By Maria Elena Hurtado. An Analysis of the Quality Ranking of Chilean Universities 2016, published on 24 November by Universitas: Grupo de Estudios Avanzados en Educación Superior, a Chilean think tank on higher education since 2012, reveals that over the past five years the quality of first degrees went up for all universities. Read more...

By Patrick Blessinger. The Cyrus Cylinder is widely considered to be the world’s first charter of human rights. Created in 539 BC by Cyrus the Great, King of Persia, it declared religious tolerance for all. Read more...

By Ellen Hazelkorn and John Goddard. The recent Brexit vote and the United States presidential election, as well as votes in Italy and Austria, highlight a growing gap between elites and others in society. Read more...

By Hamish Coates. Is higher education worth the cost, time and effort? Does it improve people, make them better citizens and create a more open and more scientific society? Does academic research serve as a catalyst for innovative change. Read more...

By John Aubrey Douglass. The concept of the public 'Flagship University' as a leading national or regional public university has its origins in the emergence of America’s network of public universities in the mid-1800s. It included a devotion to the English tradition of the residential college as well as the emerging Humboldtian model of independent research and graduate studies, in which academic research would, in turn, inform and shape teaching and build a stronger academic community. Read more...

By Bruno Morche. In the past few decades we have witnessed the growing importance of so-called ‘emerging’ countries on the world stage. A large group of countries that were traditionally described as ‘developing’ became known as ‘emerging countries’ or ‘emerging economies’. Read more...

By Victoria Herrmann. I began on 1 January 2016 in American Samoa on a grant from National Geographic. I would spend the next month on the archipelago some 5,000 miles southwest of Hawai’i to kickstart a much larger project that examines the cultural and societal impacts of sea level rise on the United States and its territories. Read more...

By Goldie Blumenstyk, The Chronicle of Higher Education. Scientists, librarians and digital historians from a growing number of universities have begun a crowdsourced effort to copy and archive thousands of federal government websites and data sets related to climate change, the environment and other areas of scientific research that they fear could become compromised or inaccessible under the incoming Trump administration. Read more...

By Aimee Chung. South Korea’s National Assembly last week focused on the role of the prestigious Ewha Womans University as part of its fourth round of hearings into an influence peddling scandal surrounding embattled South Korean President Park Geun-hye. Read more...

By Mushfique Wadud. Bangladesh’s Education Ministry and its higher education regulatory body the University Grants Commission, or UGC, do not see eye to eye on foreign university branches in Bangladesh. Read more...