By Martin Smith. If you spent the 1990s plucking songs from a stack of cassettes to make the perfect mixtape, you probably welcomed innovations of the next decade that served your favorite albums up as individual songs, often for free. The internet’s power to unbundle content sparked a rapid transformation of the music industry, which today generates just over half of the $14 billion it did in 2000—and it’s doing the same thing to higher education. More...

By Urmi A Goswami. The Delhi University undergraduate imbroglio appears to have speeded up the government's decision to restructure the higher education regulatory set up. In a reply to a written question in the Rajya Sabha, Human Resource Development Minister Smriti Irani said that the government was considering setting up a high level of committee of experts to suggest a comprehensive restructuring and revamping of the higher education regulator, University Grants Commission. More...

By David Collinson. Desire to publish in top, US-based journals has a homogenising effect on research. The changing nature of research evaluation in UK higher education is creating perverse and damaging consequences. UK higher education research is increasingly characterised by “McDonaldised” audit cultures that reduce complex issues of quality to quantified assessment measures. More...

Graduates with higher degrees in China are feeling the pinch in the job market as competitors with lower education levels rise on par and catch up as magnets for employers.
The situation came to the fore following publication of the latest statistics this week showing that by the end of June 2014, vocational school graduates reported the highest employment rate in east China's Jiangxi Province, standing at 82.7 percent.
Bachelor's, master's and Ph.D. graduates in the province had employment rates of 80.25 percent, 69.48 percent and 73.5 percent respectively. More...

The share of foreigners of the teaching and research staff employed by Finnish universities has increased from roughly 10 to 20 per cent over the past few years. Today, Finnish universities provide employment to approximately 3,000 foreign teachers and researchers, roughly 1,000 more than in 2010. Internationalisation is one of the factors considered when granting funding to universities. More...