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By Chris Parr. The move to make nursing an all-graduate profession has not had a detrimental effect on the quality of care, an independent commission on the future of nurse education has found. According to the final report of The Willis Commission, published today, the move to degree-level nursing registration has become “a lightning conductor for disquiet, offering a simplistic and erroneous explanation” for a perceived increase in the number of cases where nurses have been found to neglect their patients.
“Anxiety among patients and the public – regularly fuelled by sections of the media – that graduate nurses will be less compassionate and caring than nurses without degrees provides a turbulent backdrop to the many unresolved challenges facing nursing education today,” says the report, titled 'Quality with Compassion: the future of nursing education'. More...

By Anna Fazackerley. The move to focus PhD funding on 'world-leading' institutions is being met with fierce resistance from other universities. Ask a senior academic about their PhD and they may recall their desperate scramble to break the silence by speaking to the postman in the mornings, or the supervisor who thought training meant breathing the same air as them every so often. Janice Robottom, who started her bioscience PhD at Leeds University last month, is already having a vastly different experience. At 33, she is embarking on a PhD researching biosensors having had children and a career in high-street banking. As well as two supervisors in different departments and a third tutor for independent advice, Robottom is relieved to know she is surrounded by lots of research students in related fields...
The elite Russell Group fanned the flames last week with a report urging the government to focus funding on the "jewels in the crown" or risk falling behind globally. It quotes a "strong body of evidence" that doctoral training is best carried out in world-leading universities. Million+ slammed the report as "entirely outdated". More...

By Amy Lewis. It's advising season on my campus. My management students will want guidance selecting their spring classes. Their major classes are easy to pick -- we have checklists and flowcharts to let them know what they "need" to take. It's the general education requirements and free electives that stump them. I typically point out that employers want well-rounded employees who can draw on a breadth of knowledge. Sometimes I share that the best course I took as an undergraduate was a physical geography class completely unrelated to my major — that you never know which class will completely captivate you. This fall, I will tell my students something different as I urge them to consider taking classes outside of the business school: Those who don’t learn from the past are doomed to sell offensive T-shirts.
Last week, I was browsing the web, looking for current events to discuss in my undergraduate management classes. I came across several mentions of a T-shirt being sold by the Gap bearing the phrase "Manifest Destiny" and the unsurprising outrage and calls for Gap to stop selling the shirt and to offer a formal apology. Facing protests that the shirt was, at best, culturally insensitive and could easily be interpreted as glorifying the massacres and cultural destruction of Native Americans, the designer apparently issued a flippant tweet about the survival of the fittest. Quickly, Gap stopped selling the shirt, and issued an apology. More...

UNIVERSITY study and vocational training remain weak in the latest overseas student statistics but the English college sector appears to have stabilised.
In figures for the year to September, higher education starts across source countries fell 7 per cent, with new university students from China down 8 per cent to 35,176. China remains Australia's No. 1 university market, accounting for 41 per cent of enrolments.
Higher education commencements out of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh combined rose almost 20 per cent in the year to September. By enrolment, these three nations of the Indian subcontinent represent 8.4 per cent of the total, compared with Malaysia's 7.2 per cent. New student numbers from Malaysia have been in decline. The year to date figures from Australian Education International show continued weakness in vocational education and training, with commencements lower by 11.7 per cent. More...

By Bob Boughner. Officials of three major agricultural universities in China are interested in the idea of establishing an international campus in Chatham-Kent, says Michael Burton.
Burton, the municipality's director of economic development, has just returned from a two-week visit to China along with Mayor Randy Hope and Chatham area business entrepreneur Jorge Lamas.
Burton told The Chatham Daily News Wednesday the potential international campus would be established in collaboration with the Ridgetown campus of the University of Guelph.
"Officials with the Chinese universities were quite enthusiastic regarding our proposal,'' he said. "We expect further discussions in Chatham-Kent in 2013.''
He also revealed that a multi-billion dollar Chinese company is currently reviewing a non-disclosure agreement with Chatham-Kent to allow further discussions on a major investment proposal.
Burton said a number of meetings were also held with city mayors and outbound investment officials at the city and provincial levels. More...

By Ida Torres. Newly appointed Education Minister Makiko Tanaka rejected three applications to create new universities, calling into question the current situation of higher education in the country. Tanaka remarked that while numerous universities have been created, the quality of university education has deteriorated.
The increase in the number of universities in Japan, reaching 783 this year, could be attributed to the relaxation of the government’s regulations on establishing universities. Normally, organizations aiming to create a university are required to apply to the Education Ministry by the end of March, after which an advisory council will screen the applicants based on criteria such as financial plans, number of teachers, campuses, and buildings, and others. More...

Par Marion Duclos-Grenet. Sans être euphorique, la première moitié de 2012 avait été porteuse pour l’emploi des jeunes. Et notamment des plus diplômés. Sans être encore catastrophique, la deuxième partie se traduit par une nette détérioration du climat, y compris pour les plus diplômés. Si le mois dernier, dans sa dernière enquête portant sur l’insertion des diplômés 2011 sur l’année 2012, l’Association pour l’emploi des cadres (APEC) ne notait pas encore de dégradation elle rappelait que les jeunes diplômés sont « les premiers affectés par les retournements de la conjoncture ». « J’ai mis un an avant d’obtenir un poste en logistique à la hauteur de mon diplôme dans une grande entreprise international », raconte ainsi Virginie, diplômée d’une grande école d’ingénieurs. Comme elle ils étaient encore cette année plus de 39% de jeunes diplômés à trouver leur premier emploi plus de 10 mois après la fin de leur études, selon la dernière enquête de RégionsJob.
Des diplômés pas tous égaux
La dernière enquête « emploi » de la Conférence des Grandes Ecoles a souligné une évolution paradoxale subite par le marché: amélioration pour les plus diplômés et dégradation pour les moins diplômés. Si la chance sourit à la plupart d’entre eux, comme par exemple, à Emilie qui, à 24 ans, vient de décrocher un CDI chez Snecma à la suite d’un stage effectué dans cette même entreprise, tous les « jeunes dip’ » ne sont pas dans le même cas. Ils sont peut-être nombreux à trouver leur job par le biais de leur stage (15% selon RégionsJob), mais nombreux, aussi, sont ceux qui attendent d’intégrer le monde de l’entreprise. Suite de l'article...

By Andrew Marszal. Thirty-two per cent of students reported they had been unable to sleep because they were worried about the state of their finances, according to a recent survey.
Nearly one in three students suffer from insomnia as a result of worrying about their finances while at university, a survey has found. The survey, which was carried out by the student money saving website studentbeans.com, also found that money worries had triggered depression in 20 per cent of students. Thirty-seven per cent of students reported experiencing some form of anxiety about the state of their bank accounts. The findings will increase fears that the hike in tuition fees for British and EU students to a maximum £9000 per year – which came into effect this autumn – is putting teenagers off university due to fears of accruing large debts. Applications to universities this year dropped by 7.4 per cent nationally. UK university students were asked to describe their spending habits as part of an online Youth Spending Survey 2012 poll. More...

New Delhi: The university system was not producing "well-educated" graduates to meet needs of Indian companies, giving an opportunity to firms to enter the sector in the "guise" of training, Minister of State for Higher Education Shashi Tharoor Monday said.
He also said that the national education policy in the past has been out of step with the times.
"The major problem remains that our national education policy in the past has remained out of step with the time. Whereas countries in the Middle-East and China are going out of their way to woo foreign universities to set up campuses in their countries, India turned away many academic suiters who have come calling in recent years," he said. More...

By Rajan Menon. I've had it with globalization. In my line of work, academe, it's virtually impossible these days to avoid hearing senior university officials begin a speech (especially at commencement or at a conclave of would-be financial benefactors) with the solemn observation that "we live in a globalized world," that states and borders are of diminishing significance, that higher education must be loaded with "global content" (a vacuous, unlovely, though ubiquitous, term), and that students must be taught to become "global citizens."
There isn't a single college president, provost, or dean who fails to peddle this line, which, by virtue of its ubiquity, has become a cliché. I think that there's a secret mountain somewhere whose summit these folks scale every so often to receive, from a robed sage with a long white beard, a tablet inscribed with the watchword du jour -- and these days it's "globalization." More...