Formation Continue du Supérieur

Von Tilmann Warnecke. Für Bafög geben Bund und Länder so viel Geld aus wie nie. Dennoch beziehen immer weniger Studenten die staatliche Unterstützung. Das zeigt der aktuelle Bafög-Bericht.
Die Zahl der Bafög-Empfänger ist auf den höchsten Stand seit 30 Jahren gestiegen. Derweuk sind die Durchschnittssätze leicht zurückgegangen. Das geht aus dem 20. Bafög-Bericht hervor, den das Bundeskabinett nun verabschiedet hat. Die Entwicklung der Bundesausbildungsförderung wird alle zwei Jahre überprüft, die jetzt vorgelegten Zahlen beziehen sich auf die Jahre zwischen 2010 und 2012. Mehr...

Von Pierre Ibisch. Nur Universitäten dürfen promovieren, Fachhochschulen nicht. Dabei spielt Forschung dort längst eine wichtige Rolle. Höchste Zeit, ihnen das Promotionsrecht zu verleihen.
Theorie an der Uni, Praxis an der Fachhochschule – diese Aufteilung ist Geschichte. Sonst müsste man allen Studierenden, die nicht Universitätsprofessor werden wollen, von dem Besuch einer Universität abraten. In der Realität kümmern sich die Universitäten längst um Praxisrelevanz und die Beschäftigungsfähigkeit ihrer Absolventen – spätestens seit der Bologna-Reform. Ebenso sind Fachhochschulen längst keine reinen Ausbildungsbetriebe mehr. Mehr...

By Eve Livingston. My campus survey shows a lack of female leadership in areas where women are underrepresented later in life. University societies have long provided like-minded students with a second family on campus, as well as skills and experience that stand us in good stead for future careers. A huge number of us will get involved in a society of some description during our time at university. But are we all benefitting equally from this involvement? More...

By Jana Kasperkevic. The president has struggled to realise state of the union promises regarding wages, debt, housing and other issues. Tonight Barack Obama will deliver his sixth state of the union address as president, with an expected focus on jobs, inequality and middle class mobility. Obama has tackled those subjects before, to mixed results. In 2011, he said that America doesn't measure progress just by the state of corporate profits or the stock market, but rather "by the success of our people" and the quality of life their jobs had to offer. In November, he gave his clearest and longest economic speech on inequality, inspired in part by Pope Francis. More...

By Mona Chalabi. Datablog: Moocs appear to be revolutionising the world of education. We study the numbers to find out whether it's all just a lot of hype.
Distance learning is nothing new. In 1938, the International Council for Correspondence Education was founded in Canada. In the same year, they held their first world conference, attended by 87 delegates. Only three of them weren't from America or Canada. More...

Quiz: Did these famous faces study at Oxbridge or online?
Where did Arnold Schwarzenegger study international marketing of fitness and business administration?
Oxbridge graduates tend to dominate the media, but which of these well-known people studied through distance learning? More...

By Roy Greenslade. Academics across the world are up in arms at a proposal to bar the senior members of the International Studies Association (ISA) from blogging. The proposal says:
"No editor of any ISA journal or member of any editorial team of an ISA journal can create or actively manage a blog unless it is an official blog of the editor's journal or the editorial team's journal.
This policy requires that all editors and members of editorial teams to apply this aspect of the code of conduct to their ISA journal commitments. All editorial members, both the editor in chief(s) and the board of editors/editorial teams, should maintain a complete separation of their journal responsibilities and their blog associations." More...

By Richard Adams and Libby Page. Ucas reveals 4% increase in the number of applicants to UK universities despite slight decline in number of 18-year-olds. The proportion of British 18-year-olds applying to university has reached its highest-ever level, according to figures for undergraduate applications in 2014 – thanks to a surge in applications from London and among women. More...

By Nushy Rose. I thought Oxbridge was for the elite, but after a degree at another university I'm doing a postgrad course there. When I was 16, I wrote an article that ended up on the front page of the Guardian education supplement. That article – based on a weekend taster course at Oxford that my school had sent me on – insisted that Oxbridge was socially elitist, and its application procedure so biased towards private sector applicants that I would no longer consider it as an option for my own higher education. More...

By Nick Petford. Vice-chancellor Nick Petford writes from the Kurdistan camp where refugees have lost an education as well as their homes. As dusk approaches the temperature fall is dramatic. The small groups of residents still outside turn their backs on the cold and return home. Except of course they don't. Home is not here, among the muddy UNHCR-branded tents and water trucks but somewhere all together more hostile. There are now more than 250,000 Syrian refugees in the Kurdistan region of Northern Iraq, itself no stranger to suffering. Remember Saddam Hussein's chemical warfare against the inhabitants of Halajba? They were Kurds, the same people now offering sanctuary to their desperate neighbours. More...