“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. […]
Over the past few years, a growing number of America’s parentless children have found homes. In 2008 there were 463,000 children in foster care, a system where the government places orphans and children with parents who are abusive or unable to take care of them, in the care of guardians. That is 11 percent down […]
There is a joke at Harvard University that the only things older than the fossils in its Museum of Natural History are the scholars in its classrooms. Tenured faculty are not required to retire, and at least 180 Harvard professors — including nearly 20 percent of those who teach undergraduates — are over 65.
A new report by the UN Childrens Fund (Unicef) says most children in Bangladesh are subject to physical abuse at school, at home or where they work. The study entitled Opinions of Children of Bangladesh on Corporal Punishment covered nearly 4,000 families and was published on October 8.In all regards, the children of Bangladesh are […]
Since the Labour Party came to power in 1997 proclaiming education its priority, one grand policy after another has foundered. Schools were told to run themselves — but forbidden to do the things that matter most, such as paying good teachers more. Parents were encouraged to choose schools — but with too few attractive ones […]
When European education ministers met in Bologna in 1999 and promised to forge a common market for universities within a decade, it seemed mere Euro-rhetoric. Big obstacles stopped students nipping abroad for a term, or getting degrees recognised. Many countries offered no degree below Masters level. Some examined course modules separately, others all in one […]
“They (Taliban) are savages and we’re like a helpless herd, with no one to protect us,” says Sikander Ali, father of four girls, speaking to IRIN (Integrated Regional Information Networks) over the phone from Pakistan’s Swat valley. Ali was reacting to news that militants had ordered a ban on girls’ education from January 15. Swat […]
France may think of itself as a literary society, but real prestige is reserved for mathematics. Excellence in maths determines access to the elite, via ultra-selective grandes ecoles such as the Ecole Nationale d’Administration or the Polytechnique.
More French mathematicians have won the Fields Medal, a top international prize, than from any other European country. Top maths […]
Rachad arrived from morocco two years ago. He supports Milan (“of course”) and wants to be an electrician, like his father. Manpreet is a Punjabi Sikh, who followed her lorry-driver father here five years ago. Her ambition is rather different — she wants to become president of India. Adama, from Senegal, is the shyest. At […]
Russian universities will keep their own system of entrance exams when the country introduces its long-delayed unified state exam, a nationwide scheme similar to A levels. Years of lobbying by rectors of top universities to halt a common school-leaving / university entrance exam seems to have paid off after the education ministry announced a […]
Indian Institute of Technology Madras’ (IIT Madras) Centre of Excellence for Road Safety (CoERS) has launched a landmark ‘Data Driven Hyperlocal Intervention’ (DDHI) programme to .....Read More
At least five people, including three children, were killed and several others injured in a suicide attack on a school bus in Pakistan’s restive Balochistan .....Read More
