An international Conference, a scholarly Journal, a book Series, and an online knowledge Community.
![[rss]](http://ontheuniversity.com/wp-content/themes/k2_1.0.3/images/feed.png)
By Anthony P. Carnevale and Stephen J. Rose, The Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce
The United States has been underproducing college-educated workers for decades. The undersupply of postsecondary-educated workers has led to both inefficiency and inequity.
Adding 20 million additional postsecondary-educated workers over the course of the next 15 years will help us meet the economy’s need for efficiency and reduce income inequality.
We are pleased to welcome Dr. Fatma Gök to the 2012 World Universities Forum as one of our plenary speakers.
Fatma Gök received her bachelor’s degree from the Department of Education Sciences at the University of Ankara and received her graduate education and PhD, in 1987, from Columbia University, USA. She works as a professor at the Department of Educational Sciences at Bogaziçi University. Her academic work focuses on education policy, social foundations of education, gender in education and comparative education. She has published on the right to education, discrimination in education, the relationship between social justice and education and neoliberal policies in education. She was part of the editorial collectives of the journal “Socialist Feminist Kaktüs,” between the years 1988-1992 and the feminist magazine “Pazartesi,” between 1999-2001. She acted as the coordinator of the Education Philosophy Working Group at the Democratic Education Congress of the Teacher’s Union in 1998 and of the Working Group on the Right to Education in the Face of Global Assaults at the 5th Democratic Education Congress, again organized by the Teacher’s Union Egitim Sen. Her “Survey of Teacher Profiles”(together with Rifat Okaçabol) was published in 1998. She was the editor of “Education in 75 years” published by the Turkish Economic and Social History Association. Her comic-book, and guide, “Towards a Educational Environment Respectful of Human Rights,” prepared together with Alper Sahin, takes a critical look to school and is used as a resource for the efforts to bring a democracy to schools. “Education in Multicultural Societies – Perspectives from Turkey and Sweden,” prepared together with Marie Carlson and Anika Rabo, was published by I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd. In 2007. Recently she convened the XIV. World Congress of Comparative Education Societies held in Istanbul during June 2010.
For more information about our plenary speakers, please visit our website.
By Holbrook Mohr and Mitch Weiss, The Huffington Post
JACKSON, Miss. — The State Department is publicly acknowledging that one of its most popular exchange programs leaves foreign college students vulnerable to exploitation, but it’s unclear if new regulations the agency is pushing will do enough to stop the abuses.
The revised rules aim to shift more responsibility onto the 53 entities the department designates official sponsors in the J-1 Summer Work Travel Program. Historically, many sponsors have farmed out those duties to third-party contractors, making the sponsors “mere purveyors of J-1 visas,” according to the State Department’s proposed new rules published this spring in the Federal Register.
Federal auditors have criticized the department for years for depending on sponsors, some of whom make millions of dollars off J-1 students, to oversee the program and investigate complaints. Yet the new regulations would require little or no direct oversight by State Department employees, leaving sponsors free to continue policing themselves and their partners.
Photo Courtesy of the Associated Press
By Karen MacGregor, University World News
The Cinderella mission of the modern university – community engagement – is at last emerging as a global issue for higher education. Next week in Madrid, some 200 university leaders from around the world will gather for the second Talloires Network conference to debate developments and issues around university engagement, and to share best practice.
The expansion of the Talloires Network, an international association of institutions committed to strengthening the civil roles and social responsibilities of higher education, is itself an indication of the growing importance of university engagement.
Tufts University President Lawrence Bacow, who convened the first Talloires conference in September 2005, told University World News the initiative had evolved “in ways that I could never have imagined. The steady growth of our network and the movement more broadly illustrates that the old model of the university as an ivory tower continues to lose its influence in higher education globally.”
By Louis Menand, The New Yorker
My first job as a professor was at an Ivy League university. The students were happy to be taught, and we, their teachers, were happy to be teaching them. Whatever portion of their time and energy was being eaten up by social commitments—which may have been huge, but about which I was ignorant—they seemed earnestly and unproblematically engaged with the academic experience. If I was naïve about this, they were gracious enough not to disabuse me. None of us ever questioned the importance of what we were doing.
At a certain appointed hour, the university decided to make its way in the world without me, and we parted company. I was assured that there were no hard feelings. I was fortunate to get a position in a public university system, at a college with an overworked faculty, an army of part-time instructors, and sixteen thousand students. Many of these students were the first in their families to attend college, and any distractions they had were not social. Many of them worked, and some had complicated family responsibilities.
I didn’t regard this as my business any more than I had the social lives of my Ivy League students. I assigned my new students the same readings I had assigned the old ones. I understood that the new students would not be as well prepared, but, out of faith or ego, I thought that I could tell them what they needed to know, and open up the texts for them. Soon after I started teaching there, someone raised his hand and asked, about a text I had assigned, “Why did we have to buy this book?”
By Paul Jump, Times Higher Education
When Ines Alvarez-Garcia finished her PhD, her heart was set on an academic career in biomedicine. She knew that getting a permanent academic position would be tough, but she was prepared to make sacrifices.
Six years and two postdoctoral positions later, the Spanish researcher found herself at a crossroads. She still loved science and her project in a University of Cambridge laboratory was producing exciting results. However, the grant that had funded her position for three years had run out and the best her boss had been able to do for her was to secure a six-month extension while the outcome of another grant application was pending.
“The outcome of the application was totally uncertain. I got scared. I didn’t want to be at home looking after the children; I wanted to be working,” she says.
Staff, University World News
A report published by the US Institute of International Education and the American Institute for Foreign Study examines the intricacies of student mobility. Commenting on the report, International Focus, a publication produced by the UK International Unit, notes that more than 3.3 million students now study outside their home country.
It says the topic of student mobility is top of the agenda for those “immersed in the world of higher education”, adding that the picture is also becoming increasingly complex. The report, Who Goes Where and Why? An overview and analysis of global educational mobility, seeks to answer the many questions that educators, governments and businesses worldwide have about international student mobility.
The study covers all physical movements across national boundaries for educational purposes, with a special focus on university and college students, around whom an ‘international marketplace’ is quickly developing.
