International News

United Kingdom: Post-study work visa debate

UK government departments have been asked to set out their position on student visa reforms. The Home Office is pressing for restrictions, with opposition to post-study work limitations said to be coming from an array of departments including the Treasury.

The Times reports that Indian origin Suella Braverman, the home secretary, has proposed reducing the time […]

Nigeria: NewGlobe pedagogy revolution

“Good job you!” shouts Pauline Bika, as a group of schoolchildren completes the hokey-cokey. “Good job me!” choruses her class. Bika runs a small government primary school in Edo state, in southern Nigeria. It is reached by a mud track that starts not far outside Benin city, the state capital. Her school has 140 pupils, […]

Afghanistan: Varsities downing shutters

The majority of Afghanistan’s private universities face imminent closure, with their incomes having plunged following the Taliban’s decision to ban women from higher education. The country’s union of private universities said in December that the ban could force 35 out of 140 institutions with 70,000 female students on their rolls, to shutter doors. But academics […]

China: Online degree bans fallout

China has abruptly withdrawn its Covid-era endorsement of remotely delivered tertiary education. This order is likely to galvanise international enrolments in Western countries while straining university admissions services, visa processing and flight and housing availability.

Beijing authorities have reversed a 2020 rule change that allowed for the local accreditation of degrees and higher education diplomas taught […]

United States: Guns on campus controversy

American public universities are fighting new attempts to allow guns on campuses, with conservative state lawmakers undeterred by research data and clear opposition from institutional leaders.

The most recent instance involves West Virginia, where the state senate voted 29-4 in favour of legislation to let people bring firearms on to college and university campuses, despite opposition […]

North America: edX sale fallout

Last year’s sale of the non-profit online course platform edX has left both parties short on value, with buyer 2U still hunting for paying customers, and vendors Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) still mulling how the proceeds will boost remote teaching.

Scientists at the two universities created edX in 2012 as a […]

Lebanon:American University of Beirut bouncing back

Lebanon: AUB bouncing back

When an enormous explosion rocked central Beirut in August 2020, it wasn’t just the estate of Lebanon’s oldest university that was badly damaged. The blast — which was caused by vast amounts of ammonium nitrate dangerously stored in Beirut’s port and killed 215 people — was also a huge blow to staff morale and the […]

United Kingdom: Study visa restriction danger

London-based universities and post-92 institutions would be hit hardest if a crackdown on UK international student visas goes ahead. UK is more reliant on international student revenue now than it was the last time there were serious threats to overseas recruitment, during the prime ministership of Theresa May (2016-19). In 2020-21, tuition fees from non-European […]

Ukraine: Evocative daily grind reports

When the president of the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE) began posting photos of his daily life to social media in November, it was a gut reaction. A day earlier, Russian air strikes had hit Ukraine’s power grid, plunging the city into darkness. “I didn’t have a plan — I realised we had no heating […]

Australia & New Zealand: Student housing crisis

Boosting housing stocks could be Australian governments’ “biggest” contribution to alleviating ‘student poverty,’ a widely reported phenomenon Down Under. Eileen Baldry, deputy vice chancellor of UNSW Sydney, says that if government quarantines social housing for students, it would help them weather an accommodation squeeze and cost-of-living crisis.

Students could face weekly rents of A$200 (Rs.11,400) instead […]

China: Internal brain drain

The Chinese government has ordered universities in the east of the country not to use talent funding to poach academics from the nation’s mid-west and north east, which is causing an internal brain drain. The ministries of education and finance sought to offer some encouragement to university autonomy in funding management in a notice, but […]

United States: Harvard’s first black woman president

In making one of the biggest professional and symbolic breakthroughs in all of US higher education — becoming the first black female president of Harvard University — Claudine Gay is getting some predictable help on identifying what comes next.

Dr. (Prof.) Gay, to be clear, brings top academic credentials to the job. She earned an undergraduate […]

Brazil: Academia favours Lula

BRAZILIAN ACADEMICS HOPE THAT THE country’s upcoming final round of the presidential election on October 30 will bring an end to President Jair Bolsonaro’s “war on science”. But most admit that, even if the populist leader loses, his influence will be slow to fade.

All polls ahead of the first round of voting on October 2 […]

China CPC: Control schools

COMMUNIST PARTY OF CHINA (CPC) congresses are rubber-stamp affairs. The 2,300 delegates of the 20th Congress that recently concluded in Beijing, had no chance of scuppering the decisions — already made in secret — that were unveiled at the event. Most of them had undergone training in a vast system of schools that the party […]

South Pacific: Showpiece varsity’s dire straits

BITTER LEADERSHIP ROW AT THE WORLD’S most pan-national university has cost it almost half year’s revenue, in an escalation of the economically and politically fuelled funding insecurity that bedevils the institution. Staff at the University of the South Pacific (USP) say that the institution’s biggest contributor, the Fijian government, has withheld F$78 million (Rs.275 crore) […]

Middle East: Arabic decline anguish

IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN A PARTY FOR WESTERNERS. Young men snogged in the corridor. Girls downed tumblers of wine. The real shock, though, was the hubbub of voices. Though this was a gathering of young Emiratis, almost everyone was chatting in English, nowadays the dominant tongue of Gulf countries.

On paper, Arabic is one of the […]

The world university rankings: China science superpower

CHINESE UNIVERSITIES ARE CLOSING IN ON US global dominance of higher education, but internationalisation has proved to be a weak link for the Asian superpower, according to the latest edition of the Times Higher Education’s World University Rankings. The biggest global ranking to date reveals that the research supremacy of American universities is waning, in […]

Russia: Draft Damocles sword

FEARS OF A BROADER DRAFT COULD BE USED to suppress opposition to the Ukraine war and further limit free speech on Russian campuses, giving universities a “powerful tool” to silence potential dissenters. To date, the Kremlin has said it is drafting only reservists to fight in Ukraine, with the presidential decree explicitly exempting students at […]

Saudi Arabia: MBS’ showpiece varsity

A new university at the heart of Saudi Arabia’s planned megacity on the banks of the Red Sea could soon emerge as the country’s premier scientific institution with the backing of its powerful crown prince.

Billed as the sustainable city of the future and covering an area the size of Belgium, the $500 billion (Rs.39 lakh […]

Russia: Re-Sovietisation directive

A new requirement for Russian institutions to appoint rectors for students’ moral development is being interpreted as another sign of a country reverting to Soviet-style thought control.

Coined during the USSR era, the position of pro rector in charge of vospitatel’naya rabota — which roughly translates as ‘character-building’ — was once common in universities. Such individuals […]

Global: Learning outcomes neglect

If history is “a race between education and catastrophe”, as H.G. Wells once put it, education seemed until recently to be winning. In 1950, only about half of adults globally had any schooling; now at least 85 percent do. Between 2000 and 2018, the proportion of school-age children not enrolled in classes fell from 26 […]

Chile: Key reform on knife edge

A vote on whether Chile will accept a radical new constitution that enshrines bold commitments to higher education reform is on knife-edge as a crucial general election approaches. Public universities become free-of-charge as part of the wide-ranging changes to the system, which currently boasts some of the highest tuition fees in South America.

A draft of […]

China: Foreign students returning slowly

Recent weeks have brought signs that China could be — slowly — starting to let in overseas students shut out of the country for over two years.

On June 20, Li Jiming, China’s ambassador to Bangladesh, announced that China is planning to allow international students to return, stating that Bangladeshis would be “first in line”. That […]

United States: Affirmative action ban fear

The recently reconstituted US Supreme Court is widely expected to rule against affirmative action in university admissions in the wake of its decision to end half a century of legalised abortion nationwide. In January, the nation’s top court announced that it would review affirmative admission cases involving Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, […]

Afghanistan: Swelling academic anger

An Afghan lecturer and human rights activist has described being beaten daily by Taliban prison guards, amid mounting warnings about the prospects for academia in the country. Scholars teaching contentious subjects have expressed concern that they will be targeted since US forces’ hurried retreat in August 2021, but although fears of imprisonment and beatings are […]

India: Caste discrimination abroad

Even as caste discrimination continues to plague Indian higher education, debate about the best way to tackle the issue in universities abroad — and even over its very existence — continues to polarise academia.

India’s caste system traditionally grouped people by four major castes based on their ancestry, with the lowest class, Dalits — formerly known […]

Philippines: History revisionism fears

Filipino academics have called for the protection of historical rigour as they steel themselves for Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr’s assumption of the country’s presidency later this month. The electoral victory of Ferdinand Marcos’ son represents a dramatic turnaround for the family after its return from exile in the 1990s. The rule of Ferdinand Marcos between […]

Asia: Myopia epidemic

Education is not always an unalloyed good. Over the past few decades, East Asia has seen a stunning rise in the incidence of myopia, aka short-sightedness. And a growing pile of evidence suggests that the main underlying reason for this is education — specifically, the fact that children spend large parts of the day in […]

Australia: Nepalese inflow boom

Nepal’s emergence as Australia’s biggest source of offshore students has fanned fears that the visa programme has been subverted into an “unsponsored work permits” scheme.

Immigration expert Abul Rizvi says ballooning numbers of successful student visa applications from the Himalayan nation suggest that lax rules may be luring migrant workers Down Under on study pretexts.

This could […]

United Kingdom: Rising tuition fees

Several UK universities are raising their headline postgraduate fees by 10 percent or more next year, suggests an analysis of the latest course data for 2022-23. By benchmarking data on individual courses collected from institutional websites, The Knowledge Partnership (TKP) suggests that ten institutions will raise tuition fees by 10, with many more increasing fees […]

Ukraine: Rebuilding shattered varsities

As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine nears its fourth month, much of the focus remains on fighting and survival. When can we talk about the reconstruction of Ukrainian higher education? “Now, I think, because we have to understand that reconstruction will be taking place in stages,” says Inna Sovsun, professor at the Kyiv School of Economics […]

India: Internationalisation roadblock

Under India’s ambitious overhaul of higher education, the country aims to internationalise universities, taking advantage of strong domestic offerings. But its elite institutions continue to struggle to attract overseas students to their Indian campuses. At the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) — arguably the country’s most prestigious universities and its best known higher education brand […]

Canada: Brexit benefit

A rise in the number of international students from Europe going to Canada seems to be the “product” of Brexit, according to an analysis of latest trends in immigration data. Figures from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada on the number of study permit holders in 2021 from various countries show there is an increase of […]

South Korea: Reform resistance

South Korea’s incoming education minister may struggle to make the sweeping reforms necessary to address critical problems in the country’s higher education sector.

Kim In-Chul, who is likely to assume the post after president-elect Yoon Suk-yeol takes office in June, served two consecutive terms as president of Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, where he was a […]

Afghanistan: Grim future

Academics in Afghanistan fear that the past semester could be their last before the Taliban closes universities ahead of major reforms.

The country’s fundamentalist regime, which took over nine months ago, has already put its stamp on higher education. It has forced out female faculty members and segregated students by gender, establishing […]

China: Oz graduates travails

Oz Chinese graduates

Chinese graduates of Australian universities are ill-suited to their country’s workforce needs, often applying at the wrong time, in the wrong way and with wrong credentials for the most promising job openings. Research by Beijing-based recruitment platform Lockin has identified a “mismatch” between the career aspirations of Chinese returnees from Australian […]

Global: Cheating epidemic

Incidents of cheating in online examinations have hit a record high, according to proctoring data that shows that one in 14 students was caught breaking the rules last year. Analysis of data on 3 million tests globally that used the ProctorU invigilation platform found that “confirmed breaches” of test regulations — incidents where there is […]

Russia: Student protests crackdown

Russian institutions are leading the charge in cracking down on student opposition to the Kremlin’s war on Ukraine, with hundreds of students estimated to have been expelled already. With Russian academia increasingly cut off from the outside world, student dissidents are finding themselves targeted by the very institutions tasked with […]

France: Campus ideological wars

Sabine Saurugger (left) & Klaus Kinzler: Islamophobia row

A university leader has called for “calm and rationality” as French academics fear being caught in the crossfire of increasingly bitter culture wars in the run-up to the country’s presidential election.

Sabine Saurugger, director of Sciences Po Grenoble, hit the headlines in January after suspending Klaus Kinzler, […]

China: New model private varsities

Nanjing Integrated Circuit University

China’s new crop of privately backed, industry-focused universities could help meet skills gaps and jump-start innovation. At the end of 2021, Chinese businessman Cao Dewang came one step closer to establishing his institution when he signed an agreement with the city government of Fuzhou to build a university for developing […]