Formation Continue du Supérieur

By Grace Karram. Canada’s University of Waterloo announced this autumn that it will close its Dubai campus after only three years of operation. The withdrawal is due to financial uncertainty as a result of low student enrolment.
But the university does not plan to withdraw entirely from the region; it will stay in the United Arab Emirates, but with a redefined role. According to one report, this revamped agenda may focus on “research linkages and graduate studies”.
Research and graduate education are anything but a new role for Western institutions like Waterloo. For decades, a large portion of university internationalisation has happened in these sectors. Returning to these mainstays may not be a viable fallback option for globally aspiring universities that want to compete in the world’s high-paced education hubs.
Waterloo’s dilemma has been shared by about a dozen Western universities that have established campuses in emerging economies only to pull out later when the programmes were not as lucrative as anticipated. The majority of these are long-established Western universities with rich traditions of research and scholarship. Read more...

Dear Editor
This letter is in response to the article by Erin Millar, published in University World News on 18 November 2012.
I would like to draw your attention to the following:
I have no recollection of having been formally approached by Millar for an interview for University World News at the WISE 2012 conference in Doha. Millar says that she captured my words immediately after my official presentation at the summit on Thursday 15 November when many other participants were trying to speak with me.
If this is the case, which is as a matter of fact possible but sincerely forgotten by me due to my fatigue after my presentation and the debate which followed, my words should be considered as merely spontaneous and certainly with no connection with what the Director General of UNESC0 might have said to Millar and about which I was not informed at all.
As a UNESC0 official I have always tried to pay attention not to comment or to publicly criticise any statements made by UNESCO’s Director General at the conference or in any other circumstances.
Therefore, I would appreciate that University World News publish my response as a sign of respect for its readers and for the sake of deontology.
Yours sincerely
Georges Haddad, Director, Education Research and Prospective, Education Sector, UNESCO. Read more...

ByAlan Osborn. It was a tight call but the money came through in the end and students signed up for the European Union’s (EU) Erasmus student exchange programme will get funding after all next year.
The Erasmus cash had been caught up in a budget deadlock lasting months and the issue was only resolved this week, when the European Parliament rubber-stamped a deal agreed a few days earlier by EU ministers. Among other things the agreed deal on the EU budget for next year released a €90 million (US$118 million) special corrective sum for Erasmus. At one point it had seemed likely that Erasmus would be forced to cut students’ grants from early in 2013.
"The agreement means that the commission can now transfer necessary funds to the national agencies which are responsible for running Erasmus in the member states. The agencies will then release funds to beneficiaries of the programme, including the home universities and colleges which pay the monthly grants to students," said the European Commission. Read more...