In a sharp-elbowed opinion piece in The New York Times recently, Victor Fleischer, a law professor at the University of San Diego, took several big-name schools to task for the ways that they handle their endowments. Read more...

University leaders have warned that up to £450 million (US$694 million) could be lost from their finances under Scottish government plans to seize greater “control and influence” over the way they are run, writes Scot MacNab for the Scotsman. Read more...

The government is keen on ‘exporting’ India’s higher education to generate money by offering online degree programmes to students abroad, reports the Deccan Herald. Read more...

Millions of pounds in taxpayers’ money wrongly awarded to foreign students is yet to be recovered, reports BBC News. A total of £2.45 million (US$3.7 million) in loans and grants was given to individuals at alternative higher education providers, due to proper checks not being in place. Read more...

While affordable tuition for undocumented immigrants is a remote prospect in some parts of the United States, about 60 German universities are pushing forward a radical strategy: according to Handelsblatt they are offering refugees the chance to attend courses as guest students, without charging any tuition fees. In fact, they even pay for transportation and offer scholarships to pay for books, writes Rick Noack for The Washington Post. Read more...

Nearly half of 60 Japanese national universities that have humanities and social science faculties plan to abolish those departments in the 2016 academic year or later, reports The Japan News-Asia News Network. Read more...

Trade unionists have warned of a possible collapse of Palestinian universities against the backdrop of a financial crisis that could cause a large deficit in the higher education budget and lead to its eventual suspension, reports Middle East Monitor. Read more...

Do you remember Trump University? Probably not – it didn’t really catch on. And one big reason it didn’t catch on is because it was a total scam, say a slew of former students in complaints that were filed to the Federal Trade Commission and were recently unearthed by a Freedom of Information Act request from Gizmodo, writes Ethan Wolff-Mann for TIME. Read more...

By Marguerite Dennis and Richard Lynch. In 2015, an updated edition of Blue Ocean Strategy was published. The authors, W Chan Kim, the co-director of the INSEAD Blue Ocean Strategy Institute, and Renée Mauborgne, the INSEAD Distinguished Fellow, have been advising companies and organisations for more than a decade on “How to create uncontested market space and make competition irrelevant”. Read more...

By Ielyzaveta Shchepetylnykova. For more than 20 years, countries in the European Higher Education Area have been working towards establishing a common education and research space. However, the Bologna agreement has become a 47-speed process with each of its member states progressing at a different pace. Read more...