.

Which cities qualify?

We have only included cities that have a population of over 250,000, and that contain two or more universities in the QS World University Rankings top 700. At present, 98 cities meet these criteria, of which we have ranked the top 50. This excludes the likes of Oxford and Cambridge, and there are of course many people who prefer to study in smaller towns and cities. However, our aim is to compare the major cities that offer most as all-round study destinations, not just those that contain a world-famous university.

How do you measure the ‘best student city’?

What makes a city preferable over another for a given person is of course subjective (within reason). However, while the amount of emphasis you attach to each of them will vary depending on your circumstances, interests and priorities, we believe our criteria are all of great importance to the vast majority of prospective students: Rankings, Student Mix, Quality of Living, Employer Activity, and Affordability.

As in all QS rankings, you are encouraged to look at the full range of tables to seek out the information that is most useful to you. Take a look at the overall table to see how the cities compare once all factors are added up, or check out the individual tables to see how they measure up in each of our five categories. Which one matters most to you?

Click here to view the results tables, or check out our methodology to see how we put the ranking together.

For the full results, visit www.topuniversities.com.

Private institutions are flourishing in China, where demand for higher education is still growing at a healthy rate. In a province one hour south of Beijing, 14 private universities are in operation. In 1997, when only about 10 percent of 18-22 year-olds attended university, there were approximately 20 private institutions and now, as enrolment rates reach 27%, there are over 630. By 2020, the government hopes to push these participation figures further to 40%. Although private institutions are flourishing and have no difficulties in enrolling students, some are asking whether graduates are able to find high quality jobs, in particular government jobs, which are highly prized. Some also say that private institutions still remain second choices for most students, or namely those students who do not perform well in the national entrance exams. However advocates of private institutions say that the more focused programmes allow students to hone in on their specialised skills and a more practical versus a theoretical approach is important for those students wanting to get a head start in the job market.

The emergence of branch campuses has been a cause of controversy almost since its inception. Now there are approximately 200 foreign branches around the world. The University of Wollongong was one of the first to set up in the Middle East, which along with Asia, is seen as a lucrative market.   Wollongong’s success in Dubai has attracted attention; it started with only eight students in 1993. Today it has over 500 students and its operation is located in Knowledge Village, an area which has been designated as a special economic zone. It’s success, according to Jason E. Lane of the Cross-Border Education Research Team in Albany, is as much attributed to starting off modestly than its achievement of building a strong brand. Executive director for administration and strategic development at Wollongong, Raymi van der Spek proudly says that universities cannot rely on its reputation alone and that marketing should play an enormous role in recruiting students.

Zambia’s government has put quality measures in place to counteract the number of underperforming institutions which has proliferated in the country. Out of Zambia’s 20 institutions, 3 are government-run while 17, some not accredited, are privately owned. The Higher Education Authority Bill stipulates that the government will audit institutions and work with those underperforming with a view of registering them in six months’ time. If they do not meet the standards after six months, then they will be forced to close.  The government is also planning on creating science and technical colleges and universities and are intending to develop state colleges into universities.

Webometrics’ Ranking Web of World Universities, which measures web presence, have just published its latest results. The top ten all hail from the United States, with Harvard, MIT, and Stanford towing the line. The first non-US based institution to make it onto the list is the University of Toronto at 17, followed by Universidade de Sao Paulo USP at 20.  This year, Webometrics has expanded its rankings to include over 20,000 institutions from around the world. It has also tweaked its methodology including using a new data provider Majestic SEO.

Online education received a boost recently from former tenured professor of computer science at Stanford University, who quit his position in order to establish Udacity, a start-up company aiming to provide affordable online classes. With the US economy stagnating and tuition fees rising, the initiative is hailed by many as an important step toward levelling the opportunity for participation in higher education. Other free or low-cost online programmes are making a mark in the states, MIT offers an open platform for their lectures and have gone one step further by establishing MITx, which allows people to gain credentials.  Some argue that online education is the way forward for students looking for outcomes and that the model can be based on Amazon for example, where products, or in this case classes, or rated by users.

Women are increasingly attending universities in the Middle East, thanks to some Arab government’s goals in the 1990s to prioritise women’s participation in higher education. However after two decades of participation, women are still lagging behind in terms of attaining high-ranking positions in universities, and changing the perception of old gender stereotypes is still a challenge. Women are also pushed toward ‘feminine’ degrees such as the humanities and the social sciences.  Despite advances such as increased participation, over 50% in some universities in Saudi Arabia, attitudes and career advancement is still seen as far from equal.

As global rankings have reached its eight years in existence, University World News has released a retrospective of sorts.  Although measuring research can take on multiple incarnations – citations per paper, h-index, reputation, citations per faculty, publications – measuring teaching quality  has been less successful. Some systems are moving in the right direction such as the U-Multirank project which utilises student satisfaction surveys to measure teaching.  Other characteristics of global rankings which have become mainstays is a strong brand, and the importance of establishing itself first on the global stage. In addition, a trend moving forward is the importance of having an interactive platform for people to change the weightings applied to each indicator as students choosing their preferred university is a subjective experience.  The so-called missing indicator, some argue,  in global rankings is a measurement of students’ intelligence, an indicator used by the ubiquitous US News & World Report.

The FT has recently released its Global MBA rankings with the Stanford Graduate School of Business topping the chart, followed by heavy-hitters Harvard Business, Wharton, LBS, and Columbia. Half of the list hail from the United States while schools in China are making inroads. Canada has five schools on the list, Spain and Singapore have three, and Hong Kong has two. Some notable entries include the Indian Institute of Management (11) and the National University of Singapore (23). The FT utilised different indicators for their rankings including graduate salaries, questionnaires and research measures.

Surveys of international students, in particular, have shown that location is second only to the perceived quality of a university and its courses as an influence on study choices. Until now, however, there has been no specialist global comparison of university cities.

The new QS ranking will compare the major international study locations – those with more than one world-ranked university – from a student’s perspective. Among the 11 indicators will be affordability and employer activity, as well as independent assessments of the quality of living.

Politicians and local business communities increasingly recognise the importance of students to the economies of university cities, while universities themselves focus particularly on international recruitment. Melbourne, for example, conducts regular surveys of international students to establish their view of the city, as well as of their chosen university. The last edition, in 2010, found the expectation of a job after graduation to be most important factor influencing applicants, while safety ranked alongside academic reputation as the next most important. Lifestyle and culture were next.

In a report published last year, PA Consulting estimated that international students directly contributed £2.5 billion to the economy of London – up by more than two-thirds in five years. Other benefits that could not be quantified included their contribution to research, the skills of graduates and the likelihood of future overseas investment influenced by the city’s graduates. The overall economic benefits were put at £6 billion a year, although the consultants said the true figure could be much higher.

Five UK universities in recent years – London South Bank, City University London, West London, Edinburgh Napier and Birmingham City – have changed their names to emphasise their city locations. In Canada, the University of Western Ontario is proposing to drop the name of its province from its title to be more recognisable to international students.

Universities in Birmingham have even clubbed together to commission a Lonely Planet guide to the UK’s second city from the perspective of students and graduates. David Farrow, Director of Communications at Aston University, said: “At open days and on schools visits, and through discussions with potential students, it was plain to all of the institutions in Birmingham that young people from outside the West Midlands had a real desire to know more about what the city has to offer – and that whilst a vibrant, safe location would not be the single factor driving choice of university, it was the critical context when deciding where to spend the next three or four years of their life.”

Ben Sowter, who heads the QS Intelligence Unit, which has produced the ranking, says: “Going to university is about much more than the prestige of an institution or the quality of the research it produces. I hope this broader ranking will help to fill an important gap in the information students need in choosing where to study.”

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.

This switch would not be simple. The existing system ties in with school schedules, and means that graduates emerge at a time that suits a long-established recruitment machine.

But the Japanese media report that the prime minister and the education minister both support change. The ministry did a survey which suggests that only three nations start their academic year in April, while about 160 prefer the autumn. This anomaly reduces Japanese universities’ ability to recruit round the world. Perhaps more importantly for government, it is a problem for official targets to get Japanese students to spend time abroad.

Todai, the University of Tokyo, has now made a decisive declaration in favour of change. It says that as well as helping international recruitment, autumn admission would allow Japanese students to take a “high-impact” course on university learning, easing their transition from school to higher education. This would lead into a two-semester year followed by a western-style break from June to August. However, Todai adds that employers and wider society will need to buy into the idea. In addition, while Todai is the unquestioned thought leader among Japanese universities, it cannot proceed without support from the rest of the sector.

Here there is good news in the shape of a survey by Mainichi, the leading Japanese newspaper. It suggests that over 40 per cent of national universities and many private ones will consider the switch. Among the major players, only Kyoto (32 in the WUR and second only to Tokyo for prestige) seemed reluctant, along with some specialist teacher training institutions whose year is tied to the school timetable. Keio and Waseda, the big private players in Tokyo, are both positive.

Of course these reforms will not alter two other big problems about studying in Japan: its cost of living and its unique language. More teaching in Japanese universities is already happening in English, and it seems that the government will put more money behind efforts to internationalise Japan’s student population.

Todai statement http://tinyurl.com/757fynq