United States Secretary of State John Kerry last week officially launched Vietnam's first private non-profit university in Ho Chi Minh City, writes Ha Anh for Thanh Nien News. Read more...

By David Stremba and Scott Spragg. Every other day in the United States press there is a headline warning of an impending “China Crisis”, whereby the steady stream of Chinese students seeking US education will presumably dry up and universities which foolishly put all their eggs in the China basket will be left in the lurch, forced to consider shuttering in the face of huge budgetary deficits. Read more...

Several Swedish colleges and universities are charging students who hope to come to Sweden to study from outside the European Union thousands of krona in tuition fees, even when the students never actually make it to Sweden, reports Swedish Radio News. Read more...

By Craig Whitsed and Wendy Green. The long anticipated Australian National Strategy for International Education 2025 was released to the public on 30 April 2016. This document represents the culmination of a year-long process of consultation with stakeholders, which began with the release of a draft strategy for public comment. Read more...

By Nico Cloete. The students and vice-chancellors used countries such as Norway and Germany as examples of free higher education: the students to argue for free tuition, the vice-chancellors to argue that South Africa cannot afford it (Cloete 2016). Read more...

By Jane Marshall. The continental African Training and Research Centre in Administration for Development, or CAFRAD, and France’s elite HEC business school have signed an agreement to train leaders and high-level officials. Read more...

By Brendan O’Malley – Managing Editor. We launch the first in a global series of Special Reports on student movements and issues, aimed at deepening understanding and debate on what is transpiring across the student world. This week there are articles on student activism in Chile, Japan and India. Also, Rachel Brooks looks at what is driving the rise in student protest movements and why some are successful, and Nico Cloete investigates the vexing question of what proportions governments, business and individuals should contribute to higher education, and finds a ‘trilemma of trade-offs’.
On a similar theme, in our World Blog David Palfreyman says the funding of mass higher education is under-researched by academics but existing studies suggest that neither a free model nor one entirely funded by students is fair.
Going Global, the British Council’s flagship higher education conference, was held from 3-5 May in South Africa, with University World News as a media partner. Karen MacGregor reports on a British Council study which found that 75% of the more than 200 universities surveyed globally are involved with at least one social enterprise. And Munyaradzi Makoni says recent case studies from Ukraine, Morocco and Bahrain have highlighted the capacity of quality assurance in higher education to support nation-building in various ways.
And in our series on Transformative Leadership in which University World News is partnering with The MasterCard Foundation, Marybeth Gasman suggests that widening participation requires that faculty take on innovative and challenging teaching methods to engage an increasingly diverse student population and the student-centred approach of Minority-Serving Institutions in the US provides a useful role model. Read more...