Trading in higher education services post-Brexit will not be easy for the UK

By Brendan O’Malley – Managing Editor. In Commentary, Howard Davies says contrary to what the United Kingdom government thinks, striking trade agreements with foreign partners post-Brexit will be a daunting challenge, as all trade negotiations are lengthy and tortuous, and UK attempts to trade in higher education services will be no exception. Gerhard Duda contends that the concept of ‘distributed excellence’ is a promising but volatile guiding star for the European university system that should be developed carefully. And Andrew Norton writes that a good vocational education funding system is needed in Australia to fill jobs requiring vocational rather than higher education and solve the problem of oversupply of graduates.
   In our World Blog this week, Paul Schulmann says the downward trend in international student mobility to the United States should be taken seriously and US institutions should mitigate further declines in new enrolment and prepare for their potential impact.
   In our series on Transformative Leadership, published in partnership with the Mastercard Foundation, Dag Rune Olsen, rector of Norway’s University of Bergen, outlines how his institution is demonstrating that universities can play a leading role in addressing the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Sharon Dell asks Professor Yusuf Karodia, one of the founders of a pan-African higher education network dedicated to educating the next generation of African leaders, about his views on transformative leadership. And Stephen Coan and Brendan O'Malley outline how the fourth tracking study for the Ford Foundation’s International Fellowships Program shows that scholarship programmes can be effective in promoting social change.
   In Features, Munyaradzi Makoni and Sharon Dell highlight a new book that explores the development of young scientists from more than 50 African countries and the factors that are holding them back. And Kalinga Seneviratne reports on the proliferation of international programmes taught in English at universities in Thailand, which now hosts some 30,000 foreign students, up from under 2,000 two decades ago. More...