The trial of a university dean has raised concerns about the future of higher education in Tunisia and the longer-term plans of the dominant Ennahda (Renaissance) Party.
It was in Tunisia that street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set fire to himself on December 17, 2010 in protest against ill treatment by local police, thereby sparking the regionwide […]
Until recently Grace Wambui, a 14-year-old pupil in Nairobi, had never touched a tablet computer. But it took her about “one minute”, she says, to work out how to use one when such devices arrived at her school, a tin shack in Kawangware, a slum in the Kenyan capital.
The stone is worn and chipped, but you can still make out the motto inscribed above the 111-year-old McKean Gate that leads to Harvard Yard: “Veritas”, it says. Truth. It’s ironic, then, that in August the US’ oldest and most prestigious university was embarrassed by allegations of a cheating scandal involving a reported 125 students.
Not so long ago business management students flocked to Europe. Compared with their American counterparts, European schools were cheaper and their student bodies more diverse, both attractive features — and the salaries of European MBA graduates were often higher. Some of these attractions remain undimmed. But they are no longer enough to bring in the […]
Asian universities, especially in the republic of Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and China, performed particularly well in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2012, published on October 3, rising by an average of almost 12 places. The US continues to dominate the rankings. Its universities claimed 76 places in the top 200.
It may seem odd that Timbuktu, the malian city on the south-west fringe of the Sahara desert, is twinned with Hay-on-Wye, a placid little town on the Welsh side of the border with England. The reason for this partnership is books. Hay is famous for its bookshops and an annual literary festival. Timbuktu has a […]
Universities in Brazil have long been for the privileged few. Only 11 percent of the working-age population has a degree — and such scarcity has brought rich rewards. Graduates earn on average, 2.5 times as much as those without degrees, and five times as much as the majority who don’t finish secondary school. Until recently, […]
Dr. Anant Agarwal looks out the window of his new office on the seventh floor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Stata Center for Computer, Information, and Intelligence Sciences and muses aloud — and without evident irony — about the future of online education. “We’re going to change the world,” says Agarwal, who is heading […]
How Chinese is Hong Kong? Two recent issues have highlighted the territory’s contradictory attitudes toward the mainland. On August 22, seven Hong Kongers belonging to the Action Committee for Defending the Diaoyu Islands returned to a heroes’ welcome. They had sailed their fishing boat to those barren rocks (known as the Senkakus by the Japanese, […]
London Metropolitan University (LMU) which had to expel 2,600 including 350 Indian students because of visa irregularities in July could be taken over by a private buyer if the loss of its visa licence leads to insolvency. The institution is mounting a legal challenge to the UK Border Agency’s decision to revoke its highly trusted […]
The Buddhist monk, staring intently at the smoke rising from an incense stick, says the government is destroying state-provided education because it’s “easier to control uneducated fools”. Maduluwawe Sobitha is an influential figure among Sri Lanka’s majority Sinhala population. He is also a loud critic of the government of President Mahinda Rajapaksa. The monk’s new […]
Chile’s only university owned by the global arm of US for-profit education giant Apollo Group has had its accreditation withdrawn.
On July 18, following an unsuccessful appeal, Chile’s National Education Council confirmed a decision of the National Accreditation Commission to stop accrediting the University for Arts, Sciences and Communication (UNIACC). Consequently the university’s students will be […]
“Everyone’s pencil should be on the apple in the tally-mark chart!” shouts a teacher to her class of pupils at Harvest Preparatory School in Minneapolis. Papers and feet are shuffled; a test is coming. Each class is examined once every six or seven weeks. The teachers are monitored too. As a result, Harvest Prep outperformed […]
The University of Cambridge has secured the top spot ahead of Oxford University in Times Higher Education’s fifth annual ‘Table of Tables’. Based on the combined results of the UK’s university league tables, Cambridge retained its number one status after ousting its varsity rival from pole position for the first time last year.
Almost 7 million students are graduating from Chinese universities this summer, and there is plenty of pressure to turn newly minted qualifications into well-paid jobs. The competition is increased by the ease with which almost anyone in China can buy a fake degree.
On July 3, a former ministry of education official charged with swindling students […]
Is it possible to turn $10 billion of oil money into one of the top 10 science and technology universities in the world — in Saudi Arabia — and in just 11 years?
The answer is now “hopefully” rather than “definitely”, according to the president of the Gulf state’s flagship institution, the King Abdullah University of […]
Strict Sharia, or Islamic religious laws, imposed by Islamist rebels controlling vast swathes of northern Mali are driving thousands of students out of schools. Dress codes have been imposed, boys and girls are forced to learn separately, and subjects deemed to promote “infidelity” have been struck off the curriculum.
Outraged parents are transferring their children and […]
Since the new government of prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra took office last July, Thailand has been treated to a soap opera about the supply of tablet computers to all children starting school. Yingluck’s “one tablet per child” pledge during the campaign was probably her single most vote-catching policy, yet fulfilling it has turned into a […]
The great and good of Hollywood crowded into a white tent off Los Angeles’ Sunset Boulevard on March 8 as paparazzi snapped photos and well-dressed speakers braced themselves to take the stage. But they hadn’t gathered to witness honours, accolades or gold-plated statuettes being bestowed. The object of their interest was, in fact, a hole […]
The Republic of Korea’s Pohang University of Science and Technology has topped the first Times Higher Education ranking of 100 best universities under the age of 50, leading a strong showing for East Asian universities.
The THE 100 Under-50 aims to show which nations are challenging the US and UK as higher education powerhouses — and […]
Applications from overseas students have risen by up to 26 percent at some major UK universities despite the government’s tougher visa regime — but the number of Indian postgraduate submissions has fallen dramatically in several institutions.
Times Higher Education surveyed universities in the Russell Group and Million+ on their applications from non-European Union students for 2012-13. […]
Quebec’s governing liberal party has lost its minister of education after more than three months of strikes by as many as 200,000 university and junior college students against a proposed 75 percent increase in tuition fees, while protesters have been arrested and tear-gassed.
The resignation of Line Beauchamp caught the province’s leadership off guard. “I am […]
It is, says Gabriel Demombynes, of the World Bank’s Nairobi office, “a tremendous success story that has only barely been recognised”. Michael Clemens of the Centre for Global Development calls it simply “the biggest, best story in development”. It is the huge decline in child mortality now gathering pace across Africa.
No sooner had the celebrations following the Republic of South Sudan’s independence from its northern neighbour in July last year died down than the country’s fledgling government found itself facing serious challenges, a number of them education related.
The conflict between north and south has been ongoing since the 1950s. When the south finally achieved its […]
If you can’t beat them, join ’em. that’s the attitude being adopted by a growing number of traditional US universities towards their private-sector rivals, as they start to branch out from their main product of graduate and undergraduate degrees into the lucrative field of professional certification which is increasingly being demanded by business and industry.
Min Weifang, one of the 371 most powerful politicians in the country and former chair of council at Peking University, has called for greater academic freedom in some of the nation’s universities.
Earlier, in March, premier Wen Jiabao announced that this year China will finally meet its long-held aspiration to devote 4 percent of its gross domestic product […]
The head of a front-rank Australian university has vowed to turn the tide of institutional “corporatisation” which he believes has demoralised staff and undermined leadership. The vice chancellor of Murdoch University in Western Australia says he wants academics to be more involved in decision-making — as the institution prepares for substantial cuts to its portfolio of courses.
Opposite Tokyo’s elegant imperial gardens, hundreds of people waited in line to glimpse a British cultural icon. It wasn’t a film star, a Premier League footballer or even prime minister David Cameron, whose visit to Japan recently went largely unnoticed. The fans outside the British Embassy were assembled to see someone held in awe by all generations […]
So far this year 14 schools have been burnt down in Maiduguri, the capital of Borno State, northern Nigeria, forcing over 7,000 children out of formal education and pushing down enrolment rates in an already ill-educated region. In a video posted on YouTube in February, Boko Haram, a Islamic jihadist group based in Nigeria, called upon its […]
In the past year students protesting over the cost of university education in business-friendly Chile have captured the world’s attention. In recent months, their counterparts in statist Quebec have taken up the cause. Since February, about a third of the province’s 450,000 university students have boycotted classes to oppose the tuition-fee increases planned by Jean Charest, the […]
Higher education has become the latest battlefield in the polarising campaign among Republicans vying to challenge Barack Obama after one candidate branded the president “a snob” for suggesting that more Americans should go to university.
“There are good, decent men and women who go out and work hard every day and put their skills to the […]
The Chinese government’s budget for basic research is set to increase by more than 25 percent this year, according to Science magazine’s Science Insider website. A draft budget published last week pledges more than 32 billion yuan (Rs.25,600 crore) for basic research in 2012. This represents a 26 percent increase on last year’s budget.
Two UK institutions have dropped out of Times Higher Education’s academic prestige Top 100 in the face of increased competition from Asia and mainland Europe. Harvard University tops the Times Higher Education World Reputation Rankings, published on March 15, followed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Cambridge — an unchanged top […]
In the run-up to the french presidential elections, the Socialist Party is insisting it will not backtrack on the current government’s controversial overhaul of higher education. Instead the party promises more funds for academia as investment in “economic development”.
But despite widespread belief that substantially increased tuition fees are on the agenda for the next government […]
In November, 600,000 Colombian students walked out of lectures in protest at what they saw as the increasing privatisation of higher education in the country. Their action prompted the government to back down from plans to reform Law 30, enacted in 1992, which among other things accords higher education in the country the status of […]
Giving a child a computer does not seem to turn him or her into a future Bill Gates — indeed it does not accomplish anything in particular. That is the conclusion from Peru (pop.29 million), epicentre of the largest single programme involving One Laptop per Child, an American charity with backers from the computer industry […]
A member of the Afghan parliament is attempting to level the playing field to ensure that female students from the country’s more remote and unstable provinces have the same access to higher education as their urban-educated peers.
Mujeeb u-Rehman Chamkani, an MP for Paktia, a remote, mountainous and unsettled province in southeast Afghanistan, is pressuring the […]
A proposal to sanction the use of indigenous languages in primary schools in polyglot Timor-Leste (East Timor) has divided members of government, civil society and educators, raising questions about how language can spur harmony — or discord — in the young nation. The ‘mother-tongue’ programme is spearheaded by the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural […]
Protesters clashed with police in London on December 9 after the Tory-LibDem coalition won a vote to increase tuition fees for university students in England to up to £9,000 (Rs.6.37 lakh) per year. The proposal faced bitter criticism not only from Labour MPs but from LibDem and Tory backbenchers, but the motion was carried by […]
School-leaving examination stress and the scramble to make it into the countrys much-too-few excellent colleges is not a peculiarly Indian phenomenon. For millions of Chinese teenagers awaiting the outcome of their final high school exams, known as the gaokao (literally high-test) for university entrance, written in June, papers are as tough and stakes as high. […]
Scindia Kanya Vidyalaya (SKV) has been honoured with the prestigious Madhya Pradesh Annual Environmental Award 2025. The award was conferred by chief minister Dr. Mohan .....Read More
At least 19 people have been killed and more than 100 injured after a Bangladesh Air Force F-7 BGI training aircraft crashed into Milestone College .....Read More
