A higher education grant competition has been launched as a major collaboration between the United States and United Kingdom. The Global Innovation Initiative plans to strengthen higher education research partnerships between the US, UK and selected countries – Brazil, China, India and Indonesia.
The two governments expect the initiative to provide grant opportunities for university consortia on topics of global significance in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) in the following four areas: energy, climate change and the environment; agriculture, food security and water; public health and well-being; and urbanisation.
A press release said grants of up to US$250,000 would fund new research activities, faculty and researcher exchanges, joint publications and symposia, and various other multilateral efforts. More...

By Francis Kokutse. Ghana’s public universities are facing a boom in applications, but do not have sufficient facilities to meet growing demand that has been exacerbated by an influx of students from neighbouring countries and a double cohort leaving school this year.
As a result, admission to universities is no longer based on obtaining the required grades – some qualified candidates have been turned down or made to sit additional selection tests. More...

By Gilbert Nganga. Kenya has formally allowed universities to take over tertiary colleges in a new policy framework. But the upgraded institutions must retain their original courses, programmes and mandates, says the policy announced last Thursday by cabinet.
The policy, aimed among other things at stemming a national decline in the number of technical and vocational diploma and certificate courses, also gives the Ministry of Education extra powers over universities in protecting tertiary institutions that are being upgraded. More...

By Ard Jongsma. For the European Union, cooperation with Brazil is not quite the same as cooperation with developing and transition countries has been in past decades. Brazil is a rapidly developing economy with seven million higher education students, and a partner with a huge bag of earmarked funds. Because of this, it can set the tune to a much greater degree than less developed countries.
An EU-Brazil joint seminar on academic mobility, internationalisation and innovation, held at the education ministry in Brazil on 17-18 October, showed that what the Brazilians want more than anything else now is reciprocity. More...

By Jan Petter Myklebust. Fifty years ago the Robbins Report proposed massive expansion of higher education in the United Kingdom – up to 300% over the next two decades. In a report on Robbins, current Universities Minister David Willetts calculates that with British births on the rise again, university places for new entrants will need to rise by another 25% by 2035.
Looking at the number of would-be higher education students who reapply for university after a first rejection, there was unmet demand today of around 50,000 students, Willetts found. Increasing this figure in line with expected demographic change to 2035 would mean the 368,000 current places for first-year students would need to rise to 460,000 entrants.
Willetts authored a report, titled Robbins Revisited: Bigger and better higher education, published by the Social Market Foundation on the 50th anniversary of the hugely influential report of a committee led by Lord Lionel Robbins in October 1963. More...

By David Binder. Poverty is no longer a scourge for the unemployed alone. This statement summarises Alan Milburn’s first State of the Nation annual report on social mobility, launched last week. According to the report of the ex-British Labour Party politician, two thirds of poor children in the UK come from households where at least one person is in paid work (6.1 million poor people in working households: 4.1 million being adults and 2 million being children, 1 million more people than those in workless households). In addition, research tells us that a couple working full time on the UK minimum wage, with two children, falls well short of a ‘socially acceptable standard of living’. To meet this standard, they would in fact need to both earn £9.91 per hour, more than £3 more than the current minimum wage. Combine this with  faltering living standards for those on low to middle incomes and Milburn’s analysis becomes much more understandable. Read more...
David Binder is a Family Fiscal policy Consultant for the Christian social policy charity, CARE, where he conducts in-depth research on Family Tax, Welfare and Benefits. He blogs at: thoughtsofbinder.wordpress.com/