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

• ‘The Chinese Are Coming’ – A thriving industry in China provides assistance to applicants on identifying American colleges and helping them apply — but the help goes well beyond what admissions officers consider even remotely ethical. There are reports about forged transcripts and test scores. Several here said that when they e-mail applicants, the answers they get back aren't close to level of English fluency suggested by essays that have been submitted on the students' behalf.
• International students: a $100 billion business? – At the national level, international students were important strategically and diplomatically – fostering global engagement and cross cultural understanding, promoting freedom and democracy and easing tensions between neighbouring countries. Institutionally, students from other cultures and economies diversified the student body and symbolised the international mission of colleges and universities. They also brought fee revenue. But for national policy-makers looking for economic growth in a knowledge economy, selling services to international students was an opportunity to diversify the industrial base of a nation.
• System wide reform in the Netherlands? – Earlier this month, at the start of the Dutch academic year, the Dutch Minister for Education stated he wanted a international group of experts to study the alternatives for system wide reform in the Netherlands. The current system was bursting at the seams and did not meet the demands for the 21st century. Science Guide was the first to bring us the names of some of the commitee members. The committee will be chaired bu former Minister for Agriculture Cees Veerman. International members will be Ellen Hazelkorn (Dublin Institute of Technology and OECD/IMHE) and Bob Berdahl (UC Berkeley). The student voice will come from Koen Geven, former leader of the European Students Union. The other two (Dutch) members are still unknown.
• Will new university bring freedoms? – Saudi Arabia’s first coeducational university, a graduate research institution known as the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, or KAUST, is a test of “whether the kingdom is prepared to expand academic freedoms and women’s rights”
• EU student exchange programme outdated, says founder – The EU needs to upgrade its 22-year old student exchange programme and move towards more cutting-edge educational policies, one of its founders said. Established in the late 1980s, the Erasmus programme has seen some 2 million students spend a semester in another European country and get their studies recognised back home.

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

• India, China fuel foreign student market – Students from India and China are fuelling the growth in Australia's international education sector, accounting for more than one-third of the export market. According to a snapshot from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, China and India were the two biggest source countries for students, contributing $5.1 billion to the sector in 2007-08. The international education sector overall was worth $13.7 billion in 2007-08.
• Foreign students double in a decade – According to figures from Universities UK, which represents vice-chancellors, some 229,640 students were recruited from outside the EU in 2007, compared with just 117,290 in 1998.
• Science and the Internet – The Internet gives everybody the chance to become a publisher. It is now possible for science to reach large audiences, with the potential to eliminate the role of established filters and gatekeepers, such as the traditional peer reviewed scientific journal. This also means that science can be easily reviewed, assessed, rated and commented upon by anybody, reinforcing scientific democracy. Poor research might thus be identified more quickly and debunked. The challenge is to create open access systems and ensure that old gatekeepers are not simply replaced by new ones.

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

• UK rise in international students – The number of non-European students enrolling on courses at UK universities has almost doubled in less than ten years. The study of trends in higher education by Universities UK found a 48% increase in the number of international students between the year 2000 and 2006.
• College for $99 a Month – When Solvig was laid off from a human resources position at a Chicago-area hospital in January, she knew the time had come to finally get her own credential. Doing that wasn’t going to be easy, because four-year degrees typically require two luxuries Solvig didn’t have: years of time out of the workforce, and a great deal of money. Luckily for Solvig, there were new options available. She went online looking for something that fit her wallet and her time horizon.
• Home-grown rankings gain support – Support is growing across the higher education sector for an independent national university ranking system that would be more comprehensive than the Shanghai Jiao Tong survey of world universities. A national ranking would complement new performance indicators being developed by the federal government.

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

• Progress, what progress? – The global economic crisis has focused minds on restoring growth. But does growth necessarily mean progress? What about factors which growth depends on, such as the environment or happiness? Measuring true progress demands new indicators and a major global project to develop them is now underway.
• Asian Universities Court International Students Within the Region – NYTimes.com – The predictable choice might have been Australia or Britain, where her two sisters and thousands of her countrymen have studied. But Ms. Bao decided to embark on a journey that would keep her closer to her home in the eastern Chinese city of Ningbo, improve her English while still giving her the chance to converse with Chinese speakers, and enjoy substantially lower costs. She chose Malaysia, where she is currently a third-year business student at HELP University College, a private institution in Kuala Lumpur.
• Universities may lose students to Scandinavia – Degree courses are increasingly being taught in English – in Scandinavia and the Netherlands, threatening the livelihood of UK universities

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

• TU Delft extends collaboration with fellow technology universities – In the interests of the Dutch knowledge economy, the country’s three technology universities, Delft University of Technology, Eindhoven University of Technology and University of Twente are to further intensify and extend their partnership in the 3TU.Federation.
• Hidden Wealth: Science in Service Sector Innovation – Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) is deeply embedded within the UK service sectors and has an extensive impact on service innovation processes, which is often hidden. Although STEM is important in services sector innovation now, it is also likely to play an important part in the future of services, as many services are on the cusp of a transition to more personalised and interconnected systems, which will require significant advances in STEM.
  Hidden Wealth concludes that STEM is deeply embedded within the UK service sectors and has an extensive impact on service innovation processes, which is often hidden.
• Fees are foreign to Sweden – Students and faculty worry that the Swedish higher education, which is now free, will start coming at a price. As soon as 2011, non-European students applying to Swedish universities may have to pay a 100 euro application fee, if The Swedish Agency for Higher Education Services gets its way.
• Compact for OA Publishing Equity – On Monday, five leading universities announced a new "Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity" in which they have pledged to develop systems to pay open access journals for the articles they publish by the institutions' scholars. In doing so, the institutions are attempting to put to rest the idea that only older publication models (paid and/or print) can support rigorous peer review and quality assurance.
• What defines an international student? – The mobility of students and academics across borders has become big business in recent years, and authorities in receiving countries have become increasingly efficient in tracking and reporting the data surrounding their education-export industries. Yet, the comparison of international enrollment statistics is somewhat problematic as national agencies collect data in different ways and according to different definitions. This makes statistical comparisons difficult and often inaccurate or misleading.

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

• The Innovation Economy: the EU prepares to join the funding frenzy – Encouraging innovation in manufacturing, construction and the automobile sector forms the research and development cornerstone of the EU’s response to the economic crisis. All three sectors have seen demand plummet as consumers tightened their belts; all three must face up to the challenges of restructuring and moving forward to a greener and cleaner future.
• Calculation That Doesn’t Add Up – When critics question the validity of the calculations U.S. News & World Report uses to rank colleges, one answer the editors of the magazine have given is to note that it publishes not only the total rank, but also data on how colleges perform in the various categories that go into the rankings. So a prospective student who cares more about faculty resources or competitiveness or any other factor can see how colleges do there, and judge accordingly.
• European Universities Look Overseas for New Partnerships – With its sunny climate, relaxed lifestyle, and relatively easy-to-learn language, Spain would seem to need little selling as a destination for foreign university students. Yet although it is a popular study-abroad option for Americans and draws a fair number of students from Latin America, the country is not a major player in the fast-growing international student market. So last year the Spanish government created a foundation to promote Spanish higher education abroad.

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

• Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America’s Public Universities. – America's flagship public universities are failing to graduate enough students in four (or even six) years and are doing too little to improve the completion rates of low-income and minority students, especially black males, according to a much awaited book being released today.
• Into the globalised world – 'Suitcase scientists' working at overseas facilities would get more funding and postdoctoral researchers working offshore would be guaranteed a job on their return home under a plan proposed by the Australian Academy of Science to boost international collaborative research.
• Education at a Glance 2009 – This year’s edition of Education at a Glance is published at a time when all eyes are focused on addressing the financial crisis and its economic and social fallout. Presenting data up to 2007, this edition cannot yet assess the impact of the crisis on education systems, but its indicators provide insights about how investments in human capital can contribute to the recovery.

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

• Drew Gilpin Faust: The University’s Crisis of Purpose – Universities are meant to be producers not just of knowledge but also of (often inconvenient) doubt. They are creative and unruly places, homes to a polyphony of voices. But at this moment in our history, universities might well ask if they have in fact done enough to raise the deep and unsettling questions necessary to any society.
• The World Atlas of Innovation – The WAINOVA Atlas of Innovation Atlas gives a global picture of the innovation world, its nodes and sub-networks.
• The Geography of Innovation – Innovation is the critical component of long-term economic prosperity, driving productivity growth and (if spread across key sectors of the economy) ensuring broad-based economic growth. Sparking innovation, however, requires capital (which is threatened by the current economic downturn), skilled-labor, scientific and technological advances, and creative collaboration between government and the private sector. Innovation cannot be dictated, but it can be cultivated.
• Fixing the future: a manifesto for recovery through innovation – As Europe’s economy slip into recession we believe that Europe needs to respond in ways that don’t just address immediate needs but also ensure that Europe can thrive in the recovery. Too many of the actions being taken now are focused on putting right the mistakes of the past rather than investing in future success. And too little is being done to promote the entrepreneurship, innovation and infrastructures that will be essential to Europe’s future growth.

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

• The writing on the wall: responses of Australian public universities to competition in global higher education – This research has three principal implications: all Australian public universities need to re-examine their strategic planning processes to determine whether (1) adequate attention is being paid to rapid intensification of competition; (2) strategies already implemented in response to increasing competition are appropriate; and (3) more can be done to develop better models to guide competitive behaviour in a university sector with unique characteristics.
• International Campuses on the Rise – The number of international branch campuses has grown to 162, up 43 percent in just three years, according to a study released Wednesday by the Observatory on Borderless Higher Education, a British research institute that has been among the leaders in documenting the spread of this form of higher education.
• How a private purveyor may represent the future of Western higher education in a vast new market – When Western colleges talk about the vast market potential of China, with its burgeoning middle class and millions of young people who can't be accommodated by the universities and colleges here, they have students like Chris Dong and Mavis Xin Zhang in mind.

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

• Plasterk: binary system outdated? – At a commencement speech at the University of Twente, the Dutch Minister of Education questions the benefits of a binary system. He announces a study that will analyse the feasibility of a unitary system in the Netherlands in order to increase the flexibility for students (article in Dutch).
• The changing role of business schools in a global world – Globalisation is changing the way businesses operate and, in turn, is forcing business educators to evaluate the insights they’re imparting to MBA students and executives. Furthermore, the global recession has led to a re-think of the role of business schools in a global world, raising the curtain on a slew of new issues which need to be addressed.
• Hectic start for French university foundations – Half of France’s universities have, or are in the process of, creating foundations to raise private funding, according to research minister Valérie Pécresse.

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