By Elizabeth Gibney. New assessment scheme will not be used to direct cash to institutions.
As the UK braces in anticipation of the full impact of the 2014 research excellence framework, its seventh country-wide research assessment exercise, Europe's other research giant has just given the green light to the introduction of its own assessment system. Eight years in the making, Germany's Research Rating (or Forschungsrating) has so far consisted of four subject-level pilots, with evaluations carried out in chemistry, sociology, electrical engineering and British and American studies. On 25 January the German Council of Science and Humanities (the Wissenschaftsrat) approved plans to roll out the system across all fields.
A working group has been tasked with developing a detailed proposal on how the system will be organised. Although a number of questions remain, within a couple of years the system will be implemented across the board, Rainer Lange, head of research at the council, told Times Higher Education. The subcommittee that designed the Research Rating looked at both the UK and the Dutch assessment systems in designing the process, and it opted for a system more like that of the Netherlands. Read more...

By Ronald Roach. The national movement to make higher education institutions more transparent in terms of their comparative costs and student outcomes got a lift from the Obama administration with the launch of the web-based College Scorecard resource tool on Wednesday. President Obama, during the State of the Union address on Tuesday, announced the “new College Scorecard” as a web resource “that parents and students can use to compare schools based on a simple criteria—where you can get the most bang for your educational buck.” As a feature in the College Affordability and Transparency Center section, the College Scorecard is accessible through the White House website.
“Through tax credits, grants and better loans, we’ve made college more affordable for millions of students and families over the last few years. But taxpayers can’t keep on subsidizing higher and higher and higher costs for higher education,” Obama said. “Colleges must do their part to keep costs down, and it’s our job to make sure that they do.” Read more...

By Jim Browne. The higher-education landscape has reached a tipping point. Growing international competition; increasing privatisation and the challenge posed by Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) mean that on a global scale, higher education is in a state of metamorphosis. At home, increasing student demand, funding challenges, a proliferation of choice and calls for programme rationalisation, alongside concerns about admissions systems, have brought the sector to a transition point.
The Higher Education Authority (HEA) has published proposals for the future of higher education. One thing has emerged from these proposals: institutions can no longer operate in isolation; they must collaborate. In the past the focus was on individual institutions, but now the HEA envisages regional clusters or ecosystems of higher education within geographical boundaries. These will be composed of diverse institutions co-operating to meet the social and economic needs of the country. I have long argued for a network of collaborating institutions, each of which develops and maintains excellence in selected complementary areas. Read more...