Universities in sub-Saharan Africa must adapt to serve the growing number of students who no longer see their future in conventional salaried employment, says a report on graduate careers in the region. Research commissioned by the British Council indicates that the region’s institutions are still providing rote learning even as graduates’ focus shifts to entrepreneurship […]
Not everyone rolled out the welcome mat for Peter Mathieson, former dean of the faculty of medicine and dentistry at the University of Bristol, when he was nominated vice chancellor of the University of Hong Kong (HKU) two years ago. Chan Yuen-ying, director of HKU’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre, blogged that “if a medical […]
Although this might be news to third world “including India” politicians, enforcement of law and order is a precondition of quality education delivery.
In downtown Medelln “once a global symbol of drug-related violence in the cocaine trade” stands the bright yellow San Ignacio building. Built in 1803, this first campus of the University of Antioquia survived […]
On the desk of Zeus Rodriguez, the president of St. Anthony School in Milwaukee, a mini Republican primary is under way. A signed photograph of Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin, competes for space with snaps of Rand Paul and Jeb Bush — all three of them presidential hopefuls. St. Anthony’s is popular among conservatives […]
An Israeli business school claims to offer its international students some of “the secrets behind ‘Jewish genius’ and Israeli success” as a pre-eminent “start-up nation”. Lahav Executive Education, which bills itself “the leading developer and provider of executive education in Israel”, is a unit of the Recanati Business School at Tel Aviv University, the country’s […]
Millions of Chinese have dreamt of attending Harvard University. Harvard Girl, a how-to manual published in 2000 by the parents of one successful applicant, was a national bestseller. Georgia Institute of Technology, a prestigious university in Atlanta, has enjoyed less name-recognition. Yet this is fast changing: the number of Chinese applicants to Georgia Tech has […]
Higher education companies in Brazil are lobbying the government to rescind new rules on financial aid they fear will stop students from enrolling for privately provided education.
A federal decree quietly published during the Christmas period tightened the criteria for the Student Financing Fund (FIES), one of the federal government’s two key initiatives to support individuals […]
Going into the offices of the National Co-ordinator of Education Workers (CNTE) in Oaxaca, a city 350 km south-east of Mexico’s capital, is like entering a world of rebellious teenagers rather than teachers. Graffiti is scrawled on the walls and posters denounce “state terrorism”. The trade union’s radio station, Radio Planton (Demonstration Radio), rails against […]
“It’s all to do with their brains and bodies and chemicals,” says Sir Anthony Seldon, the master of Wellington College, a posh English boarding school. “There’s a mentality that it’s not cool for them to perform, that it’s not cool to be smart,” suggests Ivan Yip, principal of the Bronx Leadership Academy in New York. […]
THE INDIANA JONES warehouse. That’s where William Pannapacker claims much of the output of students and staff in the liberal arts ends up — in the figurative obscurity represented by the seemingly infinite, but sealed off, government storeroom where the fictional archaeologist’s discovery — the Ark of the Covenant — is placed at the end […]
IN EAST ASIA, history textbooks are barometers of nationalism, and arguments over them are proxies for disputes between states. So it’s hardly surprising — at a time when territorial disagreements are breaking out all round the South China Sea and East China Sea — that the region is witnessing a new chapter in a long-running […]
IN THE UNITED STATES, suspicions about private, for-profit universities’ high cost and dubious quality abound. Elsewhere in the Americas, though, the story is far more positive.
After equally hectic expansion, Brazil’s for-profit institutions have three-quarters of the country’s higher education market — with fees kept low and quality rising fast. And since a degree boosts wages […]
MORE THAN 2,000 YEARS ago, Huangdi Neijing, a classic Chinese medical text, identified obesity as a disease caused by eating too much “fatty meats and polished grains”. Until a generation ago, such a diet was an extravagance beyond imagination for all but the elite. But the Chinese waistline has since expanded, and at an alarming […]
GERMANY, AUSTRIA AND German-speaking Switzerland have an education tradition that sets them apart from most other countries.
Children tend to get out of school at mid-day instead of late afternoon. Secondary schools are divided into three types. The basic one prepares for technical apprenticeships and vocational training. The middle one teaches skills such as book-keeping. And […]
MANY PARENTS who picked up their children from Park View School, Birmingham on June 9 took home something else too: an official report excoriating the school. Ofsted, England’s schools inspector, had downgraded the largely Muslim institution to “inadequate”, saying it has failed to protect children from extremism.
A few months ago, Birmingham City Council received a […]
According to official sources on May 2, a Chinese kindergarten principal and an education official were dismissed over a child sex abuse scandal in northwestern Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, the latest in a slew of such cases in China.
The principal of a Haojiaqiao township kindergarten in Lingwu City, and the director of security at the […]
OF THE 658 schools in Chicago, only 126 are charter schools — publicly funded but independently run and largely free of union rules. Fifteen more are due to open this year. More notable, though, is that four of the most recently approved charters are in areas where the city recently decided to close 49 public […]
ALMOST ONE IN five of the world’s central bankers has been educated at a UK university, according to a report that stresses the “soft power” that Britain gains from educating the world’s elite. It calls on the government to commission research on how British education affects the UK’s influence globally. It would like to see […]
GOETHE UNIVERSITY Frankfurt, established in 1914 as Frankfurt University, was the creation of a Jewish philanthropist and owed much of its growth to Jewish support and academics. But under the Nazis, a third of its staff and students were forced out. The infamous Nazi scientist Dr. Josef Mengele, known as the ‘Angel of Death’ for […]
THE GOVERNMENT OF CANADA has a message for people in other countries who might consider coming to its universities to study: “It’s not all snow and ice here!” At least, that’s one of the messages Canada is sending out on websites and social media networks and in other types of marketing in a relentless bid […]
ACROSS THE RIVER from the congested metropolis of Manaus, nothing but dense green forest lines the banks of the River Negro in the Brazilian Amazon. Manaus, the capital of the state of Amazonas and host city to England’s opening match against Italy in the forthcoming Fifa World Cup, is an urban oasis surrounded by more […]
A MOTTO OF PEKING University, one of China’s leading academic institutions, is “freedom of thought and an all-embracing attitude”. But in recent months it was not all-embracing enough to allow Xia Yeliang, an outspoken economics professor, to keep his job. Economics was not the subject on which Xia was most forthright. He was a signatory […]
CHINA’S INFAMOUS UNIVERSITY ENTRANCE exam, known as the gaokao has long been subject to criticism. Admissions are based solely on the points scored in one exam, and the need for rote memorisation does little to foster creative minds. Now Beijing has taken its first tentative steps towards reforming the system.
LAST YEAR WAS NOT A VINTAGE YEAR FOR the university of Central Lancashire’s attempts to gain a foothold in overseas markets. In November it emerged that it will lose up to £3.2 million (Rs.32 crore) in the collapse of its planned Thailand campus. The university set up a joint venture company with the president of […]
UNIVERSITY GRADUATES IN NORTHERN Sri Lanka, which is recovering from decades of civil war, are looking at a sparse employment landscape with few opportunities on offer. “Those from the north face a much more difficult time than those from elsewhere in the country. New jobs are very difficult to find,” Rupavathi Keetheswaran, government agent for […]
SCHOOL IN THE TYPHOON-AFFECTED areas of the Republic of Philippines (pop. 97 million) are slowly reopening and thousands of students are resuming classes after the category 5 storm struck the island nation last November. Millions of children have had their education disrupted due to school buildings being severely damaged or used as shelters for survivors […]
YASMIN WAS AT HOME AFTER A DAY AT work at Al-Baath University in Homs, Syria, when she heard that one of her students had been shot and killed. Yasmin’s life had been dominated by Syria’s civil war since unrest began in 2011. Syria’s higher education system is in meltdown. Students and academics have fled the […]
As more people around the world start to study Mandarin, China’s education ministry has revealed that much work still needs to be done teaching the language at home. Last month it announced that 400 million Chinese, nearly a third of the population, are unable to communicate in Mandarin, and that many more cannot speak it […]
At a time when you might have expected to hear the youth of Brazil chanting about the nation’s football team, they called out “vem pra rua” — “come to the street” — an invitation to protest against corruption, police aggression and poor public services. At the peak of the Confederations Cup competition in June, a […]
Just months after Quebec had at last emerged from waves of violent student protests over higher education funding, the prospect of another divisive row looms after the provincial government announced plans that would force secularisation on staff working in higher education. The separatist government of Pauline Marois — whose election as premier last year finally […]
Power among the world’s leading universities has shifted further eastwards, with mainland Europe suffering the worst losses, show the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2013-14.
In general, this year’s tables are marked by their stability: the California Institute of Technology holds on to top spot for the third year in a row; the same institutions make up […]
It sounds as uncontroversial as apple pie. Teach for America (TFA), a not-for-profit organisation founded in 1990, places young ‘corps members’ at schools in poor areas to teach for two years. Recruits work in 35 states, most are fresh out of college, and they learn mainly on the job. Fair enough; but TFA has many […]
Russell group member the University of Exeter (UoE) is to cut the intake of foreign students into its business school following concerns over their academic quality — a move that may be followed by other UK institutions. Fifty-four percent of students in UoE’s business school are from outside the European Union — above the figure […]
As recent headline-grabbing resignations by two federal government ministers attest, the issue of academic plagiarism is a higher-profile matter in Germany, and with bigger political stakes, than almost anywhere else. Both defence minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, who quit his post in 2011, and Annette Schavan, the minister for education and research who departed from chancellor […]
Purges may be what political junkies are talking about, but for Chinese families the big issue is homework. As children across the country returned to their classrooms in September, the education ministry has put forward plans to decrease the amount of pupils’ homework.
The ministry’s proposed guidelines, issued on August 22, ban written homework for every […]
A new report has highlighted the major challenges facing Iraq’s universities as they struggle to forge international partnerships and adopt robust systems of assessment, evaluation and quality assurance. It draws on the results of a three-day conference organised by the New York-based Institute of International Education in collaboration with its Scholar Rescue Fund.
More than ever before, universities are being measured against not only national competitors but also rivals from around the world. There are already a number of well-established global university league tables, which are generally based on research power.
Then there is the Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes project, a scheme run by the Organisation for […]
Youths in northern Nigeria’s Borno state, where many members of the radical Islamist group Boko Haram (BH) have been arrested in recent weeks, are increasingly joining vigilante gangs to pass on the identity of BH members to the military-police Joint Task Force (JTF) following a string of deadly attacks on schools, according to vigilante groups […]
Five pioneering international students who risked life and limb to reach England before going on to become the architects of modern Japan, are being celebrated by a University College London (UCL) event.
The story of the so-called ‘Choshu Five’, a group of Japanese noblemen who studied at UCL 150 years ago, is testimony to the transformative power […]
Both relief and tears greeted the results of France’s school-leaving baccalaureat exam on July 5. With breathtaking efficiency, the entire country’s exam papers were corrected and marked within just two weeks. Founded in 1808 by Napoleon, the bac is an entry ticket to university as well as a yearly national ritual, which opens with a gruelling compulsory four-hour philosophy […]
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
