My daily selection of the most interesting news on the internets:

• Go8 European Fellowships – call for applications – The Group of Eight (Go8) today opened applications for its 2010 European Fellowships. The Fellowships are open to early career researchers from Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and, for the first time this year, Croatia.
• GREECE: OECD demands constitutional reforms – Only constitutional reforms such as the payment of fees and the operation of private universities will improve Greek higher education, the OECD insists in its 2009 report on Greece.
• German students ‘paid thousands of euros in bribes’ for PhDs – German prosecutors are investigating over 100 senior academics at a dozen of the country's top universities on suspicion that they awarded doctorates to hundreds of mediocre or unqualified students after taking bribes from a firm of educational consultants.

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My daily selection of the most interesting news on the internets:

• Western dominance of education under threat – “Following the Bologna Process’ lead, there is increasing concern that similar regional blocks are beginning to develop in other regions of the world – where students and universities choose to study and build partnerships in their region rather than abroad.”
• Overseas student surge hits 110,000: And all but a tenth decide they’ll stay in Britain – The number of foreign students granted permission to stay for a year or more has trebled to 110,000 a year since Labour came to power. But annually only 10,000 go home – a ratio of 11 arrivals for every departure.

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My daily selection of the most interesting news on the internets:

• Industry input good for universities – Education is vital for making Europe more competitive and innovative. Europe is already quite strong in education – however, the nature of education evolve. Education needs to be linked more to the real world and students need to be encouraged to take their creative ideas and form entrepreneurial ventures as part of the education process.
• Shut Out at Home, Americans Seek Opportunity in China – Faced with near double-digit unemployment at home, US college graduates are flocking to China due to its growing economy, entrepreneurial atmosphere and lower cost of living, not to mention its low urban unemployment.
• Reputation Without Rigor – Long a sore spot for many critics, the peer assessment survey for U.S. News & World Report’s annual college rankings has been subjected to especially tough scrutiny since June, when an official at Clemson revealed that her bosses, as part of a larger strategy to propel the university up the rankings, had regularly given low scores on the "reputational" survey to other universities to make Clemson look better.
• The New Way to Study Abroad – American students abroad are hardly rare: a report by the American Council on Education found that the number of U.S. institutions offering overseas opportunities rose from 65 percent in 2001 to 91 percent in 2006. Most of these programs range from a single week to several months. But a new internationalism is spreading across American campuses, with an increasing number of colleges now offering their students degrees in conjunction with a partner institution in another country.

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My daily selection of the most interesting news on the internets:

• California’s universities in trouble: Before the fall – The UC’s campus at Berkeley ranks third behind two private universities, Harvard and Stanford. Several of the other ten UC sites, such as Los Angeles and San Diego, are not far behind. Californians are justifiably proud. It is therefore no small matter that this glory may be about to end. “We are in irreversible decline,” says Sandra Faber, a professor of astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz who has inadvertently become a mouthpiece for a fed-up faculty. University excellence, she says, “took decades to build. It takes a year to destroy it.”
• International experience and graduate employability: stakeholder perceptions on the connection – Drawing on the literature, the authors argue that increasing globalisation and internationalisation has heightened the need for graduates with the ability to operate in culturally diverse contexts. Universities have focussed upon exchange as part of internationalisation to prepare students for work but there is still limited literature on the nature of the relationship between international experience, more broadly and graduate employability. The findings suggest that all stakeholders identify clear connections between international experience and employability given outcomes associated with the forging of networks, opportunities for experiential learning, language acquisition and the development of soft skills related to cultural understandings, personal characteristics and ways of thinking.
• Key university departments could ‘implode’ without foreign students – Vital university departments could collapse without foreign students, a leading vice-chancellor has told The Times. Professor Paul Wellings suggested that international students were propping up key disciplines in higher education institutions. Subjects such as engineering, physics and computing could implode at some universities without their input, he warned.

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My daily selection of the most interesting news on the internets:

• What Makes A University Great? – Forbes.com – Three factors distinguish top international universities from their competitors. The first: a high concentration of talented teachers, researchers and students. The second factor that sets apart top universities are their sizable budgets. The third factor of success is a combination of freedom, autonomy and leadership.
• U-Map if you want to, but critics aren’t convinced – Critics have warned that the plan could "pigeonhole" universities, restricting their development during a period of rapid change, and lead to a dramatic shake-up of the student market across Europe.
• Global Recession Status – The U.S. economy began contracting in late 2007, and the downturn spread and became global through 2008. While the recession's depth and form varies across regions, few parts of the worldwide economy are unaffected. Moody's Economy.com tracks the indicators every day, and updates the forecast as new data become available.
• Research universities and Australia’s place in world – I think the government should give serious attention to supplementing its teams of departmental compact negotiators, at least for the initial phase, with respected academic authorities and university leaders. Get this right and we can realise the opportunities that are available. Get this right and we can halt the slide of Australian higher education and research further down the international ladders. To get this right, we will have to take the hard decisions.

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