02 juin 2013
Universities are engines of continent’s development
By Russel Botman. In the light of Africa Day celebrations on 25 May and the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the Organisation of African Unity – predecessor to the African Union, or AU – it is timely to look at the role of higher education in ensuring that the continent’s rapid economic progress results in sustained human development. Africa is increasingly being identified as a success story. Analysts have noted that the international discourse has shifted from Afro-pessimism to Afro-optimism. This is largely on the back of the continent’s good economic performance. Read more...Film students get a shot of reality at Cannes festival
By Alecia D McKenzie. Rain, robbery and revelry – these are three of the things for which the 2013 Cannes Film Festival will be remembered. But overlooked in all the headlines about bad weather, stolen jewels and partying stars were the hundreds of film students from around the world trying to find financing and an audience at Cannes. The festival, which took place from 15-26 May in this coastal French city, selected 18 films – 14 fiction films and four animated films – from among a massive 1,550 submitted from 277 film schools. Read more...Creating globally recognised degrees
By Roger Y Chao Jr. Despite global interdependencies and initiatives towards globalisation and regionalisation of higher education, there are still a number of barriers to mutual recognition of higher education degrees and qualifications. Although regional and national quality assurance and qualifications frameworks have been developed and even implemented, challenges brought about by different grading systems across national and regional higher education systems – and even within the same university – need to be investigated and rationalised. Read more...Slashing fees and attracting foreign doctoral students
By John Gerritsen. New Zealand has deliberately courted foreign PhD students by subsidising them as if they were New Zealanders, allowing universities to charge them the same fees as locals since the subsidy was introduced in 2006. Recently the country announced a marketing drive backed by millions of dollars to attract more international students. Foreign PhD students are not eligible for government student loans or allowances but, with fees between NZ$5,000 and $6,000 (US$4,100 and $4,980) a year, they are paying less than a fifth what their compatriots are paying for undergraduate and non-doctoral postgraduate study. Read more...International doctoral students now outnumber locals
ByLukas Baschung. During the past 20 years the number of doctoral students in Swiss universities has almost doubled, from 11,588 in 1992 to 22,716 last year. An important factor in this spectacular growth has been the attraction of a steadily growing cohort of foreign PhD students. Indeed, while they comprised about a fourth of all doctoral candidates in 1992, for the last two years international PhD students have been in the majority. Data from the Swiss Federal Statistical Office indicates that foreigners comprised nearly 52% of all PhD students in 2012. Read more...Doctoral and international student numbers soar
By Sune Balle Hansen. ‘Vision 2020’ set by the government targets Malaysia to be a high-income nation by 2020. As highlighted in the 10th Malaysia Plan 2011-15, one of the means of achieving this goal is through the development of quality human capital. In recent years Malaysia has been focusing heavily on developing the research quality and quantity of its major universities, and the country spends 1% of GDP on research and development, as stipulated in the 10th Malaysia Plan. Read more...How are we doing higher education internationalisation?
By Marc Tadaki. Internationalisation has become a mantra in higher education. The knowledge economy is a global network, we are told, and universities across the world are encouraged to ‘plug in’ in various ways in order to reap the benefits of global interconnectedness, as well as to avoid the perils of parochialism. Rankings are the new currency of quality, English the official language of science – there is a discourse of convergence that promotes the inevitability of a singular vision for university structure, function and aims. Read more...How are we doing higher education internationalisation?
By Marc Tadaki. Internationalisation has become a mantra in higher education. The knowledge economy is a global network, we are told, and universities across the world are encouraged to ‘plug in’ in various ways in order to reap the benefits of global interconnectedness, as well as to avoid the perils of parochialism. Rankings are the new currency of quality, English the official language of science – there is a discourse of convergence that promotes the inevitability of a singular vision for university structure, function and aims. Read more...PhD mobility ebbs and flows, but most graduates return
BySimon Schwartzman. With 190 million inhabitants and about 592,000 foreign-born residents, Brazil is a relatively closed society, in spite of a long history of African slave trade until the mid-19th century and large inflows of Italian, German, Portuguese and Japanese immigrants until World War I. Today, most of the immigrants come from Portugal, Japan, Italy, Spain and border countries such as Paraguay, Bolivia, Argentina and Uruguay. About a fifth – 140,000 – have higher education degrees, coming mostly from Portugal, Italy, Argentina and Spain, according to data from the 2010 National Household Census. Brazil graduates about 12,000 doctoral students a year in its universities, up from 4,000 in 1998, and they go on to work mostly in the higher education sector and research (77%). Read more...COIL – Virtual mobility without commercialisation
By Hans de Wit. Much, if not all, of the debate in higher education seems to be focused these days on massive open online courses, or MOOCs, which according to several people should be considered nothing less than a revolutionary new model for higher education teaching and learning. In the meantime, a slower burning addition to international teaching and learning is already taking place with much less attention – ‘virtual mobility’, as it is called in Europe, or ‘collaborative online international learning’ (COIL), as it is more correctly referred to in the United States. Read more...
