By Yojana Sharma. Chinese Premier Li Keqiang was touring major universities in China last week to promote the country’s strategy for science and innovation-fuelled economic growth under a new five-year plan announced last month that will triple funding for basic research by 2020. Read more...

By Brendan O’Malley – Managing Editor. This week in our World Blog, Hans de Wit wonders if our higher education leaders are really interested in true innovation, change and social responsibility if they are only focused on rankings.
In Commentary, Tom P Abeles warns that education globally is in transformation and the traditional university cluster as the centre of knowledge is changing. Sigal Alon suggests that reforming affirmative action in college admissions is not about choosing between the race and class models but about determining what aspects to target to achieve the broadest diversity dividends. Ararat L Osipian says if allegations are confirmed against the president of Russia’s flagship Far Eastern Federal University, who has been arrested on suspicion of financial fraud, this will be one of the largest corruption scandals in Russian higher education in the past few decades. And Alejandro Caballero says universities need to find ways to develop cross-cutting skills in students like problem-solving, teamwork and leadership which will withstand turbulences as automation and technology put workers at risk of being substituted by machines.
In our six-month series on ‘Transformative Leadership’ in which University World News is partnering with The MasterCard Foundation, Brendan O'Malley tells the story of how leadership training supported by scholarships helped one young refugee’s quest, with his friends, to challenge the despondency in his camp in Uganda by building an effective education programme and starting a host of anti-poverty projects.
In Features, Jan Petter Myklebust reports on a 20-year-old from the Netherlands studying at Stockholm University in Sweden who has become the youngest PhD holder in Scandinavia. Read more...