By Beatrice Siu. Nearly 5,000 students who sat the first Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education Examination in April made plans to study overseas, a survey shows.
The Education Bureau said 7 percent, or 4,900 candidates, of those who took the HKDSE - which replaces the Hong Kong Advanced Level Examination - said they would study abroad.
The number is four times the 1,200 students - or 4.5 percent - who made the same plans after sitting the HKALE last year, Secretary for Education Eddie Ng Hak-kim told legislators yesterday.
Education consultants said more students this year inquired or decided to study overseas than in previous years likely because they were worried about the results or were seeking better education. Read more...

By Ann Törnkvist. Sweden could become more attractive to non-EU foreign students if it granted them the right to stay in Sweden to look for work after graduation, the Migration Board (Migrationsverket) has suggested in a new report.
Sweden lost more than half of its non-EU foreign students in the year following the 2011 introduction of tuition fees, according to the report. Several other EU countries give students a window of opportunity to find work after graduation. The report recommends that Sweden look into the same option in order not to deprive the Swedish labour market of well-educated employees.
“If this reform is possible politically speaking, I don’t know,” Migration Board researcher Bernd Parusel told The Local.
"I can't issue a recommendation, just suggest they look into it."
The Migration Board also suggests that a student’s spouse be able to work in Sweden. Some parts of the visa process have already been simplified for students. Read more...

By Tom Katsouleas, Dean of Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering. He serves as Chair of the National Academy of Engineering’s Advisory Committee on Engineering Grand Challenges for the 21st Century.
In a recent editorial, Ray Kurzweil, futurist and Singularity Chancellor, compared the current university model to the bookstore model, suggesting that universities will be undermined by online the way that digital books undermined Borders.  Others have suggested that universities are headed the way of the newspaper.  Others have suggested that online teaching represents a new funding model for universities.
Yogi Berra said predictions are hard, “especially about the future.”  With that in mind there are a couple of perspectives to take from predictions in old issues of Popular Science or Scientific American:  futurists always over-estimate how soon new technology will manifest and researchers in the field always underestimate it. The bottom line, though, is that while online education poses a challenge for universities, they will ultimately improve them. Read more...