18 April 2021  Issue No: 639

COVID-19 had the force of a tsunami in shaking up university international activities, but higher education is likely to emerge from the pandemic with a greater appetite for global cooperation providing it can navigate around the challenges of geopolitics, according to sector leaders on three continents.

Vaccine nationalism is legal yet profoundly unjust and relies on a framework which treats public health as equivalent to consumer products, giving a few higher-income countries an advantage. It needs to change and academics – and their students – can help to find creative solutions.

Applications from the United Kingdom’s number one overseas student market have plummeted by 40% for undergraduate courses starting in 2021-22, but it is Brexit and not COVID-19 that is to blame for the fall. However, applications from countries beyond the European Union have risen by 17%.

We are committed to enabling all of our readers to access our articles for free, but the widespread cancellation of international higher education events and sharp fall in advertising due to the COVID-19 pandemic is seriously undermining our ability to cover our costs. Please help support our high-quality journalism.

The fast-evolving world of agent aggregators needs oversight. While technology can provide students with greater transparency, accessibility and support with finding the right university, they need to do so within a quality framework. There should be a formalised and standardised way to evaluate reputation.

Although the pandemic has greatly disrupted higher education around the world, it has also reset education abroad for institutions willing to take a more expansive view of what international higher education can entail and trial approaches that are not solely focused on mobility.

The European Universities Initiative is enabling a greater number and much broader mix of universities to cooperate than Horizon 2020, releasing new energy both for the Bologna Process and the European Higher Education Area or EHEA, according to a new analysis.