By Karin Fischer. As higher education goes global, a new organization will serve as a forum for issues of international accreditation and quality assurance, from the regulation of overseas branch campuses to the oversight of free online courses.
The Council for Higher Education Accreditation, known as CHEA, announced on Thursday the formation of the CHEA International Quality Group, a membership organization that will serve as a venue both for common quality-assurance challenges faced by countries around the globe and for those that arise as universities' activities increasingly cross international borders.
"At this juncture, we've got to understand one another," said Judith S. Eaton, president of CHEA, an association that represents 3,000 colleges and recognizes 60 accrediting organizations in the United States.
There is often, however, little understanding about accreditation and oversight from country to country. Recently, for example, Chinese officials have suggested they may need to do more to regulate their overseas university partners after an American institution, Dickinson State University, was found to have awarded degrees to hundreds of foreign students who failed to complete academic requirements. The U.S. government's shutdown last year of a sham California university that operated as a visa mill led many in India, where the closure was front-page news, to question American oversight of higher education. And some American universities have balked at offering degrees abroad because of uncertainty about quality-assurance systems in other countries and confusion over how American accrediting agencies will evaluate their overseas activities.
In an interview, Ms. Eaton said she hopes the new group will serve as a setting to discuss those sorts of thorny issues. Other topics, she said, could include what role accrediting bodies in different countries should play in assessing whether higher education leads to work-force development and how to ensure quality as the number of massive open online courses, or MOOC's, explodes.

By Nigel Thrift. Around the world, immigration has become a prime political concern. I hardly need to point to the number of countries where immigration has become a major electoral issue, whether in the United States, Europe, or Australia.
And, of course, immigration policy can cut across university policy, often in destructive ways. The U.K. has become a depressing example of precisely that point. A coalition government has come to power committed to reducing net migration to “tens of thousands”—the current figure is 216,000—by the time of the next election, in 2015. The only way that it might realistically do this, given that E.U. citizens have free right of access, is by bearing down on international-student numbers.

By Karen MacGregor. A global shift towards science and technology and rapid growth in international student mobility are trends impacting on the standing of the world’s finest universities, according to the 2012-13 QS rankings. Universities from a record 72 countries are in the top 700 list published last week.
The top 100 universities average nearly 10% more international students this year than in 2011, “the biggest single-year increase in the rankings’ nine-year history”, according to the latest World University Rankings.
“The unprecedented acceleration in international recruitment reflects an escalating global battle for talent: 120,000 more international students were reported by the top 500 universities this year,” said head of research Ben Sowter in a statement.
“The total number of international students now exceeds 4.1 million globally.”

By Graeme Paton, Education Editor. Foreign students with poor qualifications are being used by British universities as “cash cows” to fill holes in the higher education budget, a leading academic has admitted.
 Universities and successive governments have “turned a blind eye” to the recruitment of under-qualified students for years to drive up funding levels, according to Prof Susan Bassnett. The scholar suggested that the abuse of the student visa system witnessed at London Metropolitan University was rife at other institutions across Britain.