http://blog.beerkens.info Higher Education, Science & Innovation from a Global Perspective Wed, 12 Nov 2008 18:15:36 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I've asked the question before whether ASEAN was becoming like the EU. I agreed with former ASEAN Secretary General Severino who answered that it is "most likely not. At least not exactly". Now we can ask another question: is the ASEAN starting its own Bologna process? It appears to be ... http://blog.beerkens.info/index.php/2008/11/creating-a-higher-education-common-space-in-southeast-asia/ There have been quite some controversies about the salaries of university leaders, especially those in the public sector. Philip Altbach and his colleagues from the Boston College Center for International Higher Education have now published a report comparing the salaries of academics around the world. Here are the results, summarised ... http://blog.beerkens.info/index.php/2008/11/academic-salaries-around-the-world/ Universities are becoming popular with donors. A recent report from private banking firm Coutts in association with The Centre for Philanthropy, Humanitarianism and Social Justice University of Kent showed that in the UK, rich donors are more likely to give to universities than any other good cause. The Coutts Million ... http://blog.beerkens.info/index.php/2008/11/philantropy-higher-education/ The OECD recently published a very interesting report on skilled migration and the diffusion of knowledge: The Global Competition for Talent: Mobility of the Highly Skilled. This publication can be seen as a follow-up of the 2002 report International Mobility of the Highly Skilled. Here's a short summary of the ... http://blog.beerkens.info/index.php/2008/10/the-global-competition-for-talent-mobility-of-the-highly-skilled/ Like last year, I tried to look at the Times Higher education university league tables from a national perspective. I gave a score of 200 for the number one university (Harvard) and 1 for the number 200 (the university of Athens) etc., and than aggregated these scores for every country. ... http://blog.beerkens.info/index.php/2008/10/the-ranking-2008-by-country-again/ German students are stretching the scope of European rules in national higher education systems. The last few years have shown a steady increase of German students in its neighboring countries. The number of German students in German speaking countries like Austria and Switzerland have increased. However, the most important destination ... http://blog.beerkens.info/index.php/2008/10/german-students-and-the-european-court-of-justice/ Tomorrow's that day that many university leaders dread. Have they gone up in the rankings or not? For some, rankings may even determine whether they will receive their bonuses or not. But most of all it's the day for your Vice Chancellor or university president to criticize league tables even ... http://blog.beerkens.info/index.php/2008/10/theqs-world-university-ranking-2008/ The blog turned three a couple of days ago: at the 28th of September 2005 I started  this blog. I  had started my postdoc at Sydney Uni earlier that year and wanted to avoid drowning in theories and concepts and lose touch with what was really happening in the global ... http://blog.beerkens.info/index.php/2008/10/3rd-birthday/ Excellence needs flagships! That is why Europe must have a strong European Institute of Technology, bringing together the best brains and companies and disseminating the results throughout Europe. That is how José Manuel Durão Barosso introduced the European Institute of Technology about two and a half years ago. Today was ... http://blog.beerkens.info/index.php/2008/09/european-institute-of-innovation-and-technology-go/ Today the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development published its annual report 'Education at a Glance'. Education at a Glance presents data and analysis on education; it provides a rich and up-to-date range of indicators on education systems in the OECD’s 30 member countries and in a number of partner ... http://blog.beerkens.info/index.php/2008/09/education-at-a-glance-2008/ At the EAIR conference in Copenhagen last month I attended an interesting presentation by Trudy Banta, a professor of higher education and vice chancellor for planning and institutional improvement at Indiana University-Purdue University. Her question was clear: Can institutions really be compared using standardised tests? Policymakers seem determined to assess the ... http://blog.beerkens.info/index.php/2008/09/can-institutions-be-compared-using-standardised-tests/ I'm on my way back to The Hague, returning from the EAIR conference in Copenhagen. Although lots of interesting new studies and findings have been presented there (some of them I'll discuss in later posts), I actually want to talk about a conference I visited last July in Berlin. This conference ... http://blog.beerkens.info/index.php/2008/08/classifying-european-institutions-for-higher-education/ Both the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEST) of the Australian Commonwealth Government and the Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS) of the British Government are looking for news to organise and coordinate their higher education sector. For this, they have started a similar initiative. Both ... http://blog.beerkens.info/index.php/2008/08/interactive-higher-education-policy/ Correlation between Genetic and Geographic Structure in Europe by Lao, Oscar et al. (2008) Full Text Available in Current Biology; See also this article in the IHT Maybe not that weird, but definitely interesting. Biologists from the Erasmus University in Rotterdam and others have constructed a genetic map of Europe. They investigated genotype ... http://blog.beerkens.info/index.php/2008/08/weird-science-the-genetic-map-of-europe/ Tomorrow, the new 2008 Academic Ranking of World Universities will be officially published. Not surprisingly, it's an almost all American affair. It's rather interesting that the publication of the Shanhai Jiao Tong rankings almost goes by unnoticed, especially if you compare it to the publication of the Times Higher Education ... http://blog.beerkens.info/index.php/2008/08/more-rankings-shanghai-jiao-tong-forbes-ahelo/