NEWS: Our correspondents worldwide report

Yojana Sharma

Asian economies can draw on the demographic advantages of a youthful population in some countries, a growing middle-class, an expanding services sector and creative industries to leapfrog more advanced countries and take the lead in the “knowledge-based economy of the future”, says a just-released report from the Asian Development Bank.

Yojana Sharma

Unearthing a huge university-related scam in China, an IT security company in America has found that Chinese online retailers are selling email addresses from top universities around the world, providing buyers with access to university libraries, journal subscriptions, student discounts and a host of other benefits including access to software developer programmes.

David Jobbins

An international study of postgraduate education has produced evidence of considerable challenges over a range of countries, from emerging economies to the most developed in North America and Europe.

Geoff Maslen

Profound changes have transformed the role of the ‘traditional’ academic in Australian universities, so much so that this once typical academic might soon be numbered among the nation’s endangered species.

Munyaradzi Makoni

The British and South African governments last week announced that they had committed US$46 million over the next four years to a major new research and training partnership promoting science, technology and innovation, the UK-South Africa Newton Fund.

Jan Petter Myklebust

Two years ago the University of Oslo appointed a high-profile international strategic advisory board to propose how to increase its global visibility as a leading research-intensive university by 2020. Last week the board delivered its report, Build a Ladder to the Stars.

Wagdy Sawahel

In cooperation with China, Algeria plans to set up an academy for science and technology, in an effort to boost the role of research in developing a knowledge-based economy. The new academy was included in a China-Algeria cooperation agreement signed on 4 September.

Education at a Glance 2014

The OECD published its Education at a Glance 2014 report last Tuesday. University World News reports on aspects of post-school education across the OECD’s 34 member nations and 10 other countries.

Karen MacGregor

Educational upward mobility has started to slow in the industrialised world, according to the OECD’s new Education at a Glance 2014 report. The share of people with lower qualifications than their parents is rising – even though higher education pays off more than ever before – and “inequalities between tertiary-educated adults and the rest of society are growing”.

Karen MacGregor

The importance of regional over global student mobility is growing, according to the OECD’s Education at a Glance 2014. The trend is reflected in the increasing internationalisation of tertiary enrolment in OECD countries as well as high intra-regional student mobility. Patterns of student mobility are shifting, with new destinations emerging.

Wachira Kigotho

Investing in higher education in the 34 country members of the OECD is being rewarded with good returns. Despite slow recovery from the financial crisis, on average 80% of tertiary-educated people are employed compared to less than 60% of people with below upper secondary education.

Peta Lee

The Russian Federation has the highest percentage of adults with tertiary education among all OECD countries – 53% against an OECD average of 32% – according to Education at a Glance 2014. But there is a contradiction between the federation’s education levels and the mean literacy of its population.

FEATURES

Kirk Perris

The Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur and the Commonwealth of Learning are offering “A MOOC on MOOCs: What you need to know about massive open online courses”. The novel short course is aimed at educators, policy-makers and other professionals interested in strategies related to the origin, architecture, economics and delivery of a MOOC, with particular reference to the emerging world context.

Peter Schmidt, The Chronicle of Higher Education

‘Civility’ just might be American academe’s newest fighting word. In the past week, pleas for civility at Ohio University, Pennsylvania State University and the University of California at Berkeley have had the unintended effect of provoking harsh attacks on the campus leaders who issued them. All have been accused of seeking to silence speech rather than simply lower its tone.

WORLD BLOG

William Patrick Leonard

Higher education institutions in the United States need to look at tailoring their budgets to consumers who are reluctant to fund ever-rising tuition fees.

COMMENTARY

Laura E Rumbley and Philip G Altbach

Global and local higher education internationalisation efforts are not opposites – and both need to be borne in mind if we are to develop the possibilities that internationalisation offers intelligently.

Martin Cohen

Academics’ views on Scottish independence have been sidelined in the debate, but what would one of Scotland’s greatest thinkers, Adam Smith, have made of the arguments being put forward?

Richard Holmes

The U-Multirank university ranking tool, developed by a consortium of organisations and funded by the European Commission, finally appeared in May. Some found it disappointing and the established rankers were probably a little relieved. It does have interesting and innovative features and it does go places where the conventional rankings do not – but it is unlikely to present a serious challenge to the hegemony of the Big Three.

Eugene Sebastian

Australia needs to do more to forge international links to build its science base. The country could start by leveraging its Asian alumni.

CLIMATE CHANGE

Following our highly successful special edition last May that focused on how universities were tackling the challenges of climate change, this week we are launching a new series of regular reports on what the world’s scientists are discovering about the impact of a warming Earth and the many ways higher education is responding to this global challenge.

Michelle Paterson

Having completed the first phase of a programme that produced a comprehensive climate change mapping study, the Southern African Regional Universities Association – SARUA – has secured funding from the Climate and Development Knowledge Network to develop a curriculum innovation network in the second phase.

Philip Kokic, Mark Howden and Steven Crimp

There is less than one chance in 100,000 that global average temperature over the past 60 years would have been as high without human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, our new research shows.

Lesley Hughes, a professor and ecologist at Macquarie University in Sydney, won the Australian Museum’s annual Eureka prize last Wednesday for her work in explaining the impact of climate change through a free online course run by Open Universities Australia.

A third of the permanent snow and ice on New Zealand’s Southern Alps has now disappeared, according to research based on aerial surveys by the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research.

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WORLD ROUND-UP

The University of Hong Kong’s student union has called on students to co-sign the ‘Declaration of the Students’ Strike’ which demands open elections in 2016 and 2017 and which students say is their “last warning to the regime”, writes Jeffie Lam for South China Morning Post.

In Canada today, it is estimated that more than half of all undergraduates are taught by contract lecturers. Not all of those people live on the margins. But there are many thousands who are trying to cobble together a full-time salary with part-time work, writes Ira Basen for CBC News.

This summer, Chad Mason signed up for online general psychology at the University of North Carolina. This spring, Jonathan Serrano took intro to psychology online at Ess ex County College in Newark. Although the undergraduates were separated by nearly 1,000 kilometres, enrolled in different institutions and paying different tuitions, they were taking what amounts to the same course – a sophisticated package devised by publishing giant Pearson PLC and delivered through a powerful online platform called MyPsychLab, writes Gabriel Kahn for Slate.

The Palmer United Party in Australia has vowed to do “everything possible” to block the Tony Abbott government’s higher education changes, pointing to the deregulation of fees and increases to student loan costs as elements it cannot support, writes Daniel Hurst for the Guardian.

Nationals MPs are quietly lobbying Education Minister Christopher Pyne in a bid to ensure that regional universities get a fair deal under his higher education reforms, writes Katina Curtis for Australia Associated Press.

In an average university, in any country of the Eurozone, the new academic year starts with scientific research. In Greece, however, newly elected senate authorities are forced to face phenomena that can only be described as ‘third world’ situations, brought on by the Greek financial crisis, writes Ioanna Zikakou for Greek Reporter.

Harvard University announced the largest gift in its history, US$350 million to the School of Public Health, from a group controlled by a wealthy Hong Kong family, one member of which earned graduate degrees at the university, writes Richard Pérez-Pena for The New York Times.

After more than a month of public silence – even on the Twitter account that apparently cost him a job at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign – Steven Salaita spoke out last week, writes Colleen Flaherty for Inside Higher Ed.

Last week Ariel University informed Professor Amir Hetsroni, who on 27 August was told of his dismissal from the institution, that his salary would not be paid after that date. That decision, as well as the dismissal itself, is in apparent contravention of university regulations as well as a ruling by a labour court on the case, writes Yarden Skop for Haaretz.

Leading members of Israeli academia penned a letter to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu calling on him to reconsider intended budget cuts to higher education, reports Lidar Grave-Lazi for The Jerusalem Post.

In what may be a Canadian record, a celebrated and prolific doctor has retracted nine University of Calgary studies that contained bogus data, writes Margaret Munro for Postmedia News.

Canadian universities pay a price for stable provincial funding that could hamper their efforts to attract international students in the future, says a report released recently by Moody’s Investors Service, writes Simona Chiose for The Globe and Mail.

The number of fee-paying students from England, Wales and Northern Ireland accepted by Scottish universities has risen sharply, new figures show. According to the latest statistics, student numbers from the rest of the UK rose by more than 10% between 2013 and 2014, reports The Herald Scotland.

South Africa’s National Student Financial Aid Scheme cannot keep up with rising demand for funding, worsened by higher education inflation, resulting in qualifying students being left out in the cold, parliament heard last week, writes Bekezela Phakathi for BDLive.

Already dealing with financial problems on many fronts, universities and colleges in the United States are worried that the large proportion of students transferring from one school to another will make it harder to solicit alumni donations, writes Jon Marcus for The Hechinger Report.

A founding agreement on the establishment of a joint Russo-Chinese International University has been signed by Viktor Sadovnichy, rector of Moscow State University, and Hu Haiyan, president of Beijing Polytechnic University, reports ITAR-TASS.

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