A long road lies ahead for Brazil and India in improving their HE systems

By Brendan O’Malley – Managing Editor. In Commentary, Bruno Morche writes that two of the biggest emerging nations, Brazil and India, still have a long way to go with regard to internationalisation of higher education, widening access, science development and achieving world-class universities. Rajika Bhandari examines key developments currently shaping the student mobility landscape in the United States and globally. Simon Boehme explains why students will better serve the goals of education from inside the academy as partners rather than from the outside as protesters. Yulia Grinkevich and Maria Shabanova find it important to maintain a balance between providing adequate support for international students and benefiting from decentralisation of university services to those students, as exemplified by Russia’s Higher School of Economics. And Vice-chancellor of Australia’s Charles Sturt University Andrew Vann says his university is seeking to find a way to honour both Western rationality and traditional Aboriginal knowledge.
   In World Blog this week, Margaret Andrews says higher education institutions need to prepare themselves for an increasingly turbulent environment, and a bit of awareness, advance planning and knowledge can make all the difference.
   In Features, the new QS World University Rankings 2018 suggest that Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, ranked 11th, is most likely to be the first Asian university to break into the world’s top 10 in future. Gilbert Nakweya reports that a UNESCO-organised conference on higher education and research in Djibouti resolved that East African governments should work with universities on climate change, while Andrew Green gives voice to the outcry from academics across Africa following a proposal by the US Trump administration to cut funding for the Fogarty centre, which is mutually beneficial to US and African collaborators. More...