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By Elizabeth Gasson. Bentley, Burberry and Cambridge University.
What we perceive to be the best of British products for cars and clothes are the shiny labels - those that scream: "I am the best".
Yet, carrying a Cambridge University certificate into a Fortune 500 company interview in Beijing, screams that out loud, too, for Chinese nationals, doesn't it?
Chinese account for 22.6 percent of the total non-EU international population in Britain, according to statistics provided by the Higher Education Statistics Agency in Britain for the year 2010-11. Therefore, this is an imperative market to uphold for the Brits, who rely heavily on international funding to bolster their universities.
"They (Chinese) like brand names. The more unobtainable it is, the better," says Jazreel Goh, marketing director of the British Council, the culture and education section of the British embassy. "They want to be seen." Read more...

The Director of Liberia’s National Commission on Higher Education (NCHE) Dr. Michael Slewion is calling on the Liberia Medical and Dental Council (LMDC) not to incorporate Liberians-China trained medical doctors, because they are not up to the task.
In an interview with this paper yesterday, Dr. Slewion challenged the LMDC to conduct a thorough review of all the credentials of Liberians-China trained doctors prior to their assignment.
According to him, his office was informed that a number of Chinese health centers denied Liberian medical doctors the opportunity to practice on grounds that the Chinese institutions that trained them were quack.
Stressing the need to conduct proper research about scholarship beneficiaries and institutions they may be about to enroll at, the NCHE boss urged government to begin liaising with his office so as to have a unique vetting process. Read more...

By Joseph Xiaojun Zhang. Aligned with what Australian policymakers are now calling the Asian Century, China has become Australia's chief partner in cooperation among students and academics in what is called "knowledge partnership."
A report released last week by Universities Australia, an umbrella organization of Australian universities, said that the country has 39 universities with formal agreements with Chinese partner institutions.
The number of university agreements between the two countries has leapt almost 75 percent in less than 10 ten years, rising from 514 to 885.
Universities Australia chief executive Belinda Robinson told Xinhua that China has become Australia's principal partner in the search for shared knowledge among the peoples of both countries.
"The value of these partnerships to Australia both in terms of productivity, trade, foreign relations and cultural understanding is enormous. What we are talking about here is not selling finite resources, but generating infinite knowledge," Robinson said. Read more...

By Manash Pratim Gohain, TNN. The Academic Financial Trading Platform (AFTP), the first massively open online course (MOOC) platform dedicated exclusively to business education, launched its courses in November 2012 to a growing community of Indian MBA students and executives. Funded by PMC Group, AFTP was founded in 2011 by two Carnegie Mellon University professors, Raj Chakrabarti (systems engineering) and Anisha Ghosh (financial economics), with the aim of delivering an integrated curriculum of business courses to interested students anywhere in the world.

By Uche Nnaike. The Committee of Vice-Chancellors of Nigeria (CVC) said at the weekend that Nigerians spend an average of $500 million annually on European and American universities. This was contained in a communiqué issued at the end of a two-day Consultative Policy Dialogue on the Future and Relevance of the Nigerian Universities and other Tertiary Institutions, organised by CVC and Trust Africa, Dakar.
The communiqué, signed by Prof. Michael Faborode, noted that the amount was about 70 per cent of the total allocation in 2008 to all federal universities. It said this was an indication of the loss of faith in Nigerian universities as shown by the rush for foreign institutions, even to other African countries.
The committee noted that constant restiveness of students between host communities, school administration, weak governance structures and processes were some of the challenges facing the Nigerian Higher Education sector, reported the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN).
According to the communiqué, the challenge have contributed to the disruptions of the academic calendar, including the constant bickering between the academic staff union, other staff unions, university management and government. Read more...

By Michael Stratford. The U.S. House of Representatives on Friday passed legislation that would reallocate up to 55,000 green cards to foreign graduates of American research universities who receive advanced degrees in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics.
The bill, called the STEM Jobs Act, was approved by a 245-to-139 vote. The measure would eliminate an existing "diversity visa" program that currently provides 55,000 visas a year to people from countries with low rates of immigration to the United States. Under the legislation, those visas would be redirected to highly educated graduates. The bill would create a new category of visas specifically for foreign students who graduate from an American research university with a doctorate or master's degree in a STEM field.
Proponents of the bill, which included nearly all House Republicans and 27 Democrats, said the new program was essential for economic growth and maintaining the nation's global competitiveness because it would keep highly trained, in-demand workers in the United States. Read more...

Hungary's government on Thursday unveiled a broad-reaching plan that aims to make higher education accessible to more students while creating disincentives for dropping out.
The main points of the plan, approved by the government at a cabinet meeting on Wednesday, were outlined by government spokesman András Giró-Szósz and deputy state secretary for higher education Zoltán Maruzsa at a press conference.
Giró-Szász said the plan aims to level the playing field and allow more Hungarians to enter college or university. The merit-based system will allow as many people as possible to enter university, not just the ones with money, he said. State-sponsored student loans, under the aegis of the Diákhitel 2.0 programme, will serve as a disincentive for leaving university before graduating, he said, adding that the dropout rate is almost 50% at present.
Giró-Szász announced measures designed to encourage students to take out the loans through helping loan repayment. State organisations will take over the student loans from their employees, he said, and private sector employers who take over the loans will be offered "significant tax write-offs". He noted that repayments for graduates start at just 4% of earnings. Giró-Szász did not reveal the exact number of state scholarships to be available next year at the press conference but confirmed that they were the same as numbers in a proposal reported in the press. Read more...

By Sarah Harris. Nearly one in five degree courses has been scrapped since the tripling of tuition fees to £9,000-a-year, it has been revealed.
Universities are concentrating on popular subjects and dropping courses that have too few applicants or are too expensive to run.
Official figures show a cull of more than 2,600 in the number of courses available to applicants planning to start their degrees in 2013.
More than 5,200 courses had already been removed for students beginning this year - the first cohort to face the higher fees.
Universities dumped some of the courses even after prospectuses went online earlier this year and in some cases after applications began, according to reports yesterday. Read more...

By Myint Oo. For half a century the people of Myanmar have lived under dictatorship in a veritable police state. The country has been isolated and devastated, with its entire infrastructure, including its health and education sectors, destroyed.
With the emergence in the past two years of a quasi-civilian government, a process of reform has begun. Opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi was allowed to enter parliament. US-Myanmar relations improved. United States President Barack Obama made a historic visit to Yangon, and gave a speech at the Yangon University Convocation Hall. “I came here because of my respect for this university…it must reclaim its greatness because the future of this country will be determined by the education of its youth,” he said.
Following Obama’s stated commitment to advancing education in Myanmar, the Institute of International Education (IIE) has launched an initiative involving the participation of nine US institutions in a strategic planning process aimed at developing partnerships with universities in Myanmar and assisting the rebuilding of higher education capacity in the country. Myanmar citizens have welcomed the IIE’s initiative and interpreted its announcement in the following way: "The eagles are coming to dance with the peacocks." the ‘dancing peacock’ is the emblem of Yangon University.
It is hoped that the launch of the International Academic Partnership Programme (IAPP) in Myanmar will help to reclaim the greatness of Myanmar’s universities and bring about the potential emergence of US-standard universities. During the 1950s, Yangon University was one of the top institutions in Asia. Now Myanmar's universities have been demoted and lag behind, ranked between 12,000 and 20,000 worldwide, according to the Webometrics Ranking Web of Universities. Read more...