Facing their toughest-ever nationwide tests of academic freedom, some US institutions are slowly trying to move past questions of intrusive donors and violent protests by teaching more directly about tolerance.
While many of the nation’s campuses remain convulsed by demonstrations, threats, and arrests relating to the Israel-Hamas conflict, several of them — including Harvard University, […]
The first international student from China, enrolled at the University of Sydney a century ago. Now its sandstone buildings hum with foreign languages: almost half the university’s students are from overseas. “For Asian kids, we value the rankings a lot,” says one of its Chinese students, who asks […]
Cambridge University is facing new legal and internal challenges to its policy of forcing academics to retire at the age of 67. Around 120 current and former professors at the institution have signed a letter to the recently installed vice chancellor, Deborah Prentice, urging her to call a vote on abolishing the Employer Justified Retirement […]
President Javier Milei: education and research slashing targets
In the wake of his shock election victory in December, a video of new Argentinian president Javier Milei tearing the names of government departments off a whiteboard went viral on TikTok.
It shows the right-winger — sporting a distinctive pair of huge sideburns — shouting “afuera” (get […]
Budget woes and internal divisions could prove fatal for a pan-Asian university backed by regional governments, scholars say. Based in New Delhi, the South Asian University (SAU) is supported by an intergovernmental partnership, the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), with eight member nations — including India, Pakistan and Nepal — […]
One of the best adventures I have had in many years is my first trip to India. I have long followed the affairs of India and regarded it as important to the world. I saw wonders there. I will describe some of them in my despatches in future.
The escalating diplomatic row between Ottawa and New Delhi has the potential to deter thousands of Indian undergraduates from studying in Canada, academics have warned.
After Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau suggested that India might have been behind the assassination of a Sikh leader and Canadian national in British […]
Universities across China are raising their tuition fees as the academic year begins, in a move that some academics believe could signal a shift to a Western-style market system.
After roughly a decade of stagnant fees, this year dozens of institutions have announced hikes — at some, charges have gone up by more than 50 percent […]
The Biden administration is signalling its willingness to accept degree programmes with fewer than 120 credits, potentially triggering a rush of consolidations that could further weaken struggling campuses.
The idea hit a milestone this summer with one of the six major US accrediting agencies, the Northwest Commission on Colleges and […]
Textbooks often cause controversy. Parents object to what they teach children about sex. History can be ideologically charged. Maps sometimes provoke anger in neighbouring countries. But rarely have textbooks caused such an uproar as in Mexico, when the government issued new books for the start of the school year on […]
For more than 50 years, admissions officers at some of America’s swankiest universities have given a leg up to black, Hispanic and Native American students whose achievements in secondary school might not, on their own, have won them a place. On June 29, the Supreme Court declared this […]
After 13 years of Conservative government, the country’s public services are in less than fine fettle. There is an exception. Under the Conservatives, England’s schools have improved. England is now the best in the West when it comes to reading at primary-school age, according to one ranking. When it comes to maths, English students of […]
Scholars have expressed hope that Nigeria’s introduction of tuition fees and student loans will end the underfunding of its universities. One of the first acts in office of new president Bola Tinubu in June was to sign into law a student loan bill, seven years after it was first introduced to the country’s parliament.
A for-profit billed as Germany’s largest university, majority owned by a private equity firm, has bought a London banking education provider with UK degree-awarding powers as well as a Canadian university, as it expands an online model that features an AI “teaching and learning assistant”.
The sale of the London Institute of Banking and Finance (LIBF) […]
Vietnamese children: “one of the world’s best schooling systems”
Ho Chi Minh, the founding-father of Vietnam, was clear about the route to development. “For the sake of ten years’ benefit, we must plant trees. For the sake of a hundred years’ benefit, we must cultivate the people,” was a statement he liked to repeat. […]
Norwegian universities have a busy summer ahead as politicians argue over the finer details of international student fees, which will be charged to those from outside the European Economic Area (EEA) from this month.
Overall support for the plans from the Norwegian parliament’s education committee on June 6 confirms the late summer deadline, despite warnings from […]
Hong Kong’s government has begun consulting universities about lifting its cap on international students, potentially bringing thousands more to the island in coming years, according to senior university officials. Legislators are looking to relax the official 20 percent limit on “non-local” undergraduate students — roughly half of whom come […]
The looming closure of dozens of insolvent universities in South Korea will change the distribution of students across the country, potentially furthering inequalities between its regions and capital city, say scholars. Korea’s rapid demographic decline has already resulted in university closures countrywide — and it is expected to get […]
The moment when his chemistry master pulled out a pistol, declared it loaded and waved it in the air was “probably”, says Justin Webb, a broadcaster, the worst point of his boarding-school career. Winston Churchill would recall the floggings, done until pupils “bled freely” and screamed loudly. George Orwell […]
In a first, Taiwan’s ministry of education has approved a so-called merger between a public and private institution — a policy initiative that scholars say could be a useful model for other universities also on the brink of closure.
In late May, the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology (NTUST), a public institution, got the […]
Teheran’s past policies of allowing Iran’s higher education sector to “blindly develop” to absorb students facing a tough jobs market have exacerbated current high rates of graduate unemployment. According to figures recently released by the Statistical Center of Iran, roughly one million university graduates in the country are […]
Simulated model of Berkeley’s new data science college
The University of California at Berkeley is starting a new college of computer and data science, in what it expects might become a nationwide model for coping with the field’s surging and often unmet demand. UC Berkeley, like many US campuses, has been overpowered by the […]
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 […]
“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, […]
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 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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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) […]
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.
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 […]
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 […]
Prayoga Institute of Education Research, an established DSIR institution in Bengaluru, and The Sports School, India's pioneering integrated sports institution that integrates academics with professional .....Read More
In the run-up to the assembly elections in Delhi, AAP supremo Arvind Kejriwal on Saturday announced an Ambedkar scholarship for free foreign education of the .....Read More
