5 March 2023  Issue No: 729

The Global Convention on the Recognition of Qualifications concerning Higher Education will come into force on Sunday 5 March, becoming the first legally binding United Nations instrument on higher education, fostering international mobility and opening up increased opportunities for students and qualification holders worldwide.

Students from Sub-Saharan Africa are being recruited in their numbers and the competition for students is increasing, with indicators predicting that the region’s 430,000 outwardly mobile students will double by 2050. Nigerian students, the biggest group of international students, opt for the UK and US, while francophone students choose France.

This is part of a weekly University World News special report series on ‘AI and higher education’. The focus is on how universities are engaging with ChatGPT and other generative artificial intelligence tools. The articles from academics and our journalists around the world are exploring developments and university work in AI that have implications for higher education institutions and systems, students and staff, and teaching, learning and research.

As university rankings and the dominance of the ‘world-class model’ begin to fade, the time is right for universities to explore other models that offer a holistic approach to their development and embrace a constant search for self-improvement and greater societal impact.

Countries around the world are promising post-study rights in a bid to boost international student numbers, but without proper jobs it will end in anger and disappointment. Instead, they should pivot towards supporting international students transition successfully to their early careers back home.

Africa continues to suffer from wealth and gender disparities when it comes to tertiary education. This is evident from the “highly variable quality” of private tertiary education institutions along with low levels of investment, facts that emerged from the first edition of a joint UNESCO-African Union education report.

Universities have been urged to ‘think ahead’ when serving students with disabilities, many of whom find that the systems in place are overly procedural and put the onus on students to come forward to provide evidence of disability – a process many find daunting.

An international AI-powered study of more than 14,100 articles in top journals has confirmed the poor reproducibility of (especially experimental) research in psychology – a blow to the discipline. Research methods and citation impact can help predict whether research is reliable, but university prestige and citation numbers do not.