17 January 2021  Issue No: 626

COVID-19 uncertainty, along with political changes in the United States and the United Kingdom, suggest we are entering a new phase of international student mobility that will see intensified competition for global talent and higher education institutions would do well to track the fast-changing landscape.

The disruption of school-leaving exams which determine entry to university is now entering its second year as countries suffer second and third waves of COVID-19 infections. It has an effect well beyond the individual country’s exams, with particular impact for international student admissions.

TU Dublin is using its 73-acre campus development – the largest single investment in a higher education project in the history of the Irish state – to build on its full-throttle commitment to working with the surrounding community to tackle unemployment and social disadvantage in an integrated way.

On 27 January 2021 University World News, in partnership with the Mastercard Foundation, will be bringing together experts and practitioners from the International Association of Universities, the Talloires Network of Engaged Universities and the Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program in an online webinar on how universities can improve their social impact.

Before we get deeper into 2021, we need to understand the lessons of 2020 and ask the right questions about higher education internationalisation in order for it to have greater impact. We need to be able to have frank, evidence-based discussions about ‘Why?’ and ‘How?’.

Rector Magnificus of the University of Amsterdam, Professor Karen Maex, has called on European Commissioners to propose a ‘Digital University Act’ to secure universities’ status as independent education and research institutions and defend them against pressures from big tech companies.

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Futurologists claim that disruption – accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic – has created a need for widespread, rapid and radical transformations in academia. But what is needed are evidence-based approaches to imagining the future, drawing on universities’ own experiments with new forms of higher education.

A weak publishing industry in Africa, including the lack of distribution hubs and an intra-Africa book trade; curricula, pedagogy and learning processes still rooted in the colonial situation and the absence of a scholarship culture, are factors that are undermining the development and production of academic books on the continent.