By Brendan O’Malley – Managing Editor. Happy New Year to all our readers! In our first World Blog of the New Year, Hans de Wit looks back at the dominant issues in international higher education over the past year and looks forward to what the key developments are likely to be in 2016.
In Commentary, Tianlong Lawrence Hu reflects on the challenge the Communist Party of China faces in bridging the gap between tackling bureaucracy and reinforcing political ideology when it seeks to restrict and punish corruption in university management. Anne Corbett, as convener of a hearing to debate whether it would be wise for the United Kingdom to withdraw from the European Union, says it emerged that there is much more at stake than funding and control. Paul Ashwin argues that, while the OECD’s Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes project is attempting to respond to a genuine problem in measuring higher education quality, the tests of generic skills say nothing about the experience of students.
In Features, Mary Beth Marklein reports that the number of foreign-born university leaders in the United States is growing as higher education becomes an increasingly global enterprise.
Brendan O’Malley unpacks the Higher Education Policy Institute's critique of the UK government's plans to shift further towards a market approach by allowing universities with high standards of teaching to increase tuition fees. Read more...