The Syria Crisis was highlighted by students and higher education experts meeting to discuss the recognition of higher education qualifications for refugees.
Refugees and displaced persons face special challenges in respect of access to education, one of which is the assessment and recognition of qualifications and access where documentation is missing or incomplete.
On 29 February, 2016, the 7th Meeting of the Committee of the Convention on the Recognition of Qualifications concerning Higher Education in the European Region also known as the Lisbon Recognition Convention (LRC) was held at the UNESCO’s headquarters in Paris. More...

Doctoral Education in South Africa was launched alongside the HERANA 3 meeting in Cape Town on 26 November 2015. Teboho Moja, Chair of CHET and Prof. in Education at New York University, delivered the welcoming address. The authors shared their insights on the key findings of the book, and Prof. Daya Reddy, president of the Academy of Science of South Africa, responded with remarks of his own. More...

Amidst the maelstrom created by the largest and most effective student campaign in post-apartheid South Africa, CHET director Nico Cloete, takes a sober look at the possible consequences of a no-fee higher education system in South Africa. He concludes as follows: "‘Free Higher Education’ sounds revolutionary and is an appealing mobilising ‘cry’. More...

Claudia Frittelli, Program Officer, Higher Education & Research in Africa, International Program at Carnegie Corporation of New York, attended the recent CHET HERANA series of meetings held towards the end of November 2015. She has written the following blog in which she shares her insights on the value of collecting data and developing indicators at institutional level in African universities. More...

In Africa Analysis, Patrício Langa, Gerald Wangenge-Ouma, Jens Jungblut and Nico Cloete argue that South Africa should look to Africa to see that free higher education, which local students are demanding, failed to universalise access or advance social inclusion.
One of the unintended consequences is that free higher education engendered gross inequities. It reproduced and reinforced colonial and post-colonial inequities with regard to distribution of schools and privilege, and therefore of the beneficiaries of free higher education. More...

The graphic below shows how the shape of the South African post-school system has change in the past four years. While there was growth across all sectors of the post-school system from 2010 to 2012, most sectors have not grown from 2012 to 2014. In fact, some sectors, such as private universities and public adult education, have shrunk between 2012 and 2014. The graph also shows that the public college sector grew the most relative to other sectors such as public universities, but, worryingly, so has the number of NEETs. More...

The ESFRI Roadmap 2016 identifies the new Research Infrastructures (RI) of pan-European interest corresponding to the long term needs of the European research communities, covering all scientific areas, regardless of possible location.
The 2016 Roadmap consists of 21 ESFRI Projects with a high degree of maturity - including 6 new Projects - and 29 ESFRI Landmarks - RIs that reached the implementation phase by the end of 2015.

Roadmap 2016 documents

The ESFRI Roadmap 2016 was launched on 10 March 2016, in Amsterdam. The event was organized under the Dutch Presidency by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) in close cooperation with ESFRI, the European Commission and the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science. Discussions focussed on strategic roadmapping, long-term sustainability and the socio-economic impact of research infrastructures. More...

The following section lists a number of useful reference documents that complement the Charter for Access to Research Infrastructures. It includes "background" documents that provide additional information on the themes touched upon in the Charter, "cross-reference" documents which provide the basis for certain text in the Charter and, lastly, the "best practice" documents which provide examples of how the Charter recommendations have already been successfully implemented in different realities. More...

The League of European Research Universities (LERU) will present its new advice paper “Maintaining a quality culture in doctoral education at research-intensive universities” during a breakfast launch event in Brussels on 15 March 2016.
LERU universities have analysed how they develop and review a quality culture in doctoral education and how they implement quality assessment procedures. The result is a paper full of practical examples from the LERU universities on how they define expectations for high quality doctoral education, how they set up scrutiny processes, how they use indicators to measure quality and how they build in feedback mechanisms to enhance a quality culture. In addition to the actual practice examples, the paper also contains a number of recommendations for universities, policymakers and funders in Europe on how to maintain a quality culture in doctoral education. More...