With less than a month to go until the January 15 deadline, Ucas expert John Madden answers more of your questions about applying to university. As the January 15 Ucas application deadline nears, teenagers across the country are losing sleep over questions ranging from how many times you should redraft your personal statement to which universities make the earliest offers.
1. How long does it take for my welcome letter to come?
It really depends on where you're applying from. Once the application has been sent to Ucas, it can take around 24-48 hours to process. Once processed, the letter will be generated and sent. This can take two to three working days to be received if being sent in the UK, but up to 21 days if being sent overseas.
2. How much does the application cost?
The application fee is £12 for a single choice and £23 for two to five choices. Read more...

By Chris Parr. An interview with former foreign secretary David Miliband is among the first podcasts now available on Times Higher Education's own podcast channel.
Available on both the THE website and via Apple's iTunes service, the podcasts feature a mix of extended interviews with academics and other figures from the world of higher education and the magazine's editorial staff discussing the biggest stories from each week's issue.
Other episodes include an extended interview with National Union of Students president Liam Burns and a discussion with University of Bedfordshire pro vice-chancellor Carsten Maple about the work of the National Centre for Cyberstalking Research. All the podcasts can be streamed or downloaded free of charge. Read more...

A UK student in Guangzhou finds out why Chinese teachers are so keen on memorisation. It's 7.30am and the walk to class takes me past scores of Chinese students reciting English in preparation for a constant stream of tests and exams.
I only recently arrived to study in China, but it doesn't take long to observe that here memorisation is paramount. Remembering rather than understanding appears to be the principal goal of the education system – and that seems archaic to the Western eye. However, the Chinese believe memorising provides a route to understanding.
International studies show that Professor An Ran, dean of international education at South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, explains: "Whereas Westerners see memorisation and understanding as mutually exclusive, Chinese tend to see them as related phenomena."
China's is among the most successful education systems in the world, which would seem to validate this approach. Read more...

By Nick Anderson. Savvy families shopping for college know that tuition typically rises faster than inflation. So Lauren Seely and her parents in Northwest Washington were startled to learn this year that an upper-tier private college on her short list had frozen its price.
Tuition and fees at Mount Holyoke — $41,456 in fall 2011 — would not rise one dollar in 2012. That helped clinch Seely’s decision last spring to enroll at the Massachusetts women’s college. The freeze reflects a growing movement to hold the line on price in higher education’s private sector, a strategy often targeting those who qualify for little or no financial aid but who worry about how to pay for college in uncertain economic times. For many families, aware that sticker prices for private schools can be at least three times higher than for public ones, these concerns are intensifying as application deadlines approach early next month. Read more...

Between the Christmas spending spree and the wait for your student loan to appear, the New Year is a perfect time to make some financial resolutions, says David Ellis.
The New Year is a curious beast. While it leaves most buoyed with a renewed, temporary sense of purpose, for students the first days of January are characterised by two things: obsessive checking of the bank balance; and a feeling in the stomach like it’s attempting an escape through the mouth. Waiting for the student loan to appear and guiltily trying to forget that overspend (curses on that generous, present-giving streak you have) means many fall into an unauthorised overdraft – and brutal bank charges which can blight the next few months. David Ellis is editor of studentmoneysaver.co.uk. Read more...

A growing obsession with funding scale risks crowding out institutions and stifling innovation, suggests Zoë Molyneux.
This will be the year in which the higher education world turns its collective attention to one thing in particular: research. The Research Excellence Framework (REF) looms closer and work is beginning on party manifestos as the coalition moves into the latter half of its reign. As a result, the sector – as well as individual institutions – will be thinking hard about how best to protect their lot and to secure a well-funded research environment well into the next parliament. For institutions, this leads to questions on two different levels. First, how do we as a sector prevent a future claw-back from the research budget by the treasury in a climate where higher education is perceived to have 'done well' in recent funding announcements? Second, should the research budget avoid painful cuts, what is the most effective way to allocate funding which will support high-quality research activities? Read more...

ADRIAN, Mich. — They're the places you think of when you think of "college" – leafy campuses, small classes, small towns. Liberal arts colleges are where students ponder life's big questions, and learn to think en route to successful careers and richer lives, if not always to the best-paying first jobs.
But today's increasingly career-focused students mostly aren't buying the idea that a liberal arts education is good value, and many small liberal arts colleges are struggling. The survivors are shedding their liberal arts identity, if not the label. A study published earlier this year found that of 212 such institutions identified in 1990, only 130 still meet the criteria of a "true liberal arts college." Most that fell off the list remained in business, but had shifted toward a pre-professional curriculum.
These distinctively American institutions – educating at most 2 percent of college students but punching far above their weight in accomplished graduates – can't turn back the clock. Read more...

By D.D. Guttenplan. For a certain kind of European, Asian or Latin American institution, the release of the world university rankings each autumn is an exercise in humiliation. Though often long established, and with good local reputations, these schools lack the endowments, research facilities and sheer size needed to compete with U.S. and British powerhouses like Harvard, M.I.T., Cambridge and Stanford. So when Quacquarelli Symonds, the London-based company behind the QS World University Rankings, announced “a new initiative that gives universities the opportunity to highlight their strength” by paying a fee for the chance to be rated on a scale of one to five stars, the business case was obvious. But so, say critics, was the potential for conflicts of interest. The fees were announced in 2010, though the initiative was not introduced fully until this year. Read more...

By David Priestland. A dated management dogma drives Michael Gove's education reforms, not evidence of what works. With the demise of the "big society", the coalition's claims to be anything more than an unimaginative deficit-cutter are in tatters – except in education, where it has been extraordinarily radical. Last year saw, among other things, plans to impose performance-related pay on teachers, the development of the EBacc exam, and the introduction of £9,000 university tuition fees. What lies behind this hyperactivity? Critics accuse the government of softening up the sector for privatisation. But the education secretary, Michael Gove, and the universities minister, David Willetts, insist that ensuring accountability for taxpayers' money and driving up academic standards are their goals. Read more...