From access to basic equipment, technology and quiet working spaces to childcare burdens and job cuts, the pandemic has exacerbated existing disparities among individuals, communities, institutions and countries.
Increased attention on inequalities has also sparked hope that systems and structures will change and that academia will become more inclusive. Universities in emerging economies could be among […]
To the delight of campaigners and some parents, Covid-19 has de-popularised school-leaving exams. With support from the Trump administration, all 50 states cancelled accountability testing last March, freeing 51 million public (government) school pupils from the annual rigmarole. The SATS optional essay-writing section and separate subject tests were discontinued this year. The Programme for International […]
Why are American universities pre-eminent in global higher education? Previous explanations have included the country’s massive economy, its enormous budget for scientific research and its history of immigration. But a scholar suggests that the answer could be something more prosaic: the fact that they are governed largely by their alumni.
Australian universities’ new recruits are taking advantage of online education by ‘sampling’ degrees before committing to them, in a trend that complicates planning and pressures universities to deliver good experiences from the outset.
Charles Sturt University’s acting vice chancellor, John Germov, says incoming students are becoming “a bit more savvy” by trying out multiple courses before […]
Russian academics have expressed alarm about sweeping legal amendments that propose government regulation over “educational activities”, fearing that the change could hit international collaboration, stop scholars making public lectures and podcasts and place the humanities under “ideological control”.
The country has grand plans to rebuild its university system after decades of stagnation and to launch five […]
A university has apologised for its handling of an online course that was based on lectures by a professor who had died, in a case which highlights the risk of encroachments on intellectual property, made more likely in the Coronavirus era.
The art history class at Montreal’s Concordia University surprised and distressed second-year […]
The number of international students applying to US universities for the coming academic year has jumped by 11 percent, according to initial estimates, raising hopes of a quick rebound under the Biden administration.
The data from Common App, a non-profit provider of college admission services, bolster a growing sense in academia that President Biden will […]
In exam-obsessed China, educators have long struggled with the problem of overworked schoolchildren. Attempts to do away with some test-oriented teaching often face resistance from parents, who worry their offspring could lose out in the race to get admitted into a good university. Some enlightened officials are taking a new tack. In the south-western province […]
No one is ever truly ready for lockdown. But when the Netherlands closed its schools last December, the Herman Wesselink College, a government high school in a well-off suburb of Amsterdam, was readier than most. About half its students have parents who completed higher education. Nearly all have their own bedroom to study in. The […]
President Erdoğan: twitter qualification partiality
Dozens of Turkish university rectors have no international research record but tweet prolifically in support of the Ankara government, scholars have warned, raising further concerns about academic independence as the country has moved towards autocracy.
In its annual review of academic freedom, Turkey’s Science Academy, a breakaway group formed in […]
China has declared itself the world’s leader in massive open online courses (Moocs), in terms of the number of courses and participants. This announcement has directed academic attention to a type of learning that was pronounced “dead” in 2017 by a vice-president of Udacity, a US educational technology giant.
Professors who chair disciplinary panels at Imperial College, London, have warned that the institution’s handling of bullying cases involving its president and finance chief could hamper their ability to fulfill their roles.
There is mounting anger at this globally respected institution that president Alice Gast and chief financial officer Muir Sanderson were allowed to retain their […]
Face-to-face lectures are unlikely to return to several Australian campuses once Covid-19 has been vanquished, raising questions about whether the pandemic will have a decisive impact globally on the long-running debate about the future of large-group teaching.
Perth’s Curtin University proposes to scrap all lectures by the end of this year, starting with those involving 100 […]
For much of human history and in many places, girls were considered property. Or, at best, subordinate people, required to obey their fathers until the day they had to start obeying their husbands. Few people thought it worthwhile to educate them. Even fewer imagined that a girl could […]
The creators of a holiday resort for US college students studying online during their Covid lockdowns are promising to expand the concept into a fundamental reimagining of the residential campus experience.
The idea by three Princeton University graduates — long-term luxury hotel rentals for students taking remote classes — has already been blocked in multiple US […]
President Joe Biden’s choice of a former schoolteacher with low-income Puerto Rican family roots as US education secretary has been seen as pointing towards a renewed focus on equality in universities.
If confirmed by the US Senate, Miguel Cardona would become the third Latino to serve in the nation’s top education […]
Tianjin University students: anti-bureaucracy revolt
A series of victories for student-led activism against controversial professors suggests that the cult of the supervisor in China is increasingly being challenged. A 123-page report of evidence compiled by Lyu Xiang, a former postgraduate student of Zhang Yuqing at the School of Chemical Engineering and Technology at
Researchers have exposed widespread PhD plagiarism among Russian regional governors, which they say is part of a broader culture of academic corruption in a country where ghostwriters are routinely hired to win the rich and powerful the prestige boost of a doctorate. Checking hundreds of dissertations online against other text revealed that half the governors […]
Pakistani students in Australia: home ministry hurdles
Dozens of Pakistani students have been waiting up to 30 months to learn whether they will be allowed into Oz for doctoral studies as the pandemic exposes Australia’s dismissive treatment of people who fortify its research training community.
Some 50 Pakistani postgrads say they have received scant word […]
Pak Knowledge City: widespread scepticism. Inset: Imran Khan
Experts are sceptical of the merits and feasibility of the Pakistan government’s plan to create a new ‘knowledge city’. Prime minister Imran Khan tweeted that it was his “dream to build Pakistan’s first knowledge city”, after launching the first phase of the project last October. It […]
UK universities have made thousands of staff redundant since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. Data, obtained by educational platform Edvoy using Freedom of Information requests and seen by Times Higher Education, show that over 3,000 staff were made redundant between March 1 and September 20 this year by the 104 universities […]
US research universities have tempered hopes for a Biden administration boost in their budgets and overseas partnerships, seeing security and political complications well beyond Donald Trump’s anti-science and nativist antagonisms.
In part, according to the main grouping of US research universities, this is because President Trump caused far less harm to their operations than he threatened, […]
Minority children in the US: worsening learning gaps
Closed schools are bad for all children, but especially bad for poor and disadvantaged pupils. This basic pattern recurs wherever and whenever researchers look for it — in the wake of a polio epidemic in America in 1916, after teachers’ strikes in Argentina in the 1980s, […]
Students looking for part-time work are often caught between two less-than-ideal options. When they need extra money, they can take on low-skilled part-time work, such as stacking shelves in a supermarket or pulling pints in a bar. If they want professional experience, internships are preferred. But these are often unpaid, excluding all but the wealthy, […]
For children themselves, Covid-19 is not a big threat. They usually have mild symptoms or none at all. Among children with symptoms, only 0.1 percent of those younger than ten and 0.3 percent of those aged between ten and 19 end up in hospital, a study from Britain shows. For school-age children, a Covid-19 infection […]
University leaders Are watching closely after Internet behemoth Google jumped deeper into post-secondary education, offering six-month certificate programmes in technical fields that it promises to treat in its hiring as the equivalent of a four-year university degree.
Google says its new certificates represent an expansion of the skills-based training it already offers through the Coursera platform, […]
For children from bottom-of-pyramid households, China’s infamous gaokao, a punishingly hard university-entrance exam taken by over 10 million students every year, offers the only chance to escape a life toiling on farms and factories. As a result, Chinese education has long involved little more than rote learning, aimed purely at the gaokao. Pupils attend late-night […]
As the US continues to reckon with a string of deaths of black Americans at the hands of law enforcement officers, attention is turning to a new focus: institutions that train police, including universities. Three states have announced reviews to consider how they can improve police education and training, including Minnesota, where the killing of […]
A report sent to the United Nations warns that greater precarity of academic employment poses a threat to academic freedom in India, with scholars on insecure contracts potentially less willing to rock the boat with critical commentary.
Dr. Nandini Sundar, professor of sociology at the University of Delhi in Academic Freedom in India: A Status Report […]
Chinese universities must better integrate overseas students on their campuses and give them the freedom to develop a sense of responsibility if the country is to realise its goal of becoming the largest provider of international education this half-century, says a new study
The paper, which is based on insights from Chinese university staff after they […]
The University of Hamburg has decided to cut ties with its Confucius Institute (more than 500 institutes have been established by communist China around the world to teach Chinese language and culture) over fears that Beijing could use it as “propaganda instrument”, in the latest sign of a more wary stance in Germany towards […]
Universities in the UK have warned that they might not be able to find a place for every eligible student this autumn despite the lifting of caps on numbers to accommodate a major U-turn on A-level grading. Institutions were already facing major uncertainty about their student numbers after last-minute changes to the handling of school […]
The share of US postgraduate students suffering depression has more than doubled during the coronavirus pandemic, according to a major survey of students at nine public research universities. A survey of 30,725 undergraduates and 15,346 postgraduates by the Student Experience in the Research University (SERU) Consortium, based at the University of California, Berkeley, found […]
One of the world’s most influential voices on higher education policy says tuition fees should be cut after coronavirus lockdowns removed the key reason students attend university — to meet top academics, mingle with interesting fellow students and to have a “great experience”.
Andreas Schleicher, director for education and skills at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation […]
Of the 1.5 billion children forced out of school by lockdowns around the globe, 700 million are in developing countries. Like pupils in rich countries, their education is suffering. But the consequences in poor places will be far worse. Before the pandemic, more children were in school than ever before, according to Robert Jenkins, head […]
In his four years as UK’s education secretary, Michael Gove has learned that no subject on the curriculum is as contentious as history. As he acknowledged in a speech in 2013, it can be an “ideological battleground” for “contending armies”. In the past few months, UK’s history wars have spilled onto the streets. Revisionism has […]
China has taken a much more assertive — some would say aggressive — global position in recent months as it defends itself against criticism on a host of issues, from the handling of the initial coronavirus outbreak to scrutiny of its technology companies and research ties. Stuck in the middle are its students, who may […]
Last year Kiana Jones took a summer job at a trampoline park, supervising birthday parties and keeping an eye out for overzealous bouncers. This season Ms Jones, an undergraduate in Tennessee, is spending seven weeks in a community centre drilling children in reading and maths. She is one of around 600 locals swiftly assembled by […]
US university leaders have been accused of “suffering from magical thinking” about their hopes of reopening campuses this autumn, as coronavirus cases surge across the country. Institutions have been forced to dial back plans to resume in-person teaching and to cut tuition fees as the US hits new records of over 50,000 infections per day, […]
The abrupt halt to international travel is more painful for Australian universities than their counterparts in other English-speaking countries, because they lean more heavily on revenue from foreign students. More than 440,000 such students enrolled in Australian institutes of higher education in 2019. At the last count, they took up roughly 30 percent of capacity. […]
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
