2 May 2021  Issue No: 641

University and college leaders in the United States have welcomed President Joe Biden’s ‘bold’ proposal to provide two free years of community college education to all Americans and substantially increase grant support for disadvantaged students, “so that every student has the ability to obtain a degree or certificate”.

Australia’s universities face a serious collapse in their income from international student fees by the end of 2022. A new report reveals that continuing border closures by Australian authorities are preventing international students from enrolling, halving the value of the international education sector.

Global university rankings may be distorted by the business activities of the ranker, including selling consulting, analytics and other services to universities, according to a new study from the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Studies in Higher Education, which looked at the QS World University Rankings.

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Aggregator start-ups are rising fast and taking on the establishment, backed by a tidal wave of investment funds. They are driven by the hunger for edtech investments and hopes of significant growth in globally mobile students, especially from India. But will they turn universities into commodities?

Undervaluing doctoral education by restricting support for PhD students and programmes due to COVID-19 resource losses risks critical damage to higher education and human and economic development – and may shift global talent flows in the immediate future, and potentially in the long run.

The European Commission says the alliances in the first two rounds of the European Universities Initiative will act as role models on the path towards the European Higher Education Area. Two new reports examining how the first alliances are operating will interest future applicants.

Vartan Gregorian, president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, who died unexpectedly on 15 April, believed Africa’s future was rooted in strong higher education institutions. Under his watch, millions in grants were allocated to key priority areas, including the nurturing of young African academics, building a network between the academic diaspora and African universities as well as strengthening higher education policy and research.