EducationWorld February 2022

Nearly half of South Korea’s universities could close in the next quarter-century as the country’s population continues to shrink, with regional institutions especially hard hit, a respected academic warns. Dong-Kyu Lee, professor of disaster management at Dong-A University, says he expects only 190 out of 385 existing universities to survive the next 25 years. Outside Seoul which hosts Korea’s most prestigious higher education institutions, a mere 44 percent of universities are expected to remain open, compared with 80 percent in the capital. Contracting demographics have already forced some universities to close, particularly outside Seoul. “At present, I think there is no hope for parochial universities,” says Prof. Lee, adding that these institutions are nearly “100 percent dependent on college tuition” and deeply vulnerable to declining enrolment. His report, which was presented at a forum held jointly by the Seoul National University Institute for Social Development and Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs, is based on the rate of childbirth in Korea’s regions, university enrolment rates and student numbers in primary and secondary education. While academics remain divided over just how badly Korea’s demographic crunch will hit its university sector, there is broad agreement that many of the country’s universities will be under threat. And in a nation where 70 percent of students already pursue higher education, boosting enrolment is a formidable challenge. Prof. Lee predicts that the coming years will generate “fierce competition” for full-time academic positions and “unfair recruitment of part-time professors,” by universities. Stuart Gietel-Basten, professor of social science and public policy at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and an expert in Asian demography, says that many universities, particularly in the regions won’t be able to stave off closure. He likens the process to industrial decline in former boom towns: “It’s like car factories in Detroit — there was nothing there before, then they built all these factories, then they closed down.” But John Lie, professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, expresses confidence that Koreans’ appetite for higher education will buffer the outcome for universities. “South Koreans are unlikely to recuperate fully from the diploma disease: the desire for education credentials. This is true not just for students and their parents, but also employers, both private and public,” he says. Therefore, he takes these grim predictions with a grain of salt. “Although there are many mediocre universities in South Korea, it’s very unlikely that close to half will close in 25 years, barring a major catastrophe. The prognostication is from one academic study, and vatic pronouncements from academics rarely come true,” he says. (Excerpted and adapted from The Economist and Times Higher Education) Also read: South Korea: Foreign faculty blues

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As the chapter closes on the 2019 killing of Bangladeshi student Abrar Fahad, advocates say universities should be doing more to prevent violent behaviour still rampant on the country’s public campuses. Last December, a Dhaka court issued death sentences to 20 students at the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET) for Fahad’s murder. But the culture of so-called “ragging” or “hazing” — brutal rituals often involving physical violence — continues to be widespread at many institutions. Aniruddha Ganguly, a student in his final year at BUET, told Times Higher Education that since this incident, the culture at his university has radically changed. “Right now it’s totally different — we’re probably the only university where any freshman doesn’t have any fear (of hazing) and the cost was a life,” he says. But according to him, this is thanks to student advocacy following Fahad’s death rather than initiatives taken by the university. Ganguly is unsatisfied with the lack of punishment of administrators and faculty, who he says should accept responsibility for preventing the kind of violence that led to the fatal attack. “The university for a long time lived in blissful ignorance of what’s going on in the halls. It’s their job to keep students safe. I think they failed horribly in that,” he says. Ganguly describes incidents in which students would be taken outside for punishment, often for perceived slights or because they held different political views. “Since residence hall corridors are all camera protected, they’d take you up on the roof… five seniors would line up 30 juniors,” he recalls. Adnan Chowdhury, a senior and criminology student at the University of Dhaka, agrees that there should be more accountability among universities for violent behaviour, but believes solutions that target the perpetrators of crimes rather than the root causes will be ineffective. Instead, he suggests that systemic changes are needed to solve university problems. For a start, he argues, student arms of political groups should be banned from campuses. According to Chowdhury, Bangladeshi students are undeniably drivers of political action in the country — including in Bangladesh’s fight for self-determination in 1971. Nevertheless, student groups affiliated with larger political organisations should not have a place at universities. But even at BUET, which for now is managing to stay free of violence, Ganguly says it is uncertain how long student culture will remain free from hazing. “I’m afraid it can return any time — what’s stopping it from returning unless there are additional steps taken?” he asks. Also read: MCI received 6 complaints of ragging in medical colleges this year

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A French proposal to create a ‘European Academy’ could help to rejuvenate efforts to build a common continental identity. Under France’s presidency of the Council of the European Union, which runs to June 2022, President Emmanuel Macron has proposed “a European Academy bringing together a hundred or so intellectuals from the 27 countries and from all disciplines to shed light on the European debate”. Thierry Chopin, professor of political science at the Catholic University of Lille, says the idea is “to create a European structure to work on the narrative of ‘belonging’ and on a common European identity, mainly through the academic world, but also by involving the cultural world more widely”. “The idea is that there will be no European sovereignty without a sense of belonging and active identification to an EU-wide political community. In concrete terms, I don’t know if it could be a permanent structure or an annual meeting,” he says. Renaud Dehousse, president of the European University Institute, a Florence-based research university created by an international treaty in 1972, says “what is being sought is really a debate”. “There is a big Macron agenda which says, ‘Let’s try to reinvent the meaning for Europe.’ Europe has been confronted for decades now, at least two decades, with a certain disenchantment, of which Brexit has been one manifestation, but only one. There’s a widespread awareness across Europe this is a problem that needs to be addressed and that one needs to ask oneself what are big issues in today’s Europe.” Prof. Dehousse argues that the new academy will be sufficiently different from Academia Europaea, a learned academy founded by 55 scholars in Cambridge in 1988, which now boasts almost 5,000 members from across the continent. “Academia is really a learned society for academics, whereas Macron makes a different point, he wants intellectuals — thinkers, who may not be academics,” he says. But other heads of pan-European academies have reservations. Sierd Cloetingh, professor of earth sciences at Utrecht University and president of Academia Europaea, says that restricting membership to around 100 would allow for “a little bit more than three per member country.” He is also concerned about restricting membership to academics from within the European Union, excluding scholars from countries such as the UK. The move comes as the European Universities Initiative, a Macron-led plan to create cross-border institutions, offers a third round of funding. Also read: European Union: Academy modernisation initiative

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Covid-19 has elicited creative solutions to food poverty on Australian campuses, as students — particularly from overseas — find inventive ways to beat hunger. Foreign students are now reserving refrigerator racks in shared kitchens to deposit leftover food for friends in need. Other stratagems include “clubbing together” to cover membership costs at bulk food retailers such as Costco warehouse stores. “You could buy a 100-kilo bag of rice and share it out,” says Craig Jeffrey, professor of human geography at the University of Melbourne. “Or just put stuff out on social media — I’ve got a kilo of rice that I don’t need; that sort of thing,” he says. According to Jeffrey, the pandemic has fostered a unified front, as media coverage put the spotlight on privations endured disproportionately by international students. “Because the issue became more public, and people are talking about it, they became more aware of other people suffering the same problem. So there are more coordinated efforts,” adds Jeffrey. Foreign students have long struggled to meet the expensive costs of living in Australia. Covid amplified hardship by forcing many out of the hospitality and retail jobs they needed to support themselves, as restaurants, cafes and shops shuttered. With no family homes to retreat to, and barred from receiving the JobKeeper wage subsidies and JobSeeker unemployment benefits that sustain their domestic counterparts, some international students are in dire straits. But the tradition of student hunger stretches long before Coronavirus. Studies in 2014 in Queensland and Victoria found that food insecurity afflicted one-quarter to almost one-half of students. But with the scant research into the issue mainly limited to occasional surveys, Prof. Jeffrey and Melbourne colleagues devised a qualitative study that was conceived before Covid’s emergence but undertaken under pandemic conditions. Interviews with 90 students at six Victorian universities found that daily hunger pangs were a common experience that left participants sluggish and detached, affecting their mental and physical health. But pandemic privations have also created common cause, as locals become increasingly aware of their foreign peers’ adversities. “One of the things we really noticed was domestic students getting worried about international students,” he says. “The care of students one for another is very apparent.” Also read: Australia: International students dollar woes

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Thousands of women were forced to leave their classrooms after the Taliban took over Afghanistan — and now, months later, they have little hope of resuming studies under the extremist regime. But the president of the University of the People (UoPeople) believes online courses may offer means of reaching them. This non profit university offers online degrees, and it has already had more than 4,000 applicants to its scholarships launched specifically for Afghans. “Following the Taliban takeover, we announced 1,000 scholarships for Afghans with priority for women,” says Shai Reshef, founder and president of the university. “We were surprised that in mere days we were flooded with applications.” Roughly 600 of the applicants have started their studies at UoPeople, and Reshef is working on raising the money to offer scholarships to all applicants. “We cannot fathom a world in which the right to education is stripped from Afghans, especially women,” he says. Although Reshef conceded that not all the applicants will graduate — on average, roughly 85 percent of UoPeople students earn diplomas — even a couple of thousand graduates would be significant for Afghanistan. Before the Taliban takeover last August, the country had low educational attainment, with roughly 10.6 percent of Afghans completing tertiary education in 2020, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco). Although UoPeople does not charge for tuition, the scholarships pay for the exam fees required, which cost $2,400 (Rs.1.77 lakh) for an associate degree, $4,800 for a bachelor’s degree and roughly $3,000 for a graduate degree. Reshef is hopeful that things will improve. “It’s really hard to tell how Afghanistan will look in a few years,” he says, adding that the Taliban regime was overthrown before — something that could happen again. “If and when it happens, we will have a cadre of educated people who will be able to move their society forward.” Also read: Taliban to announce secondary school for girls: UN official

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When Amaury Gomes began teaching history in Sobral in the mid-1990s, its schools were a mess. The city of 200,000 people lies in Ceara, a baking-hot north-eastern state that has one of Brazil’s highest rates of poverty. When local officials ordered tests in 2001 they found that 40 percent of Sobral’s eight-year-olds could not read at all. One-third of primary pupils had been held back for at least a year. Staff were not much better, recalls Gomes. He remembers a head teacher who signed documents with a thumbprint, because she lacked the confidence even to scribble her own name. These days Gomes is the boss of a local teacher-training college, and his city gets visitors from across Brazil. In 2015, Sobral’s primary-school children made headlines by scoring highest in the country in tests of maths and literacy, a milestone in a journey begun almost 20 years ago. The pandemic has thrust the city back into the spotlight as a model for educators seeking to reboot schooling after lengthy closures. Success stories are important to Brazil’s beleaguered educators, now more than ever. Before the pandemic (as in India) only about half of children could read by the time they finished primary school, compared with nearly three-quarters in other upper-middle-income countries. In 2017, the World Bank warned that it could take 260 years before Brazil’s 15-year-olds are reading and writing as well as peers in the rich world. Since then many Brazilian pupils have missed around 18 months of face-to-face lessons as a result of school closures (most have now reopened). Few countries kept classrooms shut for as long. Data from Sao Paulo suggest that during this period children learned less than a third of what they normally would have, and that the risk of pupils dropping out tripled. Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s president, seems to have no meaningful plan to get teaching back on track. Even before Covid-19 his educational policies were meagre. He said he wanted more schools to be run by the army and for Congress to legalise home-schooling. Yet his chaotic administration has not made much progress towards even these eccentric goals. It has churned through four education ministers in three years. There is one consolation, says Priscila Cruz of All for Education, a charity based in São Paulo. She thinks the vacuum in the federal government is making municipal and state officials keener to seek lessons from each other. In the classroom, Sobral has focused obsessively on making sure small children can read. The city determined that every pupil would master basic literacy before entering third grade (when they are aged eight or nine). Examiners began listening to all children in their first years of school read aloud. These days local professionals run city-wide tests in maths and Portuguese for all grades. Teachers earn bonuses if their pupils hit minimum targets. Lesson plans pumped out by the city ensure that no teacher need start a class unprepared. Every teacher spends a day a month in training. What makes…

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Even as the Covid Omicron variant surge is shutting down US campuses, dozens of institutions have quickly reversed mandatory vaccine policies after a federal judge blocked a Biden administration requirement for them. These institutions, mainly in politically conservative southern and western parts of the US, suggest that the court ruling means they are no longer allowed to impose vaccination. The ruling by Stan Baker, a Trump-appointed federal court judge based in Georgia, doesn’t itself outlaw vaccination mandates. But the judge’s rejection of the Biden policy leaves many institutions subject to the orders of their state government leaders, who have embraced and amplified Trump-era hostilities towards face masks and vaccines. The likelihood of renewed campus closures is made clear by Cornell University, which shut its main campus in central New York state and shifted final exams online after tallying more than 900 new Covid cases in a week. Cornell has been mandating on-campus vaccination all semester, and as a private institution it is not affected by the Biden mandate or Judge Baker’s order against it. In one announcement typical of the public universities halting their vaccine mandates, Northern Arizona University says the court order “for the time being prohibits enforcement of the vaccination requirements for federal contractors”. The University of Wisconsin-Madison, ending its requirement, says the judge’s decision and other unspecified legal processes “may impact our campus’ ability to require the vaccine”. The leading US higher education association counters such interpretations, making clear in written guidance that the federal court ruling — upholding a claim brought by the University System of Georgia and several state government allies — only lifts the federal mandate. “It’s important to note,” the 1,700-member American Council on Education (ACE) says, “that these decisions don’t bar institutions in states that don’t prohibit vaccine requirements from moving forward with their policies.” ACE argued during the initial outbreak last year that the pandemic was so severe that it required a federal bailout of US higher education, and it succeeded in convincing Congress to provide nearly $70 billion (Rs.518,000 crore) in emergency assistance to shuttered campuses. Now, with the US death toll from Covid hitting 800,000 and the Omicron variant pushing it higher, some of those same beneficiaries — having collected as much as $200 million apiece in federal recovery aid — are among the institutions refusing to make masks and vaccines compulsory. Also read: USA: Pfizer asks FDA to allow Covid-19 vaccine for kids under five

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