7 octobre 2012

The Globalization of Higher Education

The Globalization of Higher Education: Payment Trends, Challenges, and Solutions. Wednesday, November 14, 2012, at 2:00 p.m. Eastern.
Education has become a global industry, unimpeded by the constraints of geographical borders, time zones, or currencies. However, with all the new opportunities that globalization has offered, there have also been increased challenges and risks. Listen to this 45-minute webinar by Western Union® Business Solutions to learn how your institution can capitalize on these opportunities, while also helping improve business processes and potentially protecting itself against unnecessary risk.
International students represent an increasingly important source of revenue for educational institutions, but traditional payment methods can make handling incoming international fees complicated and expensive. During this webinar, we intend to demonstrate how our online payment solution streamlines the incoming payments process, and potentially helps improve an institution’s cash flow, while reducing administrative costs.
Another challenge for educational institutions is sending payments to overseas vendors, professors on sabbaticals, or students going on exchange. This process can be complicated and expensive, and fluctuations in foreign currencies, particularly exotics, can result in unpredictable losses. We intend to demonstrate the best practices for institutions looking to make payments in exotic currencies, as well as to highly regulated countries like China and India.
In order to illustrate the above points, Eric Gillespie, Finance Operations Manager from St. Andrews University, and Nancy Majerek, Treasury Manager from Notre Dame will provide case study examples of how their institutions were able to leverage the dedicated team of sales and product specialists at Western Union Business Solutions to improve their incoming payment solutions in order to enhance the experience for both their students and back office staff. They will also address how working with Western Union for their outgoing payments helped their Accounting Department budget more effectively and improve vendor relationships. As your university globalizes, learn about how our exciting products and services can help take the hassle out of international payments.

Emplois des seniors - des dispositions transitoires avant l’entrée en vigueur du contrat de génération

Dans le contexte de préparation du contrat de génération, une circulaire interministérielle vient préciser les modalités transitoires pour les branches et entreprises qui auraient dû conclure dans les prochains mois de nouveaux accords en faveur de l’emploi des seniors.
Cette circulaire précise que les entreprises couvertes à la date du 4 septembre 2012 par un accord de branche ou d’entreprise, ou par un plan d’action, sont considérées avoir rempli leurs obligations jusqu’à la date limite de négociation des accords « contrats de génération » qui sera fixée par les dispositions de la future loi.
En conséquence, ces entreprises et branches n’auront pas de pénalité à déclarer et à verser dans cette période et n’auront pas à renégocier d’accords pour une période limitée. Elles pourront dès lors se consacrer pleinement à la préparation de leurs futurs accords « contrats de génération ».
Afin d’inciter les entreprises à mettre en place des accords en faveur de l’emploi des salariés âgés, la loi de financement de la sécurité sociale pour 2009 avait fixé, pour les entreprises employant au moins 50 salariés, une pénalité de % des rémunérations ou gains versés aux travailleurs salariés ou assimilés lorsqu’elles n’étaient pas couvertes par un accord ou un plan d’action.
Le document d’orientation adressé le 4 septembre 2012 aux partenaires sociaux pour les inviter à négocier sur le contrat de génération, indique que ce dernier a vocation à se substituer aux « accords seniors. »
Voir aussi Emploi des seniors - dispositions transitoires avant l'entrée en vigueur du contrat de génération.

Στο πλαίσιο της προετοιμασίας της γενιάς της σύμβασης, η διυπουργική εγκύκλιος διευκρινίζει τις μεταβατικές ρυθμίσεις για τους κλάδους και τις επιχειρήσεις που θα πρέπει να έχουν ολοκληρωθεί μέσα στους επόμενους μήνες νέες συμφωνίες για την απασχόληση των ηλικιωμένων. Η εγκύκλιος αυτή αναφέρει ότι οι εταιρείες που καλύπτονται από τις 4 Σεπτέμβρη 2012 από τη βιομηχανία ή την εταιρεία, ή από σχέδιο δράσης, θεωρείται ότι έχουν εκπληρώσει τις υποχρεώσεις τους μέχρι τη λήξη της προθεσμίας των διαπραγματεύσεων "συμβάσεις γενιά "που θα καθορίζεται από τις διατάξεις του προτεινόμενου νόμου. Περισσότερα...

MOOC’s and the McDonaldization of Global Higher Education

By Jason Lane and Kevin Kinser. We’ve been treated to a rash of stories about how new technological models for higher education raise questions about the viability of the traditional campus. After all, why invest in an elaborate physical plant when virtual education can effectively expand your reach exponentially?
This is of particular interest for global education and multinational universities, as the expense and difficulty of establishing foreign educational outposts may make virtual options seem even more attractive. At this point, though, it’s hard to see how massive open online courses, or MOOC’s, can be the silver bullet to developing globally engaged students or institutions.
To be clear and to set aside a straw-man argument, we don’t believe that MOOC’s were established with global engagement in mind. These entities are mostly about access.
However, they have become popular in overseas markets (for example, 61.5 percent of Coursera’s enrollments come from outside the United States). This development has led some to view MOOC’s as a possible alternative to other forms of global expansion, and to question the relevance of colleges’ establishing physical presences overseas. More...

Global University Rankings: the New Olympic Sport?

By Ellen Hazelkorn. The main global rankings of universities have been published recently and with them, the predictable news headlines. However, over the years, the headlines have taken on a more geopolitical edge: An opinion article in The Wall Street Journal asks “Can U.S. Universities Stay on Top?” Public Affairs Ireland claims, “Irish Universities Lose Ground in World Rankings.” ABS-CBN News in the Philippines says, “Budget Cuts Blamed for Low University Rankings.” And The Telegraph celebrates, “British Universities on the Rise.”
It seems clear that it’s not just university “insiders,” as my colleague Michael Bastedo suggests, who are interested in the rankings. National competitiveness and a country’s ability to attract investment and talent are now bound up in the prestige associated with global rankings.
The pervasive focus on the top 100 can obscure the changing geography of academic activity. While major structural inequalities exist between developed economies and the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), the inequity depends on what is being measured. Many countries in the developed world are experiencing a severe crisis of public and private debt, but Brazil’s development bank has a balance sheet four times that of the World Bank, and China and India are both investing heavily. More...

Australian Higher Education Grapples With the Rise of Asia

By Susan Woodward.The future of Australian higher education wholly depends on staying relevant and competitive as global economic power shifts to Asia.That inextricable link between Asia and Australia was the main theme of the Australian International Education Conference, which attracted about 1,200 delegates here this week from some 40 countries.
Speakers challenged universities, vocational institutions, and the nation to move beyond the aggressive recruitment strategies that have seen Australia achieve the world's highest international-student concentration, or risk losing their edge. Australia's reputation has suffered in recent years as those tactics have increasingly been seen as predatory. Instead, experts said, the nation must treat Asian countries as potential partners.
"The quality of the policy decisions we make now will determine whether we succeed or fail in capturing the tremendous opportunity that the emerging middle class in Asia is offering us," Jason Yat-sen Li, a business-development leader who works in China and Australia, said at the opening plenary session. More...

Open Courses From America Find Ea­ger Au­di­ences in Chi­na

By Angela Chen. Mo Li, a Chinese post­doctoral fellow at the University of Mich­i­gan at Ann Arbor, wrote to a Yale University philosophy professor last year with a strange re­quest. Mr. Li had never met the professor, Shelly Kagan, nor had he ever at­tend­ed Yale.
But while working on a doctorate in developmental biology at the Chi­nese Academy of Sciences, in Bei­jing, Mr. Li and his girlfriend had watched free online lec­tures of Mr. Ka­gan's philosophy course "Death" in the summer of 2010. They liked the course—and the professor—so much that when the two decided to marry, Mr. Li asked Mr. Ka­gan to surprise his future wife with "a sen­tence or two of con­grat­u­la­tions on our mar­riage." Mr. Ka­gan did, and Mr. Li and his wife were de­light­ed to hear from the pro­fes­sor whose open courses have made him a star in a coun­try he has nev­er vis­it­ed.
As more and more courses are offered free to anyone with an Internet connection, some American professors have developed a huge following abroad, particularly in China. Another such scholar is Mi­chael J. San­del, a Harvard University professor whose highly popular po­lit­i­cal-phi­los­o­phy course "Justice" was the first Harvard course to be offered free online. More...

Low quality, social Darwinism drive study-abroad fever

By Qiang Zha. With respect to Chinese higher education, two phenomena have been widely discussed recently. One is that the age of Chinese students who choose to study abroad is becoming younger. Most Chinese students went abroad to study in graduate programmes in the 1980s, then in undergraduate programmes from the late 1990s, but now a rising proportion of study-abroad students are in high schools.
It is estimated that high-school students now account for half or even more of Chinese students who choose to study abroad. Understandably, these high-school students make this choice so that their access and transition to Western universities will be easier and smoother. The other notable phenomenon is the growing call to improve and assure the quality of higher education in China, evident in the emphasis laid in such milestone policy documents as the National Outline for Medium and Long Term Educational Reform and Development (2010-2020) – or the "2020 Blueprint" – and most recently a national working conference on higher education quality control and assurance, held from 22-23 March in Beijing.
A discussion of these two phenomena together may shed some light on why more Chinese students are choosing to study abroad, even though access to higher education in China has been hugely expanded in recent years.
Deterioration of higher education quality
While the world has been stunned by China’s efficiency in moving to mass higher education on a short timeline, why are Chinese students increasingly drawn to studying abroad? Access to universities and colleges in China is much broader than a decade ago. In 2011, among participants in the national higher education entrance examination or gaokao (mostly new high-school leavers), some 78% on average across the country had the chance to go to a university or college. Yet an increasing proportion of Chinese high-school students now choose Western universities instead.
Overall, Chinese higher education enrolment grew at an annual rate of 17% between 1998 and 2010, while the volume of Chinese students studying abroad increased by over 25% annually in the same time span. The number of Chinese students studying in the United States increased by 80% from 1999-2009. In 2011 the number of Chinese students who went to study abroad hit a record 339,700. This figure is expected to rise to between 550,000 and 600,000 by 2014. This group is also getting younger. In the past five years, the number of Chinese students attending private high schools in the US grew by over 100 times, from 65 in 2006 to 6,725 in 2011.
If this tendency continues, it may threaten student supply in Chinese higher education in the long run, combined with China’s demographic change – a projected reduction of 40 million in the 18-22 age group in the population over the next decade. Since 2008, the population of gaokao entrants has shrunk by 1.4 million, for which these two factors are cited as being directly responsible.
As a more immediate consequence, Chinese students are now estimated to contribute more than US$15 billion a year to the economies of their host countries – with US$4.6 billion going to the US alone – equivalent to almost a half of China’s total higher education appropriations in 2008. The fact that more and more Chinese households are becoming well-off could be a factor behind the trend, yet this single factor wouldn’t be sufficient to explain the reasons behind ever growing study-abroad fever among Chinese students and parents. Indeed, there are few cases like China, where the domestic higher education supply and the study-abroad volume are growing dramatically, side by side. In the rapid massification process, Chinese higher education suffered a serious decline in quality. This might be another fundamental reason responsible for the rising study-abroad fever.
Ever since the huge expansion of Chinese higher education enrolment started in 1999, concerns over and criticism of deteriorating quality in teaching and learning have been heard. After 2005, the enrolment expansion was slowed considerably, while attention and resources were gradually shifted to addressing problems associated with quality and equity.
This process was fuelled by the famous question raised by influential scientist Qian Xuesen (or Hsue-Shen Tsien): why have Chinese universities failed to engender innovative minds?
Thus, with respect to higher education, the 2020 Blueprint, officially unveiled in July 2010, placed a focus on improving and assuring quality, aiming to nurture creativity among Chinese students and create a batch of ‘world-class’ universities. The working conference on higher education quality explicitly announced a policy of stabilising enrolment in Chinese universities – with future increases targeted at vocational education programmes, professional graduate programmes and private institutions – while pressing for immediate actions to address higher education quality issues.
Focus on higher education quality
Just before the working conference, the Chinese government unveiled two other important policy documents signalling concrete efforts and more resources to be brought in for this endeavour. More...

Immigration crackdown: over 10,000 student visas revoked

By Benjamin Preiss. THE Immigration Department cancelled more than 10,000 student visas in the past financial year, with many students failing to fulfil course requirements.
The department revoked 2219 student visas in 2011/12 for failure to meet course progress or attendance benchmarks.
Two visas were cancelled on character grounds and 15 visas withdrawn for providing wrong information or bogus documents. A department spokesman said student visas were also cancelled if the holders falsely claimed to be students.
The department cancelled 3107 visas for non-genuine students, breaches of visa conditions and voluntary requests for cancellation. The department is currently compiling figures for the previous financial year. More...

Universities woo foreign students with lucrative courses

By Radhika Seth. When you think of education from a global perspective, most students prefer going to the United States, UK and Australia to complete their graduation. Japan probably doesn’t figure in many students’ lists mainly because of the preconceived notions of language and cultural barriers. However Japanese universities are keeping a tenacious hold on the global student market by offer courses in English and opening localized offices in different countries.
Recruitment and liaison offices are sprouting up in various countries, for example, the University of Tokyo recently inaugurated an office in India, and the Doshisha University, a private university in Kyoto, have their presence in Britain, South Korea and Vietnam, among other countries. State-of-the-art technology, pop culture, manga and anime; basically everything Japan is being used to pull in the foreign students.
Last year in December more than 100 potential recruits attended a promotion held by Tohoku University’s local office at Lomonosov Moscow State University. Endeavors like this resulted in 1,432 foreign students enrolling at Tohoku University as of May. Some universities are opting for partnership with local firms who have foreign offices, for example in April 2011 Meiji University opened an office in China leveraging its ties with JTB Corp., the nation’s largest travel agency. According to the education ministry, Japan boasts of excellent research facilities for students; however foreign students account for only 3.1% of the country’s total undergraduate and master’s degree students.

L'université Sud Toulon Var et la Main à la pâte créent un centre d'enseignement