By Jairam Reddy. All post-1994 ministers have had to deploy administrators to shore up troubled universities. Until recently, university councils — the highest decision-making body of universities — did not have a collective voice. But the new University Council Chairs Forum South Africa (UCCF-SA) aims to rectify this. The vision of the organisation is to promote co-operative governance and transformation of universities, within a unified co-ordinated higher education system.
Since 1994 the higher education sector has undergone fundamental transformative changes at the level of governance, funding, planning, quality assurance, growth and expansion of the system. The number of university students has increased from 495 356 in 1994 to 937 455 in 2011, and black students have increased from 43% to 80%. More...

By Patricia Sabga. A new report argues that tighter state budgets have triggered higher tuitions.
Biola Jeje, 22, graduated Brooklyn College last May with a degree in political science and a mission: Force lawmakers to address the $1.2 trillion student debt crisis.
“It’s unfair that it’s happening to us, and we’re even being sort of blamed for the amount of debt that we’re being put in,” she said from the offices of New York Students Rising, where she serves as statewide coordinator.
Jeje left college with $9,500 in student loans, less than half the $29,400 national average for four-year college graduates. She and her fellow activists are mobilizing support to march on Albany, New York state’s capital, to deliver a message to legislators. More...

By Will Jackson and Vandy Muong. Waiting to begin a shift as a cashier at the 24-hour BBWorld restaurant on Monivong Boulevard, demure young Srun Vouchleng, wearing a white and red uniform that matched the burger joint’s decor, quietly explained how her dream of getting a university education was crushed. As is the case for so many young women in Cambodia, the social, financial and logistical challenges of completing higher eduction proved insurmountable. Vouchleng, 26, who grew up in a rice farming family in a small village in Kandal province, said she had always wanted to attend university and, after finishing high school, moved to Phnom Penh chasing her goal. More...

By Matt Krupnick. When Hannah Benbow ran into problems with the for-profit college she attended, she turned to the federal government for help.
Benbow, 24, wrote to the U.S. Department of Education when the Art Institute of Washington in Arlington, Va.—one of more than 50 for-profit Art Institute campuses across the country—told her unexpectedly that she would need to apply for yet another student loan, on top of the nearly $120,000 she’d already borrowed, to cover $7,000 in fees she said were not disclosed to her before she signed up.
“Since my parents and family have already co-signed my other ridiculous amount of loans, they were denied on this one,” Benbow wrote in her letter to the agency, whose responsibilities include regulating higher education.
She never got an answer. More...

Nivedita Ghose had never imagined that studying to battle diseases could place her in the theatre of operations where the tensest geopolitical conflict between Russia and the US since the end of the Cold War is unfolding.
Since Friday, the student at Ukraine’s Crimea State Medical University in Simferopol has put aside her textbooks, keeping track of the frenzied evacuation plans at the varsity as Russian troops occupy the city.
“As a medical student, you’re not scared of blood,” Ghose said today over phone. “But when you go abroad to study, you don’t imagine that you’ll get caught up in a war-like situation. This is a lot scarier than surgery.”
Nearly 700 Indian medical students at the Crimea State Medical University are caught in the heartland of the conflict over Ukraine. Over 5,000 Indian medical students are enrolled at multiple Ukrainian universities in Kiev, Kharkiv, Odessa and Lugansk, apart from Simferopol – attracted by even lower fees than offered by Chinese medical schools. More...