NEWS: Our correspondents worldwide report

Yojana Sharma

New regulations currently being considered by China’s Ministry of Education could lead to a tightening of services provided by international student recruitment agents – to the extent of banning the operations of some altogether.

Hiep Pham

A new government decree to tighten regulations on foreign-based education institutions and cross-border programmes in Vietnam will come into force this month, aimed at arresting the unregulated proliferation of foreign-linked institutions and raising standards in the sector.

Jane Marshall

Five years after former president Nicolas Sarkozy announced Operation Campus, a major initiative aimed at making France a global higher education leader, “no stone has been laid, no building permit registered”, said Geneviève Fioraso, minister for higher education and research, as she announced a relaunch of the project last Monday.

Alya Mishra

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh overhauled leadership of the Education Ministry in a sweeping cabinet reshuffle last week. But with just 18 months to go before national elections, experts said the new leadership was likely to stick to existing higher education policies.

Geoff Maslen

Australia’s federal government has released a bold policy on the nation’s relations with Asia over the next 13 years. It is an ambitious and highly expensive set of goals with no indication of how the country will achieve them – or afford them. Higher education has a key role to play.

Robert Visscher

The Netherlands’ new coalition cabinet has introduced budget cuts that hit students hard. From September 2014 undergraduate scholarships will be turned into loans for new students. The very popular free public transport pass will be scrapped in 2015. Students are outraged.

María Elena Hurtado

Chilean universities have spoken out against a high-level proposal that the country’s primary research funding agency be moved to the economy ministry.

Michael Gardner

The German Employers’ Federation has called for sweeping changes to the country’s teacher training system. The organisation warns of a possible shortage of teachers if the profession does not remain attractive.

Wagdy Sawahel

East Asia and the Pacific is the largest source of international students, representing 28% of the world’s 3.6 million mobile students in 2010. Central Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa have the most mobile students, and several countries have more students abroad than at home.

Dinesh De Alwis

The Sri Lankan government launched a new National Human Resources and Employment Policy document on Tuesday, which aims to upgrade the country’s human capital and help turn Sri Lanka into a ‘knowledge hub’ in Asia.

Munyaradzi Makoni

The ruling party-aligned South African Students Congress has disowned a racist poster erected at two campuses last week that likened international students to "cockroaches" and called white people "pigs".

FEATURES

Sue Brownlow

Higher education, business and public sector collaboration can transform struggling economies and change lives, says a new report by UNICREDS – University Collaboration in Regional Development Spaces – a three-year European Union project that has just ended.

Jan Petter Myklebust

The Nordic Council of Ministers for Education signed a new agreement on compensation for hosting one another’s students, at a meeting in Helsinki last week, with an increase in the per capita payment for countries that receive more students than they send.

Munyaradzi Makoni

The Regional Initiative in Science and Education, or RISE, a programme aimed at boosting higher education in Africa in the sciences and engineering through postgraduate training, is facing an uncertain future after major donor support ends next year.

WORLD BLOG

Grace Karram

The media criticises universities for not preparing students for the world of work, but open access courses show that ‘irrelevant’ courses will continue to be offered as long as students are willing to apply for them.

COMMENTARY

Rahul Choudaha

Universities are competing in the same markets for international students. They should consider new emerging markets like Saudi Arabia if they want to avoid relying on too narrow a base of students.

Jane Tinkler

How can universities disseminate their research more widely? By using social media, including blogs, academics can get their research out to a wider audience, including policy-makers, and engage with them directly. This can have implications for university funding.

Carolina Jimenez

A new study of cooperation between British and Spanish universities shows a range of different partnerships emerging. Such cooperation is expected to grow for both undergraduate and masters degrees despite – or maybe even because of – the recession.

David Dickson

Last month TWAS, the organisation set up in 1984 to raise the status of basic science in the eyes of political leaders in the developing world, renamed itself The World Academy of Sciences. This reflects changes in development – but the academy must ensure its original priorities are maintained.

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World Round-up

Appalling conditions facing overseas students in Australia, including housing in overcrowded firetraps and abuse by host parents, have been highlighted by a New South Wales government-appointed task force, writes Melanie Kembrey for The Sydney Morning Herald.

Monday’s howling winds and pounding rains largely gave way to quiet on Tuesday as Hurricane Sandy left many colleges and universities along the Atlantic coast of the United States damaged, without power, and waiting to determine when classes could begin again, writes Alexandra Tilsley for Inside Higher Ed.

The “abysmal” state of free speech at Canadian public universities is stifling the right of students to speak their minds, according to a new report card that gives mostly failing grades to universities and their student unions, writes Sarah Boesveld for National Post.

Irish universities are fighting plans to change the law to give the government absolute control over pay, conditions and staff numbers. University leaders have met Education Minister Ruairi Quinn to express reservations about proposed new legislation, writes Katherine Donnelly for the Irish Independent.

Questions have been raised about whether many scholars are "little or no better qualified than those they are teaching" following an analysis of the latest data on how many academics have a doctorate, writes Jack Grove for Times Higher Education.

Israel’s Council for Higher Education has given the controversial political science department at Ben-Gurion University a three-week deadline to commit to remedying problems pointed out by an international committee, reports Israel Hayom.

Graham B Spanier, the former president of Pennsylvania State University who was once one of higher education's highest fliers, was charged on Thursday with conspiring to cover up child abuse allegations against Jerry Sandusky, the former football coach who was convicted in June on 45 counts of m olestation, writes Brad Wolverton for The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Many countries in Central and Eastern Europe have trimmed back spending on education after the 2008 global financial crisis and its aftermath. But Poland and Lithuania have bucked that trend. Given the importance of a well-educated and skilled workforce for future growth, that may prove to have been the smart way to go, writes Judy Dempsey for The New York Times.

On Cocody University campus, the biggest in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire, workers are busy – finishing paint jobs, planting shrubs and installing tables and chairs for around 62,000 students (out of 85,000 in the whole country). The university is reopening after 18 months, writes Isabelle Rey-Lefebvre for the Guardian.

The United Kingdom and Indonesia further strengthened their education links last week, by committing to nine new long-term partnerships in higher education, reports the UK government’s Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

For South African school-leavers who choose to enter higher education, getting an acceptance letter from the university of their choice is only half the battle won. For most students whose homes are nowhere near the institutions, finding a place to stay is a major struggle, writes Nontobeko Mtshali for The Star.

Zambia’s government will spend about K31 trillion (US$6 million) over four years to transform five training institutions into universities, and establish a new one. It plans to have the six institutions operating in the course of next year, writes Fridah Nkonde for The Post.

In a society where anonymous internet commenters freely lob insults, and politicians spew partisan barbs, the decline of basic civility isn't limited to academia. But the push for more polite discourse – often as an extension of more entrenched diversity efforts – is firmly taking root on campus, writes Alan Scher Zagier for Associated Press.

A leading British historian has accused a US university of “colluding in the Sovietisation” of Roman Catholic intellectual life after after the university rescinded an invitation to a prominent liberal theologian who has argued the case for same-s ex marriage, on the grounds that she dissents publicly from the church’s moral teachings, writes Lizzie Davies for the Guardian.

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