The satisfaction rate for students studying at UK higher education institutions and further education colleges remains high, despite the tripling of tuition fee rates, with 86% saying they are satisfied overall with their course in this year's National Student Survey. Read more...

By Jan Petter Myklebust. The new Minister of Higher Education and Science Esben Lunde Larsen is on a mission to ‘cultivate the elite’. Read more...

By Lee Adendorff. Two of Australia’s leading universities, the Australian National University, or ANU, and Deakin University, will host a new research hub with the aim of developing strategies to counteract violent extremism and the radicalisation of young people on home soil, it was announced last week. Read more...

By Mary Beth Marklein. US presidential aspirant Hillary Clinton this week unveiled her US$350 billion plan to make college more affordable, joining other Democratic contenders who have made student debt relief a central part of their platform. Read more...

By Brendan O'Malley. American universities maintain their dominance of the 2015 Academic Ranking of World Universities, or ARWU, released by the Center for World-Class Universities at Shanghai Jiao Tong University on Saturday, taking eight out of the top 10 places, and 16 out of the top 20. Read more...

By Brendan O'Malley. Internationalisation is not a goal in itself, but a means to enhance quality, and it should not focus solely on economic rationales, according to a heavyweight report on internationalisation commissioned by the European Parliament. Read more...

The Agence Mauritanienne d’Information, or AMI, reported that under the agreement Nouakchott would increase studies in the Chinese language, and Chinese students would come to Mauritania for courses in Arabic. Read more...

By Nico Cloete. With 82,000 young Ivorians passing the school-leaving baccalauréat examination, giving them the right to higher education, but only 30,000 places available in the country’s universities, private Tunisian universities are hoping to attract them – and to extend their offerings to other countries in the region.
With schooling in Côte d’Ivoire recently made compulsory until the age of 16, nearly 5,000 Tunisian schoolteachers could find posts in Ivorian schools, according to La Presse de Tunisie. Read more...

By Nico Cloete. During the week of 13 July 2015, I was in Buenos Aires for a workshop led by Fernando Calderón, the former head of the UN Human Development Reports in Latin America. The meeting was part of a Latin American-African project on rethinking development, linked to the recently published book by Manuel Castells, Reconceptualizing Development in the Global Information Age [1], in which South Africa was one of five case studies. Read more...

By Wachira Kigotho. African higher education systems have become casualties of war, caught in the crossfire of Islamic fundamentalism that cuts across the spectrum of religious and political thought, according to Professor Sultan Barakat, director of research at the Brookings Doha Center in Qatar. Read more...