By Peta Lee. Modifications to existing systems in Europe are vital to removing barriers and improving the recognition of immigrants’ foreign qualifications, according to a European Union-funded report titled Tackling Brain Waste. The document, compiled by Madeleine Sumption for the Migration Policy Institute’s project Immigration, Skills, and Mobility in the Transatlantic Labor Market, concluded that more detailed evidence on the costs and benefits of possible interventions was needed if policy decisions were to be directed more effectively. The report pointed out, for example, that little was known about how employers valued formal assessments of qualifications equivalence (or if they were even aware of the various types of policy designed to facilitate recognition internationally), and many of the programmes to support retraining had never been evaluated. More...

By Wachira Kigotho. The absence of nearly all African universities from global ranking systems has been of major concern to potential students, parents, employers and other stakeholders, who feel locked out of making informed choices on the quality of universities in Africa. But Nigeria – which has one of the largest higher education systems on the continent, comprising 128 universities – has established a national ranking system, the first of its kind in Africa. In 2001 Nigeria’s National Universities Commission, or NUC, developed a set of indicators of verifiable data that could help prospective students to make career choices.
“There was also the desire by the government to have a transparent and objective mechanism for identifying centres for excellence that could benefit from preferential funding,” said Professor Peter Okebukola, a former executive secretary of the NUC, in a study on Nigeria’s experience of ranking published in UNESCO’s recent report on Rankings and Accountability in Higher Education: Uses and misuses. More...

By Jan Petter Myklebust. The European Court of Justice, or ECJ, of the European Union has been ruling against discriminatory practices regarding student financial aid for the children of migrant workers, and regarding discounted public transport fares. But the European Students’ Union has warned that the grant system in several states might be at risk.
In the case of Elodie Giersch and others v Luxembourg, on 20 June the court ruled that three European Union (EU) citizens were entitled to support because their parents worked in Luxembourg. The students could not be discriminated against on the basis of nationality.
“While stating that Luxembourg legislation which excludes the children of frontier workers for entitlement to financial aid for higher education studies pursues a legitimate objective, the court holds that the current system goes beyond what is necessary to attain that objective.”
The court explicitly said that the objective of increasing the number of Luxembourg citizens with a higher education degree could be “attained using less restrictive measures”. Read...

By Jan Petter Myklebust. Of the 252,827 students exchanged under the Erasmus programme during 2011-12, around 75,000 – 30% – moved between 100 sending or receiving universities. Spain dominated the list, with 31 institutions in the top 100 for both sending and receiving students. The University of Granada was the top sending and top receiving university, sending 2,101 of its students abroad under Erasmus and receiving 2,052 Erasmus students. Among the top 100 receiving institutions, only four were in the United Kingdom and only one – the University of Nottingham – was in the top 100 for sending universities. More...

By Maina Waruru. East Africa has a second Islamic university, after Kenya’s Commission for University Education, or CUE, granted a letter of interim authority to Umma University to offer various degree and diploma courses. On 23 July the university transformed from being Thika College for Sharia and Islamic Studies to a full university owned and managed by Islamic institutions in Kenya led by the Supreme Council of Kenya Muslims. Umma University, which says its vision is to be a “centre of excellence and a seat of knowledge” in East Africa, is busy setting up a new main campus in Kajiado county, some 70 kilometres south of Nairobi. More...

By Kudzai Mashininga. Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe has promised to improve higher education quality and access, following his re-election in a disputed poll on 31 July that handed him what is believed to be his last term in office. Mugabe (89), who presides over a country with the highest literacy rate in Africa, made the pledge at his last rally before voting day. The president said that when he took over the reins in 1980, at independence from Britain and white minority rule, only one person in the previous administration’s public service had a degree: George Smith, who he was later appointed a high court judge, now retired. Today, Mugabe claimed, Zimbabwe has the most degreed state employees in Africa. More...

By David Jobbins. UK students’ satisfaction with their courses is being maintained, according to the 2013 National Student Survey, published last Tuesday. The survey, conducted annually by Ipsos MORI since 2005, gathers opinions mainly from final-year undergraduates on the quality of their courses. Aimed at current students, the survey asks undergraduates to provide “honest feedback” on what it has been like to study their course at their institution.
The 2013 survey shows that 85% of respondents are satisfied overall with their course – the same proportion as in 2012. A further 7% were neither satisfied nor dissatisfied, while 7% were dissatisfied. The vast majority of students responding to the survey began their courses in 2010, two years before the government introduced its controversial policy under which universities in England were permitted to charge tuition fees of up to £9,000 (US$14,000) a year. More...

By Alya Mishra. A ruling by India’s Supreme Court that appointments for highly specialised teaching positions in medical colleges cannot be subject to affirmative action caste-based quotas has led to a political uproar that has disrupted the current session of parliament, where a number of higher education bills are pending. The issue of caste reservations is highly political, with elections due in five states and national elections scheduled for 2014. Political parties frequently curry favour with specific caste groups or ‘vote banks’ by promising quotas in government jobs. Medical positions are among the most prestigious of these. More...

By Karen MacGregor. The United States held steady in the just-published Academic Ranking of World Universities, or ARWU, dominating global higher education with 17 universities in the top 20 and 149 in the top 500 – one fewer than last year. Some institutions swapped places in the top 20 but they were all still there except for the University of Tokyo, which slipped a place to make way for the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, ETH Zurich. “In continental Europe, ETH Zurich becomes the first university in the region listed among the world top 20 in the history of the ARWU, the ranking stated when releasing the results on Thursday. More...

By Eugene Vorotnikov. Russia’s government plans to increase its control over higher education quality by regularly monitoring graduate employment. The first monitoring exercise will be completed in November, with the results to be taken into account in compiling national university rankings in 2014. According to the Ministry of Education, universities that have the worst records regarding graduate employment will be closed and their licences will be revoked. The government plans to draw on Western experience of graduate employment monitoring, using the Financial Times Global MBA Ranking as a guide in designing its own system. More...