23 May 2021  Issue No: 644

It may feel like commodification, but price, ranking and international student employability are likely to become the key measures of a university’s value proposition when most institutions are obliged to engage with aggregator sites. So why is so little attention paid to employability metrics?

Countries around South and Southeast Asia seeing a new COVID-19 wave – the most serious outbreak to date in some countries – are looking to vaccinate students to keep universities functioning and are hoping to keep reliance on online-only courses to a minimum after over a year of disruption.

The Council of the European Union has called on European governments and higher education systems to support the European Universities Initiative and make it central to building a European Education Area by 2025, but universities say more funding and action to remove obstacles are needed.

After the European Union reaffirmed its commitment to the European Universities Initiative, which is pioneering ways for universities to collaborate across borders to raise the quality of higher education, it’s time to consider what it has achieved so far and where it goes next.

Africa lags behind other regions in terms of the amount of gross domestic product spent on research. In Ghana, one reason is that the government has failed to win the battle against unions to ensure that money ostensibly aimed at promoting research is actually used for that purpose.

Universities in Africa must be more vocal about the failures of higher education institutions in the Global North to challenge the status quo of innovation- and technology-sharing that is denying millions access to life-saving treatments. If African universities are engaged in global collaboration on health research, they should attempt to direct the downstream access implications of these partnerships.