Formation Continue du Supérieur

By Sean Nyhan. “Why is it that internationals are always at a disadvantage?” This was the question posed by a prospective student from India, reflecting on the application process to American universities. Written in the MIT “admissions blog,” the student’s full comment will offer more perspective:
“In my case, the testing cost alone is more than $230, which is a huge cost…as I’m in India, there’s an additional…‘security surcharge to test in India and Pakistan’ of $22. And I’m not exactly rich. Add to that, some universities don’t even offer application fee waivers for international applicants. So why is it that internationals are always at a disadvantage?? Fortunately MIT offers application fee waivers for international students.”
International student testimonies, like the above, make it clear that costs incurred during the application process are sometimes not routine. Application fees, standardized testing, and the translation and mailing of transcripts can stretch students beyond financial comfort.
Like MIT, the University of Chicago also allows international students to apply for an application fee waiver, “If your family makes less than or around $75,000 a year” – well beyond average annual household income in the developing world. However, they are a minority, and even the notion that international students can face financial disadvantage shares no consensus among admissions professionals. In contrast to MIT’s practice, for instance, the neighboring University of Massachusetts approaches international students much differently:
“Since international students must verify that they have adequate finances to pay for their education, requesting a fee waiver indicates that they do not have adequate finances and therefore would not be able to enroll. For this reason, we do not waive application fees for international students.”
As these conflicting policies make clear, not only does no standardized system exist to exempt international students from application fees – similar to the “application fee waiver” developed by NACAC and College Board for disadvantaged American students – but vastly different perceptions of America’s international student community exist as well. Read more...

By Aaron Smith. As total student debt passed $1 trillion last year, more than 35 percent of repaying borrowers under age 30 were at least 90 days late on their payments. The first three months of 2013 were the worst on record for student loan defaults. A college education still pays, but rising tuition, low graduation rates and burgeoning debt levels are pushing postsecondary credentials out of reach for too many students. Meanwhile, the government is expecting to earn a $34 billion dollar profit on federal loans next year. Read more...

By Anamaria Dutceac Segesten. There was a time when university presses, defined not as enterprises but as simple printing facilities, had as primary function the publication/diffusion of research texts produced at the university with which they were affiliated. One of the primary text forms to be published was the doctoral or magisterial dissertation.
The range of readers and buyers of dissertations and other such academic texts has never been very wide, and that posed a series of problems for these academic labels. Should they be self-sustaining and thus work commercially, or should they be financed by the universities themselves? If the latter, should they only publish works produced at the respective “mother” university, or should they be open to research coming from outside? If the former, how can they find a market that would make the publishing profitable? Read more...

By UD. It takes guts to be a high-profile moral - nay, spiritual - leader and a plagiarist.  Ask Richard Land. Given the likelihood of capture, you need to have that Elmer Gantry, je m'en fous, caution to the winds, borderline-psycho thing.  You need to have Gantry's arrogant assurance that you can break the rules in all sorts of additional ways - in the case of Gilles Bernheim, Chief Rabbi of France, that you can employ a ghostwriter and not tell your publisher; that you can accuse a dead man who was your student of having plagiarized you; that you can plagiarize in other places in the book in question as well as in earlier books bearing your name; and that you can, for the final flourish on your intellectual fraudulence, lie about having earned an agrégation degree.  You need to believe that you can do all of these things and not get caught.  You need to believe that when you are discovered to have lied about having done these things, people won't feel contempt for you and ask you to resign the position you've corrupted. Read more...

Last Friday, we had a good discussion on how to pick a graduate program. One issue that came up was debt. I strongly recommended that people only go to graduate programs that provide ample funding. People disagreed (a little) so I wanted to take a moment to explain the underlying logic:
- First, about 50% of doctoral students will not earn a PhD. So it makes no sense to pile up debt for a degree you may not get.
- Second, about 50% of doctoral degree recipients will not work in academia or a tenure track position. It makes little sense to take debt for a job you may not get.
- Third, tenure track jobs have modest salaries. Professors aren’t poor, but we make a middle class salary, not MD salaries.
In financial terms, the academic career is high risk and low pay off. The pay off is mostly in non-financial terms. Once you understand that money is not the guiding principle of the typical academic career, then it makes little sense to invest money in it. Read more...

The European University Association has released a new analysis of the state of global university rankings. Various evaluation systems continue to proliferate and existing ones refine their methodologies, the report says. But some things do not change. The study notes "biases and flaws" that favor elite universities. Further, the report says that most rankings -- which tend to focus on research - "still not able to do justice to research carried out in the area of arts, humanities and social sciences." Read more...

By Jamil Salmi. A study of recent university mergers in Russia confirms some of the findings presented in my 2009 book “The Challenge of Establishing World-Class Universities” about the difficulties of constructing top institutions following the merger approach.  Igor Chirikov, senior researcher at the Moscow School of Economics, reports that the various programs of excellence launched by the Russian government since 2005, which “encouraged” many universities to merge, have achieved mixed results. For the past 7 years, the Russian government has actively sought ways of enhancing the performance and contribution of its leading universities.  It initiated the Federal University program in 2005, followed by the Innovative University program in 2006, and the National Research University program in 2009.  In many cases, setting up the new federal universities involved mergers. Read more...