By Karen MacGregor. There were 250 delegates from 28 countries at the first Global Conference on the Internationalisation of Higher Education, more than a third of them from outside host country South Africa. Read more...

By Karen MacGregor. With nearly five million study abroad students worldwide and millions of refugees escaping conflict or in search of a better life, international credential evaluation has never been more important, says evaluation expert Margaret Wenger. Read more...

By Karen MacGregor. “Education is more than access to information. Education is also a way to see that information in itself is not education,” says Dutch higher education expert Hanneke Teekens. Therefore, universities will remain very important institutions that produce leaders, “especially in an intercultural context and in an interconnecting world”. Read more...

By Karen MacGregor. Developments over three decades have placed one issue centrally on the agenda for higher education internationalisation – the huge and growing challenge of global inequality – says Professor Derrick Swartz, vice-chancellor of Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, or NMMU, in South Africa. Read more...

By Yojana Sharma. Universities in Japan and South Korea dominate a ranking of Asia’s most innovative universities based on data from publishing giant Thomson Reuters. Of the top 20, 17 are in Japan and South Korea, with Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology or KAIST, and Japan’s University of Tokyo heading the pack, according to the ranking released last week. Read more...

By Yojana Sharma. The Sustainable Development Goals, in particular Education 2030, are providing renewed impetus for region-wide and global principles for higher education qualification recognition across borders, according to delegates at a meeting of Asia-Pacific countries hosted by UNESCO to address challenges facing the region’s growing numbers of internationally mobile students. Read more...

By Michelle Paterson – Acting Editor. In a series on ‘Transformative Leadership’ in which University World News is partnering with The MasterCard Foundation, Judith Eaton, who leads one of the international organisations that have taken a stand against academic corruption and issued an advisory statement, says the gains that could be made have far outweighed the risks.
In Commentary, Tom P Abeles points to how universities are evolving, with academia shifting to competency as a measure both of faculty and students. Ranjit Goswami says the model curriculum idea proposed in India will not provide a quick fix to raising higher education quality in an era of mass expansion in enrolment.
In World Blog, Hans de Wit, Andrés Bernasconi and Daniela Véliz-Calderón find in a recent study that Catholic universities are in a state of flux not only with regard to their internationalisation strategies but also in their understanding of what it means to be a Catholic university in the world today.
In Features, Nic Mitchell reports that British universities are looking at expanding transnational education on the European mainland amid fears that there could be a dramatic decline in European student numbers in Britain post-Brexit. And following the publication last week of Australia’s Good Universities Guide, Geoff Maslen looks at the proliferation of good university guides across the world.
Last but not least, University World News was the media partner for the first Global Conference on the Internationalisation of Higher Education, held in late August in the Kruger National Park in South Africa. In a Special Report, Karen MacGregor writes that the idea was to create an inclusive platform where voices from the global South and North would carry equal weight in an internationalisation debate. Read more...