16 July 2023  Issue No: 748

To move forward, international higher education must reject neocolonialism and embrace a pluralist system based on a consensus about the global common good, equality of respect and epistemic diversity, that can unite us across the colonial divide between ‘the West’ and ‘the rest’.

The parties to the Global Convention on the Recognition of Qualifications concerning Higher Education have agreed on a set of rules and are getting to work to agree on a common set of guidelines that will help to improve equity in student mobility worldwide.

Artificial intelligence will revolutionise student recruitment and allow smart universities to focus on their unique selling points – as long as they get their course recruitment criteria in order and make key data about price, excellence and graduate employability accessible on their websites.

The rise of global university rankings has resulted in many universities joining the prestige race and has pressured governments to launch academic excellence initiatives. Yet, while they have had a beneficial impact in some countries and on internationalisation, they are not a substitute for systemic reform.

The QS rankings system’s first ever basic formula overhaul adds a new alumni impact measure to its graduate employment rate metric, which reinforces the idea that great universities are for the few, preferably male, candidates who will make their careers in business and politics.

With prospective students increasingly expecting universities to meet climate and social requirements, higher education institutions need to create an education sector that is both environmentally and economically sustainable by identifying the most efficient and cost-effective ways to decarbonise their building stock to meet their emissions targets.

Some of the United States’ most prestigious colleges and universities – Georgetown, Fordham and Boston College among them – owe their existence to the money that Jesuits made from buying and selling human beings, according to a new book that documents the Jesuit slave trade.

A learning ecosystem includes all the elements that contribute to a learner’s overall learning experience. To create sustainable learning ecosystems, we need to integrate learning across formal, non-formal and informal learning processes and activities in a more strategic way, promoting a culture of learning.