By George Mills. A scheme which would see 'godfathers' helping out Spanish university students in financial difficulties has received mixed reactions from from within the education sector.
It all started with a telephone call.
In July, the Dean of Spain's Malaga University, Adelaida de la Calle, received a call from a pensioner offering to pay the course fees of one student.
From there, her proposal took shape. More...

Nell McCreadie elaborates on the findings from a recent study on the exploring the value of academic libraries in developing countries. Case studies indicated that there is a clear need for better promotion of resources, awareness raising and skills development. However, this is not just a case of internal promotion, but also a case of developing external relationships with the scholarly community to promote advocacy for the library.
A common concern that our global library partners often raise with us is that the role of the academic library in supporting teaching and research staff is not fully understood. Too often, library patrons fail to fully understand the origins of the resources that they are using and how they are able to access them. A new study released by SAGE tells a similar story, with librarians in the developing world becoming increasingly aware of the need to communicate the value of their academic libraries. The study explored opinions of both the library and academic teaching and research community to understand how the library is perceived. More...

By Brigid Laffan. Research gulf divides higher education. Higher education is in the throes of change and challenge. Across the world, governments are reforming national systems in the search for prosperity. This is evident in the proliferation of targeted strategic investments in research and education, initiatives which foster a culture of intense competition, of which rankings are one indicator. Competition and internationalisation will intensify over the next 20 years.
In May, Minister for Education Ruairí Quinn set out seven objectives for Irish higher education that had phrases such as “world-class”, “excellence in teaching and learning”, “an open and excellent public research system”, “globally competitive” and “internationally oriented”. Yet the sector is experiencing its fifth consecutive cut in funding, draining people and resources from the system. More...

By Salimullah Khan. TERTIARY education has faced a crisis all over the world since the 1960s. As one war ended another began. Education provided the royal road to social mobility for many in the former colonial world, especially among the middle classes. Demand for tertiary education intensified as social expectations steeply rose. By that time, economic growth began to stagnate. This widening gap between the number of job-seeking educated young people and the effective demand for their skills caused a crisis in education on a world scale.
After liberation, Bangladesh had only a handful of public universities. Since the turn of the century, both public and private universities have proliferated. Growth, i.e. access is in itself a good thing. Equity, or filtering down, is however quite another. Growth in itself will not take care of equity. Education does not filter down. If it did, in 1947, after a hundred years of filtering down, literacy rate in the country would not remain stuck at 6% of the population.
How are our universities doing now? More...