By Paul Szoldra. Forget Bitcoin ATMs. The oft-misunderstood digital currency is going even more mainstream. 
The University of Nicosia in Cyprus announced they would be accepting Bitcoin as a form of payment for tuition, making them the first accredited institution in the world to accept the cryptocurrency. Read more...

By Geoff Maslen. Australia's universities are so dependent on fees from international students, they would be forced to close some departments without the income the more than 320,000 foreigners provide each year.
Of this total, a quarter are studying at offshore campuses and 29 per cent are from China.
According to the most recent figures from the federal Education Department, the nation's 39 public universities had total revenues of nearly $24 billion in 2011. Foreign students contributed more than $4 billion in fees and charges to that sum but, because their enrolments fell by about 8000 last year from a peak of 332,600 in 2011, the fee income for 2012 was probably down by more than $100 million - still only a tiny slice out of $4 billion. Read more...

By Tim Dodd. Two influential vice-chancellors have renewed their push for “flexibility” in university fees to allow them to rise to boost funding for cash-strapped higher education institutions.

Writing in Monday’s The Australian Financial Review, Glyn Davis, the vice-chancellor of the University of Melbourne, and Greg Craven, the vice-chancellor of the Australian Catholic University (ACU), said the federal government’s review of the demand driven system for university funding should consider this option.

The two represent two different universities with very different interests, but they have found common cause on the fee issue. More...

In response to calls for affordable higher education from President Obama on down, Blackburn College has created a free tuition program for students with the greatest need.
Blackburn President John Comerford announced the program Saturday at his on-campus inauguration as the school’s 16th president.
“Higher education faces a continual call for greater accessibility and affordability for students seeking college degrees,” he said. “This call for action has been heard from President Obama, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, and our own elected state officials.” Read more...

By David Crosier and Andrea Puhl. When a country’s tuition fee system does not cover administrative charges, who picks up the bill?
Comparing tuition fees - the fee charged to higher education students for educational instruction - seems straightforward.  It should be as simple as crunching a few numbers or better yet, locating dots on a chart. Every year, country comparable data on tuition fees are issued by international information providers. The chart below, based on Eurydice’s National Student Fee and Support Systems and the OECD’s 2013 ‘Education at a Glance’, for example clearly shows that England charges more tuition fees than Japan. It seems straightforward.  But is it? Short answer: not really.
Student fees can take many guises, and fees can be charged to cover, or not, a wide range of services: course offerings, staff salaries, administrative fees, libraries, facility upkeep, etc.  When a country’s tuition fee system does not cover, let’s say, administrative charges, who picks up the bill? Is it the state using public money, or is it students paying an ‘administrative fee’ out of their own pockets on top of the so called ‘tuition fee’?  The answer is: both!
Some countries, such as most Nordic countries, but also for example Austria, make it easy: they officially do not charge any tuition fees at all during first cycle higher education, meaning that part is truly ‘free’. Of course ‘free tuition’ does not take the regular cost of living into account, but even that can potentially be covered by financial support systems like student grants.
In other countries, such as Ireland, the situation seems just as easy at first glance, but it isn’t. Here, first cycle higher education students also don’t pay tuition fees if they meet the terms of the ‘free fees scheme’, a scheme that takes factors such as nationality or residency into account among other criteria. However, what’s not included in the Irish scheme is the ‘contribution’ of EUR 2,500 that students pay per academic year. This ‘student contribution’ covers costs for services such as libraries, registration, facility costs, etc. It is easy to see that these costs that Ireland considers ‘additional’ would be fully covered by the term ‘tuition fee’ in another country, such as Italy, where students typically pay a tuition fee of around EUR 1,300.
Hence, comparing tuition fees in Europe is not as straightforward as comparing dots on a chart because it’s not always clear what they stand for. Do they represent the official definition of ‘tuition fees’ for each country? Or do they represent what students actually pay?
Eurydice’s new ‘National Student Fee and Support Systems’ publication tries to capture the actual amount of money that students must spend for first and second cycles of higher education  in each country regardless of what the fee is called there.  The diagrams reveal wide variations in the amount of fees paid by students across Europe. Yet as simple as this approach may seem, a full range of other questions arise. For example, where fees exist, are they paid by all students or are some groups exempt? Are fees paid before or after graduation? The publication shows that all these scenarios exist in the EU.
Even when all of these questions about fees are answered, the information remains only partial. The rest of the picture needs to be filled in with information on the student support system. Are some or all students able to access grants and/or loans? Are there other forms of support, such as tax relief to parents of students in higher education, or family allowances? Only when these different data sets are seen together does a picture of the funding reality for different students emerge.
The main problem behind comparing information on fees and support is that cultural reality differs dramatically. There are countries where the idea of charging fees in higher education remains an almost sacred taboo – but yet where no-one would question paying fees to learn to drive. Compare that to parts of Canada where fees are routinely charged for higher education, but learning to drive is part of the core school curriculum.
In the end what matters most to students is knowing whether they can afford higher education. On a European scale, that’s exactly what Eurydice, with its National Student Fee and Support Systems, tries to assist them with.