NEWS: Our correspondents worldwide report

Yojana Sharma

Law degrees from eight universities in England will no longer be recognised for admission to the Singapore bar, according to an announcement by the Singapore Ministry of Law last week, in a move seen by some as protecting graduates from Singapore’s own universities in an over-supplied market.

Brendan O’Malley

Universities remain divided on the value of U-Multirank, the new multidimensional ranking of universities, although most will continue to contribute data to it, a consultation of European University Association members has found.

Naw Say Phaw Waa

A new National Education Bill has been presented to Myanmar’s parliament after months of protests over the previous education law, but students are angry at what they say is government broken promises regarding the amended bill.

Brendan O’Malley

English universities have become over-reliant on growth in recruitment of full-time postgraduate students from China and have developed a risky dependence on scholars funded by their own governments, according to new analysis by the Higher Education Funding Council for England, or HEFCE.

Suluck Lamubol

Two activists have been sentenced to prison terms for performing a play on campus that was deemed to have defamed the Thai royal family.

Suchitra Behal

Nalanda University, set up on the initiative of India with international support, is at the centre of a political storm over the resignation of its Chancellor, Nobel Laureate Professor Amartya Sen, who blames Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party-led government for delaying confirmation of his continuance in the post.

Munyaradzi Makoni

South Africa’s parliamentary committee on higher education has joined vice-chancellors in calling for more money for student bursaries and loans, in the interests of equity and access and against a backdrop of patchy student unrest and fundraising campaigns by universities.

Gilbert Nganga

University graduates in Kenya may be required to seek clearance from the government’s student loan agency before they can secure a job. The Higher Education Loans Board has drafted new guidelines that will make it mandatory for companies to demand clearance certificates from graduates, as part of efforts to curb student loan defaulting.

Geoff Maslen

All post-secondary students should be entitled to a public subsidy that would enable them to undertake tertiary studies in the vocational education and training area or in higher education, says a new report.

Paul Basken, The Chronicle of Higher Education

Years of using a Harvard nameplate to flog his insistence that polar bears are doing fine, and that sunspots might explain planetary warming better than the Industrial Revolution does, may finally have caught up with Wei-Hock Soon.

Ashraf Khaled

Students in Egypt are pushing the government to hold university student elections more than a year after their original due date, amid increasing on-campus restrictions.

ADVERTISEMENT

NV Varghese, Jinusha Panigrahi and Lynne Heslop

Nine of the largest higher education systems in the world will convene at the Going Global conference in London this year to debate the impact of the greatest global massification of higher education ever experienced. They are facing unprecedented challenges.

AFRICAN HIGHER EDUCATION SUMMIT

Karen MacGregor

Academics from across Africa and the world have described the ‘parlous’ state of the humanities and submitted recommendations for their reinvigoration to policy-makers attending the major African Higher Education Summit in Senegal from 10-12 March. Among other things the academics have called for higher quality doctoral education, the participation of scholars in national debates and an end to funding and promotion discrimination.

COMMENTARY

Nicholas Wyman

US students are turning their backs on university education due to high fees and a lack of jobs. Community colleges offer an alternative and President Barack Obama is right to expand funding for them.

Ashish Jaiswal

Business schools need to be reformed to reflect global complexities and MBAs need to bring business ethics out of the shadows.

Pushkar

India’s GIAN initiative aims to attract US scholars to the country to boost its higher education system, yet the government does not appear to have considered using resources closer to home.

FEATURES

Mandy Garner

The London School of Economics is pioneering new ways to ensure that research careers are not stalled by maternity or paternity leave, including allowing a term free of teaching to catch up on research, a phased return to work and taking into account the impact of leave on output in decisions on probationary periods and promotion.

Wagdy Sawahel

Only one Saudi university out of more than 600 Arab universities located in the 22 Arab states was included in the U-Multirank ranking based on ‘international orientation’. But what is the real position of Arab universities in international orientation performance?

WORLD BLOG

William Patrick Leonard

The number of students travelling abroad to study is falling, and demographic changes, coupled with new developments in Korea and a thriving Chinese market, mean that the decline is likely to continue.

FACEBOOK

University World News has a popular Facebook group. If you are not a member, do consider joining to see our regular updates, post on our wall and communicate with us and other University World News fans. You can also follow University World News on Twitter @uniworldnews

WORLD ROUND-UP

Chilean Education Minister Nicolas Eyzaguirre has said the government will start providing free higher education in 2016, reports IANS. "President Michelle Bachelet has clearly said that free education will begin in 2016, and we are going to honour that promise," Eyzaguirre said recently.

The ambitions of Chinese students are shifting: no longer are they attracted just by the glittering names such as Harvard. Pursuit of education abroad is becoming an end in itself. Universities far less renowned than Georgia Tech are reaping the benefits, reports The Economist.

University students can have their fees increased or their degree course altered on a whim as a result of unfair contract terms imposed by British universities, according to a recent investigation, writes Kate Palmer for The Telegraph.

Militants claiming loyalty to Islamic State have seized the university in the central Libyan city of Sirte, residents said, days after a video showed them staging a convoy parade, reports Reuters.

Palestinian students from Gaza are still prevented by Israel from studying at West Bank universities, after an announcement last week to the contrary was retracted as a mistake, writes Ben White for Middle East Monitor.

More than half of Jordanian universities failed a recent national proficiency exam held by the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research, writes Saba Abu Farha for Al-Fanar Media.

A global network of fraudulent online universities is using high-pressure sales tactics and phony scholarships to extract money from students who end up with worthless degrees, writes Benjamin Plackett for Al-Fanar Media.

Germany’s Bertelsmann has agreed to take a controlling stake in United States-based Alliant International University as the first step in a plan to build a global network of universities to share research and data, write Harro ten Wolde and Joern Poltz for Reuters.

The World Bank on 19 February approved a US$65 million credit for the Nepal Higher Education Reforms Project to help address the human resource needs of the country and add to the national knowledge base, reports the Financial.

Private higher education institutions are demanding faster procedures to process student visas to third country nationals, saying Cyprus is losing the chance of becoming a regional education centre, writes Evie Andreou for Cyprus Mail.

Protests took place in various universities across Turkey last week against the killing of a student during a clash between supporters of the opposition Nationalist Movement Party, or MHP, and the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, at Izmir-based Ege University, reports Today’s Zaman.

The University of Massachusetts at Amherst has reversed a controversial new policy that would have barred Iranian students from certain science and engineering programmes, the institution announced recently. The move followed consultations with the US State Department and outside counsel, writes Elizabeth Redden for Inside Higher Ed.

Subscribe / Unsubscribe / Sent to:

Terms and Conditions / ISSN 1756-297X / © University World News 2007-2015