Welcome to The Fifteen, a global round-up of the stories animating higher education institutions and systems around the globe. Let’s get to it.
- Iran’s intelligence ministry has issued an order banning universities from accepting any students of the Baha’i faith on the grounds that they are a security risk. The Iranian/Persian state has a record of discrimination against Baha’is going back over 150 years.
- Two very different universities in the UK are planning to merge: the University of Kent, in the country’s southeast, and the University of Greenwich in Greater London. Some are saying this is less a merger than a take-over, with Greenwich in the driver’s seat. These are two institutions with quite different profiles and ways-of-being; the literature on university mergers is not very encouraging about how this will turn out.
- Australia’s longest-running institutional crisis seems to have come to an end as vice-chancellor Genevieve Bell has finally resigned. Bell surely mis-stepped (several times), but as many have pointed out not everything she was blamed for was her fault, and there are more general governance issues at play as well.
- The Government of China released a three-year program to shift more educational programs to better suit the country’s high-tech ambitions. A key element of the measure is not just to make one-time adjustments, but to give institutions more freedom to respond to changing market/technological opportunities on their own.
- Graduate unemployment is also stalking South Korea. In response, some institutions are striking deals with corporations and creating “employment conditioned contract departments” where institutions agree to teach an enterprise customized curriculum to a group of students, and the company agrees to hire all the graduates. These, it turns out, are quite popular.
- The UK’s famously over-developed periodic research assessment exercise was given a brief pause by Research England as the research councils responsible re-think some of the exercise’s basic principles. One matter under consideration is whether or not all institutions require the same level of scrutiny, regardless of research-intensity. Coincidentally even the head of Universities UK is now calling for more institutional specialization in research or rather less “unfunded hobbyist research” in the face of widespread research funding shortages.
- Hong Kong’s universities have been rising in popularity among globally-mobile students lately. The Hong Kong government would now like to expand the number of “non-local” (which includes the PC) university spots to 50% of the total, but claiming these new seats will all be new and no local student will be pushed out. Not everyone is convinced.
- A similar story in Malaysia: as we saw two weeks ago, the Malaysian Chinese Association, which has been arguing that the increase in international students has come chiefly at the expense of Chinese students, is continuing to push for reforms to the admissions system. The latest push is being fueled by a story about a Chinese student with near-perfect grades being denied entry to any of the country’s top university accounting programs.
- Student housing crises are everywhere. Here are stories from Ireland, Italy, Spain, Turkey, Greece, Kazakhstan. The question is: if it’s a crisis absolutely everywhere, can we still call it a crisis?
- The OECD’s Annual Education at a Glance publication came out last week, producing a host of stories around the world. In the UK and France, there was shock over PIAAC results (not released at the time PIAAC came out last December) that university graduates in their countries had deeply sub-par language skills. In Belgium, the hand-wringing was mostly about low completion rates and long times-to-completion.
- In Canada, the Mastercard Foundation unveiled a $235 million set of grants to institutions to recognize strides made towards Reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples. This is a big deal.
- Kenyan universities are starting to come to grips with how a tuition fee cut in the middle of a huge financial crisis is going to impact them. The government claims research commercialization can turn it all around.
- In India, results from the annual government-run National Institutional Rankings Framework came out on September 4th and it’s basically all anyone has been able to talk about since. Some notes on the new methodology can be found here.
- The Moroccan government has adopted a new law on higher education, one which is comprehensive, wide-ranging and modernizing. But neither the national faculty union nor the national student union are impressed (the envisaged expansion of private higher education is the main bone of contention, but the big issue seems to be mostly a lack of consultation). Is a national strike in the offing? We’ll see.
See you back here in two weeks!
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