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. […]
In some parts of Asia, masked but cautious students and faculty are beginning to fill up classrooms, laboratories and dormitories once more. If the spread of Covid-19 continues to be contained, most universities in mainland China, Hong Kong, Macao and Singapore expect to be open for at least some in-person teaching in the 2020- 21 […]
While publicly dangling possibilities and preparations for campus reopenings, US colleges must keep a serious internal focus on strengthening their remote learning options, advises their chief quality assurance advocate. US colleges seem to be making good progress towards online proficiency, says Judith Eaton, president of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation. “This is an opportunity […]
First-year students are set to be a priority across Europe when campuses tentatively reopen in autumn (September), to avoid an increase in dropout rates — but low reliance on tuition fees means there is less pressure to restart in-person teaching for some continental institutions.
There is a patchwork of different approaches across the continent. German universities […]
Of all the regions covered by the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, Asia has arguably advanced the most in terms of higher education in recent years. Three Asian universities now feature among the Top 25 of the global league table — remarkable progress given that four years ago, in 2016, there […]
A survey has revealed that the French public has lost confidence in scientists during the coronavirus pandemic, largely because of a policy U-turn over face masks and the antics of a “populist” microbiologist who has vocally championed hydroxychloroquine, the treatment touted by US President Donald Trump. Since the crisis began, trust in […]
“Graduation equals unemployment has long been a common saying in China (the nouns share a character). It is often used in jest by university students as final exams loom. But for the 9 million or so who graduated in May — a record high — the words convey a dark reality. As China limps back […]
Hong Kong’s two medical schools, which have been important critical voices in global public health policy, have received significant government support for 26 studies related to Covid-19. The Health and Medical Research Fund-approved HK$111 million (Rs.108 crore) for the University of Hong Kong Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine (HKU Med) and the Chinese University […]
A wide variation in different countries’ success in tackling Covid-19 could lead to major winners and losers in the coming battle to recruit international students, it has been predicted. Perceptions that some nations have struggled to contain the outbreak could be the difference between university sectors losing millions or billions of dollars, according to calculations […]
Job security is emerging as the key battleground as Australian universities strive to offset the billions of dollars the Covid-19 crisis is costing them. Universities are scrapping construction and refurbishment plans, and deferring discretionary spending. Institutions are also courting banks, those with contingency funds are raiding them and every institution is eyeing its cash reserves.
Lucian Stiopu watches his son cycle round Central Park in Peterborough. Before the government imposed a lockdown, he says, the boy would spend about nine hours a day at primary school, allowing him to go to work in a prison. And now? Stiopu’s son reports that his teachers are setting a bit of work online. […]
The voices of epidemiologists and public health experts have inevitably dominated initial responses to the coronavirus crisis. This has meant that other disciplines have been sidelined and risk being shut out altogether from the thinking processes informing decisions about how to move forward.
So what can those in the social sciences bring to the table, both […]
US college students are stepping up demands for partial tuition refunds for the spring semester, with a growing number pursuing legal action against institutions they accuse of overstating virus-related financial losses. The students have filed lawsuits against more than a dozen universities, in some cases citing the institutions’ own data showing they had been charging […]
The death of Anucha Thasako was supposed to change everything. After several sharp blows to the head during a Thai boxing bout in 2018, the scrawny 13-year-old fell to the floor, unconscious. The referee rushed to his side, to no avail. There was no doctor in attendance. Anucha died soon afterwards from brain haemorrhage. He […]
One of Russia’s leading universities has banned its academics and students from identifying their institutional position when making public political statements. This ban is being interpreted as a further erosion of academic freedom in the country.
Critics claim that Moscow’s Higher School of Economics (HSE), known for its relatively liberal leanings, has clamped down on dissent […]
A leading German university has been plunged into scandal after it emerged that it had signed a contract binding it to abide by Chinese law while accepting hundreds of thousands of euros from China to set up a professorship to establish a Chinese teacher training programme.
German lawmakers have criticised the Free University of Berlin (FU) […]
Like any hotbed of scholarly activity, the University of California (UC) is no stranger to rows. Recently a debate over the use of SATS and ACTS, tests used in college admissions, has spilled out from campus into the courtroom. In December, a lawsuit denouncing UC’s use of the tests was filed in the Alameda County […]
It is a scary time to be ill in Wuhan. The city has one-third of all confirmed infections by the coronavirus and three-quarters of the deaths caused by it. People there are barred from travelling elsewhere (similar rules apply across Hubei, a Syria-sized province of which Wuhan is the capital). Since late January, military medics […]
Boris Johnson’s proposal to reintroduce post-study work visas in the UK could have the unintended consequence of forcing Australian universities to shorten their Masters degree programmes. A key selling point of UK universities is the opportunity to complete a Masters degree in a year, rather than two years, as is standard in most other parts […]
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
