By Jacob Davidson. A new study shows giving more Americans a college education will help lower-income groups, but won't do much to close the income gap.
There is a growing acknowledgement that inequality is one of the most pressing national issues. President Obama certainly feels that way. In his State of the Union Speech this past January, Obama focused his speech around the issue, framing the debate as a question about the future of America. Read more...

By Abraham Gerber. The 51 public universities and 101 private ones must face up to the reduction in student numbers and some will have to close.
The Ministry of Education yesterday outlined plans to merge universities, as the number of students has been on the decline. Read more...

By David Fickling. In Ballarat, where the first mass Chinese migration to Australia was sparked by a 19th-century gold rush, Federation University is tapping its modern equivalent.
Chinese students are flocking to Australia, making up a fifth of some 400,000 people seeking an education Down Under. At Federation, more than 44 percent of the students attending Australia’s newest university come from overseas with most paying fees that are about double those paid by locals. Read more...

By William Patrick Leonard. For decades America’s public regional universities enjoyed both the relative security of state funding and the benefits of governmental financial aid to their students. Federal and state governments provided aid to qualifying students at the same time that these same institutions steadily increased their tuition fees. Read more...

By Agnete Vabø and Jannecke Wiers-Jenssen. All Nordic countries offer free higher education to their citizens. Traditionally, international students have also been able to study for free in this region but in 2006 Denmark introduced tuition fees for international students coming from outside the European Union and the European Economic Area. Read more...

By Douglas Proctor. The International Education Research Network, or IERN, is a one-stop research portal for the international education community, supporting collaboration between academics, professional staff, governments and industry associations. Read more...

By Madeline Will, The Chronicle of Higher Education. The Indiana state government’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act has stoked national controversy and outrage since Governor Mike Pence signed it into law. Meanwhile, for university leaders in the state, it has become a public-relations nightmare. Read more...

By Geoff Maslen. The nation’s leading Group of Eight, or Go8, research-intensive universities has done a sudden about-turn in its support for the federal government’s higher education reforms and called for an independent “depoliticised” review by the learned academies and employer and business organisations. Read more...

By Jan Petter Myklebust. The Norwegian government has begun the biggest series of higher education reforms since 1994, when 98 higher education institutions were merged into 26 university colleges.
Minister of Education and Research Torbjørn Røe Isaksen said he expected significantly fewer universities and university colleges would result from the reforms than the 33 Norwegian institutions today. Read more...

By Nic Mitchell. New global university rankings released on 30 March and funded by the European Commission, U-Multirank shows the continuing dominance by US universities for their research publications and patents.
But the results of U-Multirank’s second edition also reveal pockets of excellence around the world, with 148 institutions from 29 countries achieving 10 or more top A grades from the 31 institutional indicators used to compile the rankings.
Launched last year in Brussels, U-Multirank or UMR, set out to break the mould of traditional world university league tables, such as those published by QS, Times Higher Education or THE, and the Shanghai Academic Ranking of World Universities. Read more...