By Bahram Bekhradnia. We must return to first principles to develop a fair method of paying for higher education, argues Bahram Bekhradnia. David Willetts did much while he was minister for universities and science, but one thing he did not manage was to create a sustainable basis for funding higher education. More...
03 août 2014
Ideology: the enemy of a sane funding system
Three-minute thesis finalists chosen
By . Elephant poo and ageing among the topics outlined in brief by PhD students. Presentations on elephant poo, ageing and Aids have all made it to the final of a competition that challenges PhD students to describe their thesis in three minutes. More...
Open access papers ‘gain more traffic and citations’
By . Open access science articles are read and cited more often than articles available only to subscribers, a study has suggested. The Research Information Network analysed the web traffic to more than 700 articles published in hybrid science journal Nature Communications in the first six months of 2013. More...
Bank announces £550 million for university projects
By . The Santander banking group is to invest €700 million (£550 million) in university projects over the next four years, a conference has heard. More...
Unconditional degree place offered as prize in competition
By . Falmouth’s course in creative advertising takes unconventional admissions route. A university is offering a “completely unconditional” place on its BA in creative advertising to the winner of a competition challenging potential students to “sell me something you own”. More...
Willetts moots plan for universities to take on student debt
By . Former minister says he looked at idea while in government. Universities should take on their students’ tuition fee debt so that they have an incentive to get their graduates into well-paying jobs, the former universities and science minister has argued. More...
Student visa rules tightened by government
By . Universities and colleges told proportion of visa refusals allowed will halve. More universities could lose their licences to sponsor international students after the government announced it would introduce stricter rules on recruiting students from outside the European Union. More...
Students’ sense of community ‘on the slide’, research suggests
By . Pressure of higher fees and rise in en-suite accommodation blamed. Students’ sense of cohesion and community in accommodation at university is on the wane, with more than one in three failing to form close friendships with those they live with, according to new research. More...
“A little brains, a little talent…”
By Melonie Fullick. The pet-peeve language issue I’m going to look at in this post is a particular way of using the word “talent,” which isn’t really a metaphor per se but more of a quality or attribute that is nominalized and reified in ways that detach it from actual people, and their lives and work. I’ve discussed this briefly before in a post about international mobility, where I described “the extraction and objectification of ‘talent’ as something apart from those who might have it and use it, and transformation into a product available for sale.” But lately it seems like these expressions are popping up more regularly in the higher ed news articles I’m reading. Read more...Coaching graduate students
By Jennifer Polk - From PhD to Life.On my new LinkedIn group (called From PhD to Life, natch), Laura Graham asked me what I thought were “the greatest areas of need” when it came to working with graduate students. At first, I responded briefly: I am a coach, not an editor or mentor-for-hire, which means I take a non-directive approach, and that it was difficult to generalize. Well, yes, but what an unhelpful answer! So a few hours later I responded more fully, reflecting on my own experience coaching graduate students. More...
