The Minister of Education, Prof Jane Naana Opoku-Agyemang, has called for an immediate end to the prevailing phenomenon of protocol in the admission of students to the country’s universities and second-cycle schools. She stated that the ministry would not comply with that practice any longer but would rather look at the competence of students in the admission process as part of measures to enhance the quality of education. 
“I will not comply. We will look at competence and that is how quality of education can be improved, as we know Ghanaians are capable of rising,” she stated. 
Prof Opoku-Agyemang stated this when she and other committee members of the Eastern Regional university paid a courtesy call on the two paramount chiefs of the Yilo Krobo and the Manya Krobo Traditional areas last Tuesday. The committee, chaired by Dr Raymond Bening, also visited the proposed site for the University of Environment, Science, Technology and Innovation and other sites at Odumase-Krobo. The visit was to enable the members to familiarise themselves with the land for the proposed university and also collaborate with the traditional authorities towards the establishment of the institution. More...

Overseas tertiary students in New Zealand -- 30 percent of them from China -- are paying more for their education while their overall numbers decline, the New Zealand government revealed Friday.
Overall international student numbers were down 3 percent, driven by a 10-percent fall in private training establishments, in the first four months this year, according to a report on the country's international education sector.
However, tertiary education institutions saw international fees rise by 25 million NZ dollars (19.57 million U.S. dollars) to hit 404 million NZ dollars in the year to the end of June, Tertiary Education, Skills and Employment Minister Steven Joyce said in a statement. Read more...

By Colleen McCain Nelson and Caroline Porter. The Idea Is to Reward Colleges That Offer Students Better Value, President Tells Buffalo Audience.
Calling growing student debt levels a "crisis,'' President Barack Obama laid out a plan Thursday aimed at reining in rising tuition costs by creating a system to rate colleges and eventually tie federal student aid to the institutions' performance.
The president called for rating colleges before the 2015 school year on measures such as affordability and graduation rates—"metrics like how much debt does the average student leave with, how easy is it to pay off, how many students graduate on time, how well do those graduates do in the workforce,'' Mr. Obama told a crowd at the University at Buffalo, the first stop on a two-day bus tour.
"The answers will help parents and students figure out how much value a college truly offers," he said.
Once a rating system is in place, Mr. Obama will ask Congress to allocate federal financial aid based on the scores by 2018. Students at top-performing colleges could receive larger federal grants and more affordable student loans. "It is time to stop subsidizing schools that are not producing good results," he said. Read more...

By Dick Ahlstrom. Isme says entrepreneurship must become central element of third-level training. Irish universities have rejected claims by a business lobby that third-level education here was delivering graduates ill-prepared to enter business.
The Irish Small and Medium Enterprises Association (Isme) yesterday said the universities were “failing industry” and called on the third-level sector to stop paying “lip-service” to entrepreneurship education. It should be part of their “core identity”.
It criticised the universities for their large classes, poor teaching methods, dry academic content and a lack of relevance for real business life. “The result is a graduate unfit for work, ill-prepared for business life and error prone,” it said.
Dublin City University president Prof Brian Mac Craith dismissed the claims yesterday saying entrepreneurship training was spreading through all faculties at graduate and post-graduate level.
The university had launched UStart in January, a programme that offered undergraduates an accelerated scheme to help them set-up and launch business ideas. This had the financial support of the J P Morgan Chase Foundation, Prof MacCraith said. Eight student teams were already working on the programme.
Last March the university became the first in Ireland to be designated an Ashoka Changemaker Campus, joining a network of colleges and universities supporting the field of social entrepreneurship in education, he said. The university now styled itself the “university of enterprise”. Read more...