By Marielk. Last week, the latest Education and Training Monitor was published by the European Commission, highlighting the impact of budget cuts on European higher education. The Commission has been calling Member states to focus on “growth friendly expenditure“, including education and training, issuing individual recommendations to 17 countries in July 2013. However, the tendency is that funding available for education and training has been decreasing and budget cuts are a common phenomenon across Europe. Read more...

By Marielk. In recent years, mobility of students and workforce has created increased attention on instruments that would make cross-border recognition of educational qualifications easier. This has frequently been presented as an issue and can understandably be a quite frustrating process to have your hard earned foreign diploma not recognized in your home country. Read more...

Student finance in England has got into a horrible mess. Loans are subsidised, costing the taxpayer a lot of money, and – as a result – the Treasury has rationed them. Some students who have the right qualifications can't get a university place. That is profoundly unsatisfactory for them, as well as for cash-strapped colleges who would like to expand to balance their books. As teaching subsidies in arts and humanities are eliminated, and with even core science, technology and maths subjects underfunded, cash-strapped is exactly what almost all colleges are. More...

By Randeep Ramesh. Chancellor says end of 'cap on aspiration' funded by selling loan book, but critics question sustainability of annual £700m needed. English universities will be able to take as many students as they want from 2015, after the chancellor said the limit on places would be abolished – leaving critics to question how the expansion would be funded in the long-term, with potentially damaging implications for the arts and humanities. More...

The government's decision to scale down its own much heralded student scholarship scheme has surprised many of us (Report, 23 November). Yes, we knew cuts were coming because of the absence of controls over student number growth outside universities and through the determination to preserve the science and research budget. We knew the cuts would focus on reducing student mobility by disinvestment in access measures. We knew it was likely that the poorer in society would probably be hit the hardest. The surprise has been the response of the independent regulator, the Office for Fair Access. More...

By Abby Young-Powell and Libby Page. This week's news: a player in the civil rights movement criticises Oxbridge and students occupy in protests across the country. Oxford and Cambridge don't have enough black students, American civil rights activist Rev Jesse Jackson has said this week. On Monday, 72-year-old Jackson visited Cambridge University Union, where he expressed disgust at low numbers of black students in Oxbridge colleges. More...