Rejecting dire warnings that increasing competition in higher education will end in disaster, Paul Ramsden argues that the opposite could be true, but only if the sector is allowed to take charge of its own destiny.
A series of doom-laden stories, rich in self-serving hyperbole, have haunted the discourse of higher education since the Browne report. The latest terror to grip the sector is that this year's downturn in undergraduate numbers is the result of students being deterred in their droves by higher fees. That this panic is without foundation means nothing to the media and an assortment of senior academics. Let's be generous and say that they must have forgotten the lessons of basic statistics. They happily mistake correlation for causation and predict a trend towards the end of the university as we know it - from a single year's full data and very preliminary figures for 2014 admissions. Read more...

By Elizabeth Gibney. All eyes are on Brazil's academy and its rising research output, generous funding and willingness to team up internationally in a bid to become a major player. Adnei Melges de Andrade is a busy man. As vice-rector for international relations at the University of São Paulo, his office is increasingly the first port of call for visiting ambassadors, ministers and even prime ministers and presidents. His institution, widely seen as Brazil's top university, sometimes receives as many as five delegations a day. "In 2010 we had 88 delegations; in 2011 it was 142," says de Andrade. "This year we had 105 by June, and I think there will be many more."
With higher education budgets in Europe and the US being cut, it is perhaps not surprising that politicians and vice-chancellors across the world are interested in the Latin American giant and its growing spending power. According to one report, The State of Science 2011, produced by the Network of Ibero-American and Inter-American Science and Technology Indicators (RICYT), Brazil invested $24.9 billion (£15.6 billion) in research and development in 2010. Although cuts to the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation budget last year may dent this figure slightly, it will still be from a base three times bigger than in 2002. Adjusting for the purchasing power of each currency, Brazil now spends more on R&D than Canada or Italy. The boom in spending has seen a commensurate rise in scientific output. The number of papers by Brazilian authors in the Thomson Reuters Science Citation Index doubled between 1997 and 2007, making the country the 13th-largest producer of science in the world. Approximately three-quarters of researchers in the country work in academia, and a trip to some of Brazil's top institutions reveals ample proof of the fruits of this investment.The University of São Paulo is the top-ranked Latin American institution in the 2012-13 Times Higher Education World University Rankings, at 158, and it is the oldest university in Brazil. Read more...

Universities are a knowledge industry that imposes borders on movement and transfer at its own peril, says Abhinay Muthoo.
Imagine that you run one of the nation's most successful export industries. You produce one of the world's most sought-after cars. Designed by the world's best engineers, these models are so hot that you can't possibly keep up with demand. Even though you can offer the car to only carefully screened, potential buyers, you can live with that limitation. It only adds cachet. Business thrives.
Then the government changes the laws to make entering the showroom harder to do. Your customers will require more scrutiny before they are allowed to walk in to make their purchases. The same goes for your design engineers. Your most promising customers are put off. They decide they will try one of your competitor's excellent new models. The world-class engineers, uncertain over whether they can come to work and whether they will be allowed to remain, are recruited by more welcoming competitors elsewhere. Read more...

By Rebecca Ratcliffe. Elite institutions will team up with the Open University to offer free internet courses through FutureLearn, a new company that will rival US programmes Coursera and edX. Eleven top UK universities are joining the Open University to launch free internet courses, in a bid to catch up with the elite US institutions that have led the way online.
King's College London, along with the Universities of Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, East Anglia, Exeter, Lancaster, Leeds, Southampton, St Andrews and Warwick have partnered with FutureLearn, a company set up by the Open University that will offer free, non-credit bearing courses to internet-users around the world.
The courses are modelled on the US phenomenon 'massive open online courses' (Moocs), which have attracted millions of users across the globe, and are especially popular in emerging economies – a key market place for UK universities.
FutureLearn will promote UK institutions to international students, said Prof Martin Bean, vice-chancellor of the Open University. Read more...

By Barbara Fister. Mita Williams, of the University of Windsor, recently posted her slides from an amazing talk that she gave last month. Anyone who follows me on Twitter might have noticed my ALL CAPS enthusiasm for what she had to say. It was a wide-ranging talk, but it projected the kind of future we can have if we pay attention to what’s going on and keep hold of one important idea: the future of the academic library is free.
Free as in freedom.  Free as in access to ideas without gatekeepers or tolls. Free as in enabling the creation of new things, of bringing the community to the world instead of the other way around. Free as in... well, libraries. She points to our increasing dependence on corporations for both proprietary content and for access platforms. Library software providers are dwindling in number, being bought and sold like pork bellies by private equity firms, and in spite of all that market fermentation, the catalog still sucks. If academic libraries pooled their funds, instead of each being a customer individually negotiating with a limited number of vendors, we could do so much more. We have let the idea of libraries as nodes in a world of idea-sharing lapse in the face of license agreements and defining our hyper-local value propositions. Read more...

By Karin A. Wurst. The recent conversations on the future of the humanities degree -- most prominently at the Annual Convention of the Modern Language Association by its then-president, Russell Berman -- are encouraging steps in addressing the challenges. The position paper that Berman helped write outlines some meaningful first steps to address the time-to-degree issue, for example, that will need to be a driver for change. The recent article “The 5-Year Humanities Ph.D.” on Inside Higher Ed reiterates Stanford’s desire to continue fostering the debate with an emphasis on shortening time to degree for humanities Ph.D.s.
The current contribution seeks to expand the conversation and offer some concrete ideas for desirable changes beyond the time-to-degree issue. In particular, some funding changes -- coupled with restructuring programs so that the summers are utilized better and students have an expectation of an impactful year-around engagement -- need to take place. In addition, in order to open more avenues for employment, we may have to provide a similar co-curriculum as we do on the undergraduate level, one that produces T-shaped Ph.D.s aware and confident not only of their disciplinary depth, but also of their broader transferable skill set. Read more...

By Matt Reed. “Lose the do-rag.”
A dozen or so years ago, I actually had to say that to a student who was on his way to a job interview. It simply hadn’t occurred to him that wearing a “do-rag” (a bandana over his hair) would be a problem. (Now, faculty tell me, similar conversations occur with young women who favor bare midriffs.)
That didn’t happen at Williams. There, most of the students arrived with the informal folkways of the professional class already at hand, and those who didn’t, picked them up quickly.  We knew that you didn’t go to an interview in a t-shirt, or unshaven.  We knew about the handshake, the small talk, and the rule about showing up 10 minutes early.  We didn’t necessarily know how to write resumes, but we knew that they existed, that they mattered, and that we could get help from career services. Read more...

I read something recently that said, “By acting as if grading motivates learning, we put both student and faculty energies in the wrong place.” Grades are supposed to assess learning, not be the goal. Students too often see the grade as the thing they go to class for, when they are supposed to go for learning and practice. And it’s the professors’ faults because we hold grades over their heads.
Or is it the professors’ faults?
I wrote this in class. I sometimes use Sondra Perl’s composing guidelines as a pre-writing activity. Many a Chronicle blog post has arisen out of class time with Perl’s guidelines. About five steps in with this one, I looked up and saw about four students studying for another class and at least one sleeping (or close enough to it). Read more...

By William G. Moseley. Study abroad can be a powerful experience for many students. A student’s trip overseas can be one of those transformative educational periods after which a young person will never look at the world the same way again. Yet many students, faculty members, and college administrators don’t take this education as seriously as they should.
Let’s be frank, some students view study abroad as a vacation or at least a time when normal academic standards ought to be relaxed. But as an instructor and director on two different study-abroad programs for undergraduates in South Africa and Botswana, I have sought to expose participants to new cultures and provide academically rigorous courses. Read more...