By John Richard Schrock. Police cars blocked the street, parked front bumper to back bumper, forming a barricade to traffic. Five blocks ahead, a similar barricade prevented any oncoming traffic. I had told my taxi driver "Yangling High School" and we had arrived.
I faced the quietest scene in China since I landed in Beijing one week after the Wenchuan earthquake and the whole country came to a halt in a moment of silence. But this was an annual event and is the most critical time in the life of Chinese youth.
It was the second day of the two-day national high school leaving examination or college entrance exam, the gaokao. Read more...

By William Patrick Leonard. The financial relationship between students and their tertiary education institutions partially mirrors a contract. While both sides brings something to the table – tuition in exchange for instructional services with certification upon meeting all requirements – there are important differences. Read more...

By Jack Stripling, The Chronicle of Higher Education. College campuses may seem to be unlikely laboratories for producing viable Tea Party candidates, but this election season the record is surprisingly good. Read more...

By Peta Lee. The number of students studying for a British transnational education award in the United Arab Emirates, or UAE, has seen astonishing growth over the past few years. This includes a 37% increase in students during the past two years – bringing to 15,000 the number studying there for United Kingdom awards.
The UK Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education, or QAA, has just released the findings of a Review of UK Transnational Education in United Arab Emirates: Overview. Read more...

By Nic Mitchell. As demand for full-time English undergraduate education continues to confound the prophets of doom by going up this year – despite the near three-fold increase in tuition fees – concern is mounting at falling applications for postgraduate courses, especially from British students. Read more...

By Junya Ogasawara. Our society is becoming more connected and complicated every day in this era of globalisation, and every country faces so-called global issues such as poverty, human rights, and educational or environment problems, whether directly or indirectly. Many organisations, including the United Nations and higher education institutions, have been tackling these matters. However, there are still many possible avenues these organisations could explore. This is one of the reasons why the United Nations Academic Impact, or UNAI, was launched four years ago in 2010. UNAI is a global initiative that aims to promote the realisation of the aims of the UN through activities and research. Read more...

By Matthew Zingraff and Anne Schiller. International student mobility is on the rise. East Asian students are particularly mobile, and the number electing to remain within the region is growing. Regional education hubs are a means to compete for internationally mobile students.
A case in point is South Korea’s Incheon Global Campus, or IGC, part of a larger business, research and leisure hub in the Incheon Free Economic Zone, near the Incheon metropolitan area. Read more...

By Gulsun Saglamer. The issue of gender inequality is a problem that is as old as human history and we have reason not to be over-optimistic in our expectations when we remember that women were accepted to colleges and universities only 150 years ago.
Data for academic staff by gender shows patterns of both horizontal segregation, for instance regarding women’s lack of participation in scientific areas, and vertical segregation, which is used to define the difficulties women face in terms of career progression.
The European Commission’s She Figures, which present statistics on gender equality in science, show that women stand less chance of reaching senior levels in higher education and research institutions and also of holding positions of influence through membership of scientific boards. Read more...

By Yojana Sharma. Chancellor of JF Oberlin University in Tokyo Dr Toyoshi Satow took over the three-year presidency of the International Association of University Presidents at its 2014 conference held in Yokohama in Japan. He outlined his vision for the IAUP, known as the ‘global voice of higher education’.
UWN: As you take on the IAUP presidency what do you think are the main challenges for university leaders, looking ahead?
Satow: We are all aware the world is rapidly globalising and changing. We are not talking about boundaries any more. We talk about the globe and its citizens. However, we still see many global problems such as complex issues in the world economy, regional or religious conflicts, environmental issues and so forth. Read more...

By Suvendrini Kakuchi. The development of innovation and technology in higher education to meet the world’s rapidly changing needs emerged as the main focus of higher education leaders who gathered in Japan’s port city of Yokohama for the conference of the International Association of University Presidents, or IAUP. 
The theme of the conference was “Creating the Future of Higher Education”, and university presidents have been looking at how universities around the world can collaborate to adapt to an environment that is being transformed by technology and globalisation. Read more...