G7 needs to work together to ensure no one is left behind in higher education

By Brendan O’Malley – Managing Editor. In Commentary this week, European Commissioner Tibor Navracsics says G7 education ministers meeting this month must together address key higher education challenges of social inequality, digital disruption and mass population movements.
Going Global, the British Council’s flagship higher education conference, was held last week in Africa for the first time, with University World News as a media partner. Munyaradzi Makoni reports that government ministers from South Africa and the United Kingdom told the opening plenary that global higher education connections are helping to build a more open and empowered world. Karen MacGregor unpacks the findings of a 26-country study by the British Council on the shape of global higher education, released at the Going Global conference.
The latest Times Higher Education World Reputation Rankings were also released at the conference, which sparked a heated debate, according to Karen MacGregor, with one expert warning against basing policy on “what is essentially a report card on disparities of wealth”. Meanwhile, at the IREG-8 conference on university rankings being held in Portugal last week, as Brendan O'Malley reports, Simon Marginson contended that multi-indicator rankings need to disaggregate data to drive performance, singling out reputation surveys as the main obstacle to incentivising performance. And in our World Blog, focusing on the new national rankings in India, Erich Dietrich and Rahul Choudaha argue that the country should use the rankings as a tool to improve the quality of the overall system, not as a means of allocating funding to benefit a handful of institutions.
In our series on ‘Transformative Leadership’ in which University World News is partnering with The MasterCard Foundation, Carolyn Muriel Shields says leadership with a focus on equity and social justice is essential to address the increasingly persuasive demands of university students for an equitable higher education learning environment. Stephen Coan reports on the African Leadership Academy, a pre-university leadership initiative targeting talented high school pupils from across Africa, which ambitiously aims to prepare students to play a leading role on the continent. And Rajika Bhandari says a new report by the Institute of International Education indicates that fellowship programmes that give higher education opportunities to emerging social justice leaders in the developing world can indeed nurture transformative leaders.
Lastly, a reminder to readers that University World News will be holding a webinar on emerging issues in transnational education on 24 May. You can register here. Read more...