By Karen MacGregor. The South African government has announced a R4.5 billion (US$282 million) boost to the National Student Financial Aid Scheme, or NSFAS, for short-term debt relief for students. This follows last year’s intense #FeesMustFall protests and is in line with the findings of a presidential task team on funding challenges at universities, which reported back last month. Read more...

By Rodrigo de Oliveira Andrade. Cases of scientific malpractice in Brazil increased significantly between 2009 and 2012, according to a study looking at article retraction in scientific journals.
The study, published in Science and Engineering Ethics, says that this could threaten the country’s growing popularity as a research partner. Read more...

By Maina Waruru. Twenty-three proposals from eight countries have been conditionally selected for the World Bank’s Eastern and Southern Africa Higher Education Centres of Excellence Project – ACE II. Ethiopia, Tanzania and Uganda each bagged four research centres, followed by Kenya and Rwanda with three, Malawi and Zambia with two and Zimbabwe with one. Read more...

By Maria Elena Hurtado. As the Chilean saying goes, this New Year arrived with a bread loaf under its arm for the almost 200,000 students that will be attending university for free at the start of the new academic year this March. Read more...

By Wachira Kigotho. Garissa University College in northeast Kenya has reopened, nine months after 147 students were killed in a brutal assault by Somalia-based al-Qaeda linked al-Shabaab Islamist militants. Read more...

By Brendan O’Malley. New data contradicts a common assumption that many if not most international graduate students come to the United States to pursue doctoral degrees. Read more...

By Brendan O’Malley. The Irish government has unveiled an ambitious strategy to make Ireland a “global innovation leader”, with a plan to increase public and private investment in research, and a commitment to increase annual research masters and PhD enrolments by nearly 30%. Read more...

By Brendan O’Malley. The Higher Education Policy Institute or HEPI has warned the government that it may be about to “flunk” its attempts to initiate the biggest shake-up of UK universities in decades. Read more...

By Brendan O’Malley. The United Kingdom is suffering a cheating epidemic fuelled by the influx of international students, with almost 50,000 students at British universities caught cheating in the past three years, according to an investigation by The Times newspaper based on responses to more than 100 freedom of information requests. Read more...

By Brendan O’Malley – Managing Editor. Happy New Year to all our readers! In our first World Blog of the New Year, Hans de Wit looks back at the dominant issues in international higher education over the past year and looks forward to what the key developments are likely to be in 2016.
In Commentary, Tianlong Lawrence Hu reflects on the challenge the Communist Party of China faces in bridging the gap between tackling bureaucracy and reinforcing political ideology when it seeks to restrict and punish corruption in university management. Anne Corbett, as convener of a hearing to debate whether it would be wise for the United Kingdom to withdraw from the European Union, says it emerged that there is much more at stake than funding and control. Paul Ashwin argues that, while the OECD’s Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes project is attempting to respond to a genuine problem in measuring higher education quality, the tests of generic skills say nothing about the experience of students.
In Features, Mary Beth Marklein reports that the number of foreign-born university leaders in the United States is growing as higher education becomes an increasingly global enterprise.
Brendan O’Malley unpacks the Higher Education Policy Institute's critique of the UK government's plans to shift further towards a market approach by allowing universities with high standards of teaching to increase tuition fees. Read more...