By Patrick Boehler. At 7.15 every morning, Professor Wen Shuming and eight Chinese colleagues share a breakfast prepared by two local maids, who have been taught how to cater to the tastes of alien educators.
The group then leave their shared home and head for the office: two tube-shaped rooms with bare walls and fluorescent lights in a one-storey building on a busy road, next to a cash machine, a sportswear store and a deserted private school.
They are employed by Soochow University, but this office isn’t in Jiangsu province, nor even in China. It is on the outskirts of Vientiane, the capital of Laos.

By Loveness Kaunda. On 31 August, the International Education Association of South Africa – IEASA – launched its first special interest group, which will become a feature of its annual conferences and one of the main features of the association’s strategies for achieving its objectives.
This was a culmination of many years of collaboration between IEASA members and the chairs of similar special interest groups from the European Association of International Education and the International Education Association of Australia. Joint collaborative activities over the years included workshops, seminars, training and joint conference presentations on aspects of internationalisation at home and internationalisation of the curriculum. It was decided to launch IEASA’s first special interest group on internationalisation of the curriculum at its 16th annual conference, which was hosted by the University of Cape Town. (See video showing conference highlights here.)

By María Elena Hurtado. As a placatory gesture to protesting students, Chile’s President Sebastián Piñera has enacted a law that cuts interest rates on student loans and has also increased education spending in his budget proposal for 2013. But despite all government efforts, students appear to remain unsatisfied.

The new legislation, announced at the end of September, reduces interest on loans for private university students from 6%-2%. Once they secure employment, monthly repayments will amount to only 10% of salary, a 40% reduction to what had previously been on the books.
Piñera said the new law would offer improvements to the current situation. “The government’s previous system did not link repayment to earnings. Students had to pay a fixed sum, independent of their level of earning or whether they were in employment or not.”

By Robert Visscher. The number of Dutch students attending universities in Flanders in northern Belgium has increased for the 10th year in a row. Universities and politicians in Belgium are concerned about the trend, particularly because of the costs and the poor performance of Dutch students.
Over the past four years growth in the number of Dutch students in Belgium has been especially high. Their number has increased by 50% to more than 6,000.
One of the main factors pushing Dutch students towards neighbouring Belgium – especially the region where people mostly speak Flemish, which is close to Dutch – is tuition fees, which are €1,771 (US$2,300) in The Netherlands against €578 (US$752) in Belgium.
Doing further study sets a student back between €4,000 and €20,000 in The Netherlands, while Belgian students only have to pay a tuition fee once.