7 March 2021  Issue No: 633

Leading anglophone international higher education destination countries like the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia have seen their market share of international students reduced in recent years, yet their recovery strategies lack proper investment and are based on a false analysis of the challenges in the coming years.

On average 56% of university students worldwide said their mental health suffered during the COVID-19 pandemic, but the share rose to more than 70% in Brazil, the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, a survey of the hopes and fears of 17,000 students in 21 countries found.

Chinese higher education continues to show improvements in the latest ‘QS World University Rankings by Subject’, with a record number of programmes now achieving a top-50 rank. Russian higher education continues to strengthen, with a record number of departments achieving top-20 places.

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No Latin American university is found in the top 100 of international rankings. It seems the Cordoba higher education revolution of 1918 is holding Latin American universities back and preventing them from fully engaging with national development needs for first-class research and innovation.

Experiential learning methodologies must evolve with the move to greater blended and online learning post-COVID to increase student engagement and foster holistic skills development. Immersive and interactive experiential approaches, which were beginning to feature more regularly across campuses, should be used within digital learning.

In many countries – Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Israel and New Zealand, for instance – the public has an insatiable interest in military history and understands why it is important, but the same is not always true of universities, where military history programmes have become increasingly unfashionable.