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Indonesia is embarking on a drive to produce more PhDs, according to Education and Culture Minister Muhammad Nuh who was speaking at a Global Education Dialogue in Jakarta on March 3rd.  The conference was organized by the British Council with the objective of encouraging cooperation between research bodies and universities in Britain, Australia and Indonesia.
Although Indonesia has more than 3,500 higher education institutions and more than five million students there is still a shortage of trained researchers.
Deputy Minister of Education and Culture, Musliar Kasim, said that the Indonesian government was providing  scholarships for research students to go overseas and that the country wanted to focus on research in agriculture, energy and health.
Source: Jakarta Post. More...

The annual US News and World Report Graduate School Rankings were published. The rankings cover law, business, medicine, the natural sciences, the social sciences and the arts and humanities and are based on data from 1,300 graduate programmes in the US. The rankings use several criteria, which vary according to discipline, such as surveys, admission rates and scores on standardised tests. The law school rankings include the rate at which graduates pass the bar exams and the engineering school rankings include expenditure on research. Some programmes, such as Masters of Fine Arts, are ranked according to a survey of deans and academic experts. More...

Robert Morse of US News has just returned from Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates where he has been discussing the new rankings of colleges and universities in North Africa and the Middle East.
At the moment, US News is planning to use several indicators  such as reputation surveys of employers and academics, bibliometrics, citations and data supplied by universities and colleges.
Other possible indicators include the accreditation status of the university in general and of specific programs, faculty and student diversity, governance and independence of the university and employment and other student outcomes.
The first rankings will be published towards the end of  2014 and it is expected that the methodology will develop over the next five years.
Source: US News. More...
See also Arab nations face mobility and research obstacles without rankings.

By Marilyn Achiron, Editor, Directorate for Education and Skills. How many times have you heard successful people, in all walks of life, credit their triumphs to hard work and perseverance? Now PISA adds to the chorus with some hard evidence: when students believe that working hard will make a difference in their studies, they score significantly higher in mathematics.
This month’s PISA in Focus examines how students’ perseverance and belief that hard work yields positive results are clearly linked to better performance. Read more...

By Dirk Van Damme Head of the Innovation and Measuring Progress division, Directorate for Education and Skills. It is perfectly normal that teachers and students are not of the same age. In contrast to other public services, it is a distinctive feature of education that the professionals, i.e. the teachers, are older than their clients, i.e. the students. One could think of education as an institutionalised dialogue between generations, as a social space in which they interact. Through education, societies transmit the knowledge, skills, culture and values of a society from one generation to another. Nevertheless, students are not just passive recipients of former generations’ knowledge and values, but also transform and build upon them, thus influencing the development of societies. Especially in a period of rapid social change, the dialogue between generations is critical to ensure that no generation gets left behind. Across OECD countries, some schools take this role very seriously and even try to organise opportunities for individuals of all ages to meet and exchange, for example by inviting grandparents to school or by welcoming senior members of the community to interact with younger students. Read more...