By Evie Andreou. PRIVATE HIGHER education institutions are demanding faster procedures to process student visas to third country nationals, saying Cyprus is losing the chance of becoming a regional education centre.
DISY MP Kyriacos Hadjiyiannis told the House education committee earlier this week that the government needed a strategic plan.
When university tuition fees, accommodation, food and transportation are taken into account, students spend twenty times more money than tourists, Hadjiyiannis said. More...

The World Bank on February 19 approved a US$65 million credit for the Nepal Higher Education Reforms Project to help address the human resource needs of the country and add to the national knowledge base.
The project intends to support reforms in selected institutions for improving quality, relevance, and efficiency of higher education; and to assist under-privileged students for equitable access, according to World Bank. More...

Germany’s Bertelsmann <BTGGg.F> has agreed to take a controlling stake in United States-based Alliant International University as the first step in a plan to build a global network of universities to share research and data.
Europe’s largest media group has made education its top investment priority. It has vowed to achieve 1 billion euros ($1.13 billion) in revenue from a global market that advisory firm GSV has estimated will be worth $5.5 trillion this year and $6.4 trillion by 2017. More...

By Ben White. Palestinian students from Gaza are still prevented by Israel from studying at West Bank universities, after an announcement this week to the contrary was retracted as a mistake.
On Wednesday, Israel's Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) announced that a quota of 50 students would be permitted to exit Gaza "for the purpose of academic studies" in the West Bank. However, as related by NGO Gisha, the very same evening, COGAT clarified that there had been a "clerical error" in the relevant document, and that there would be no such permits. More...

Chilean Education Minister Nicolas Eyzaguirre has said the government will start providing free higher education in 2016.
"President Michelle Bachelet has clearly said that free education will begin in 2016, and we are going to honour that promise," Eyzaguirre said Thursday.
"We are going to present to Congress sometime this year a bill to finance and regulate higher education," Xinhua quoted Eyzaguirre as saying. More...

By Wagdy Sawahel. Only one Saudi university out of more than 600 Arab universities located in the 22 Arab states was included in the new ranking based on ‘international orientation’, despite having a good documented record of internationalisation performance in several studies.
Produced by independent consortium U-Multirank, the 18 February international orientation ranking is based on a range of indicators including student mobility, international academic staff, and international research cooperation as measured by the proportion of international joint publications and international doctoral degrees. Read more...

By Mandy Garner. Women’s career progression in academia is a thorny subject around the world. A recent UK report shows the majority of academic staff under 25 are women, but for every age group after that the majority are men.
The annual Equality in HE: Statistical report 2014 by the Equality Challenge Unit, or ECU, found that women continued to be under-represented at senior levels in UK universities. Read more...