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

• UK Universities’ annual funding reduced by £533m – The government is to cut university funding by £533m, Business Secretary Lord Mandelson has said. In a letter to the Higher Education Funding Council For England (HEFCE), he also asks universities to protect quality and access to higher education.
• Skilled Immigrants and the Recognition of Foreign Credentials in the US – Many immigrants in the United States arrive with impressive resumes. However, their education and training are often overlooked in the job market. The MPI estimates that more than 1.3 million college-educated immigrants are unemployed or underemployed
• The international student experience: three styles of adaptation – The subjective well-being of a sample of 979 international students attending a large metropolitan university in Melbourne, Australia, was investigated. Cluster analysis of responses on 21 measures identified three different patterns: positive and connected (58.8% of students), unconnected and stressed (34.4%), and distressed and risk-taking (6.7%).

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

• CHINA: New form of English emerging – Professor Joseph LoBianco and Dr Jane Orton argue that the world's communications profile will change dramatically because of increased English language learning in China and increased Chinese language learning in the rest of the world.
• Transforming Australia’s Higher Education System – The Australian Government is proposing a landmark reform agenda for higher education and research that will transform the scale, potential and quality of the nation’s universities and open the doors to higher education to a new generation of Australians.
• EIT launches first Knowledge and Innovation Communities – The European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) has unveiled three major new innovation clusters focusing on climate, energy and information technology. Each of the initiatives will bring together academia and industry at several locations across Europe.

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

• Accounting may be AQF test case – Few academics appear aware of the test the Australian Qualifications Framework will set them, but they need to start swotting if they want to maintain their authority to decide what they teach.
• Singapore to help set up innovation universities – India and Singapore will cooperate with each other in setting up 14 innovation universities, minister for human resource development Kapil Sibal said at the Singapore Symposium jointly organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and the Institute of South Asian Studies (iSAS).
• EIT launches first Knowledge and Innovation Communities – The European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) has unveiled three major new innovation clusters focusing on climate, energy and information technology. Each of the initiatives will bring together academia and industry at several locations across Europe.

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

• What Is a College Degree Worth? – With average college tuition costs rising about 4.4% to 6.5% a year, research shows students are increasingly skeptical about the value of a big-ticket college degree. And more parents are pausing before signing big tuition checks.
• OECD Science, Technology and Industry Scoreboard 2009 focuses on innovation – What impact has the crisis had on innovation and spending on research and development? How can innovation help to solve environmental and social threats? How are countries tackling these challenges? The OECD Science, Technology and Industry Scoreboard 2009 provides the data and analysis to answer these questions and others to give policy makers an insight into the trends shaping science and innovation.
• A certificate for excellence in internationalisation? (in Dutch) – Accreditatieorganisatie NVAO wil een certificaat invoeren waarmee opleidingen kunnen aantonen dat ze 'goed' of 'excellent' bezig zijn op het gebied van internationalisering. De organisatie lanceerde dit plan vorige week tijdens een seminar over internationalisering en accreditatie. Een pilot moet begin volgend jaar plaatsvinden. Medewerkers van onderwijsinstellingen toonden zich kritisch.

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

• Why Skills Matter – As longevity and access to education improve around the globe, Europe can no longer count on a large lead in scientific know-how, education, and innovation.
• Fêted Finnish innovation system falling apart – Finland's celebrated innovation system is in need of a radical overhaul, according to a new international review. A panel of experts concluded that the landscape for innovation in Finland has become "fragmented and suffers from weak international links".
• Improving education: What to teach? – In the long list of problems that plague American education, one is primary: what should students learn? For decades, however, this question has baffled people. In an education system run by the 50 states, success is in the eye of the beholder. Mississippi has different expectations for pupils than Massachusetts does. America as a whole has fallen behind. In a ranking of 15-year-olds in 30 industrialised countries in 2006, American teenagers came a dismal 21st in science and 25th in maths.
• League of European Research Universities expands membership – The League of European Research Universities (LERU) has announced that Imperial College London and Barcelona University will be joining on 1 January 2010. This brings the total amount of member institutions to 22.

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

• TNO: Higher education important factor in local economy (in Dutch) – Uit het door TNO uitgevoerde onderzoek ‘Kennis als economische motor’, blijkt dat de kennissector jaarlijks goed is voor een bijdrage van 14,5 miljard euro aan de Nederlandse economie. Omgerekend zo’n 25.000 euro per student. Daarnaast levert de sector 288.000 arbeidsplaatsen op. TNO berekende ook het indirecte effect op de economie. Daaruit blijkt dat het werkelijke belang nog veel groter is. Volgens het onderzoek levert de kennisindustrie buiten de eigen sector een bijdrage van nog eens 6,5 miljard euro en 69.000 banen. Alles bij elkaar gaat het dus om 21 miljard euro en 357.000 arbeidsplaatsen.
• Another One Bites the Dust – Of all the projects to build international online universities, U21 Global might have been the most ambitious. Universitas 21, the international consortium of highly reputed research universities that opened U21 Global in 2001, predicted the program would enroll 500,000 students and be netting $325 million annually by 2011.
• Denmark: Quest for world-class universities – Denmark's goal of 1% of GNP spending on public research will be achieved next year, according to Minister for Science, Technology and Innovation Helge Sander. The nation's total research budget is proposed at DKK18.4 billion (US$3.8 billion), or 1.04% of GNP – a 20% increase since 2006 and part of Denmark's plan to create world-class universities.
• Life as a scientist in South-East Asia – From Cambodia to Singapore, Shiow Chin Tan finds the situation for scientists varies enormously across South-East Asia. When I travelled around the region, as part of my IDRC–SciDev.Net Science Journalism Award, I found a huge range of attitudes towards science. One of the most common problems for scientists was money.

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

• Overseas students: an easy target – Of all the immigrant groups in Britain, asylum seekers and international students (that is, those from outside the European economic area) are perhaps the easiest to attack – both by the government and by the tabloids.
• Britain ‘losing out on tens of thousands of overseas students’, says report – Britain is losing tens of thousands of overseas students – worth £8.5bn a year to the economy – because of errors and obstructive behaviour by immigration officials, a report will say this week.
• Discovering One’s Talent: Learning from Academic Specialization – In addition to providing useful skills, education may also yield valuable information about one's tastes and talents. This paper exploits an exogenous difference in the timing of academic specialization within the British system of higher education to test whether education provides such information. I develop a model in which individuals, by taking courses in different fields of study, accumulate field-specific skills and receive noisy signals of match quality to these fields. Distinguishing between educational regimes with early and late specialization, I derive comparative static predictions about the likelihood of switching to an occupation that is unrelated to one's field of study.
• Free thinking? States’ firm grip on Europe’s academy – European universities lack true autonomy from state control, an analysis of governance across 34 countries concludes.

  The report by the European University Association (EUA) says that although the European Commission recognises that more autonomy is a "crucial step towards modernising in the 21st century", governments are still exercising too much central control over the academy. (Also read the very relevant comment by Terence Karran below the article)

• Annette Schavan: "Ich wünsche mir mehr Bildungsbürger" – Ein Interview mit Forschungsministerin Annette Schavan über Bildungschancen in Deutschland, die Fehler nach Bologna, richtiges Investieren und das Studium heute.

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

• Uni takes on offshore accreditation – Melbourne University is to takeover the accreditation of the MBA’s of current students at online provider U21 Global amid uncertainty over a planned restructure of the Singapore-based venture.
• We should learn a valuable lesson from foreign students – The Prime Minister has announced a review of the criteria for granting visas to study in Britain. The proposed regulations suggest that visas would no longer be approved for international students looking to take A levels, the International Baccalaureate or foundation courses in the UK. Visas would be granted only to students undertaking degree programmes.
• Global Reach: Emerging Ties Between the San Francisco Bay Area and India – Based on more than two years of research and nearly 200 interviews in both the Bay Area and India, this report documents the historical, cultural, educational, trade and investment links between the two economies and makes a convincing case for the distinctiveness of the Bay Area-India connection and the wide range of business and other opportunities that it presents.
• New index puts an economic value on innovation – Two thirds of private sector productivity growth in the UK between 2000 and 2007 was driven by innovation, according to a new Innovation Index compiled Nesta, the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts.

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