By Patricia Cohen, in The New York Times
For professors, publishing in elite journals is an unavoidable part of university life. The grueling process of subjecting work to the up-or-down judgment of credentialed scholarly peers has been a cornerstone of academic culture since at least the mid-20th century.
Now some humanities scholars have begun to challenge the monopoly that peer review has on admission to career-making journals and, as a consequence, to the charmed circle of tenured academe. They argue that in an era of digital media there is a better way to assess the quality of work.
To read more…
By Rebecca Attwood, in Times Higher Education
It is a familiar lament: teaching excellence is doomed never to be rewarded as handsomely as research success - if at all. But some institutions are determined to tackle the pedagogical deficit. Rebecca Attwood reports.
We are proud of our reputation for teaching quality,” says David Mackintosh, deputy vice-chancellor of Kingston University.
“This is our primary focus as an education institution, so we are committed to recognising and rewarding excellent teaching, as well as research.”
But in doing so, he believes the university faces a challenge: finding fair and equitable criteria with which to assess top-quality teaching.
To read more…
By David Jobbins and Karen MacGregor, in University World News
American universities continued to lead the latest Academic Ranking of World Universities, but US dominance of the global top 100 list compiled by China’s Shanghai Jiao Tong University slipped this year, to 54 institutions against 67 in 2009. Harvard clinched the top slot, as it has since the ranking was first published in 2003.
The University of California, Berkeley, leapfrogged Stanford into second place, while MIT pipped Cambridge into fourth place, leaving the UK university - one of only two non-US universities in the top 10 - in fifth place. Next came California Institute of Technology and Princeton, Columbia and Chicago. Oxford retained its 10th place for the fifth year in a row.
To read more…
From Simon Marginson and Philip Altbach, in Times Higher Education
Asian higher education is on the rise in a success story that is shaking up the global order. Simon Marginson explains the importance of the Confucian model to the region’s progress, while Philip Altbach discusses the systemic problems that could limit its advances
Confucian higher education is a new kind of system; an alternative global template. In some respects, the drivers of the Confucian model differ from higher education in mainland Western Europe, the UK and the US, where the modern university was incubated.
Statements about “the rise of Asia” are misleading. Asia is larger and more heterogeneous than Europe. In some nations, higher education is stagnant. In others, it is gaining ground. And the 40 per cent of Asia situated in the “Confucian zone” is moving into the stratosphere.
To read more…
From Yorick Wilks, in Times Higher Education
As cash-strapped UK science increasingly looks to Europe for funding, Yorick Wilks warns of a rotten framework of red tape, intellectual corruption and cronyism driven by bureaucrats in pursuit of personal agendas
A squeeze on UK research council funds is likely, which is something that is certain to make European Commission funds look more attractive to British academics. The time was, say some Russell Group academics, that they never bothered to apply for Commission grants, pointing to their markedly lower prestige in research assessment exercise ratings and the onerous paperwork involved. But you hear less of that talk these days, especially as the Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme for Research (FP7) funds are vast and show no signs of being cut during the ongoing financial crisis.
To read more…
From Anthony P. Carnevale, Nicole Smith, Jeff Strohl, Center on Education and the Workforce
“America is slowly coming out of the Recession of 2007 - only to find itself on a collision course with the future: not enough Americans are completing college… By 2018, we will need 22 million new workers with college degrees - but will fall short of that number by at least 3 million postsecondary degrees… At a times when every job is precious, this shortfall will mean lost economic opportunity for millions of American workers.” - Help Wanted, Executive Summary
The report presents a new approach that answers some critical questions about the emerging economy, including:
- When will the jobs come back?
- Where will the jobs be? Which states? Which industries? Which occupations?
- What postsecondary certificates and degrees will be required?
- Will the education system be able to keep up?
- How much will it cost to fund the postsecondary education America needs?
For more…
By Phil Baty, in Times Higher Education
International comparisons of universities still have their detractors, but the appetite for them continues to grow. Phil Baty traces their roots and looks at how they are increasing in number and quality, while Ellen Hazelkorn considers their impact and value
Marginson believes that rankings are “changing history, not just in higher education, but in all the social, economic, cultural and governmental sectors affected by higher education. In other words, the ranking systems - and the single worldwide higher education sector they embody and create - will change almost every sphere of human activity.”
So, anyone who thinks that university rankings are a bit of fun - an inherently shallow service to student consumers good only for selling newspapers - may need to think again. It is not only students, parents and university marketing staff who are taking them seriously.
The rise of global rankings has transformed higher education for ever,” says Simon Marginson, professor of higher education at the University of Melbourne.
For Marginson, rankings are “creating one single worldwide research-university sector, which provides the basis for a one-world knowledge system and, ultimately, a single world culture - in which diversity will continue to abound, but held within one container”.
To read more…
Sarah Brookover, left, a senior at Rutgers University in New Jersey, with Vibiana Bowman Cvetkovic, a reference librarian.
From Trip Gabriel in the New York Times:
At Rhode Island College, a freshman copied and pasted from a Web site’s frequently asked questions page about homelessness — and did not think he needed to credit a source in his assignment because the page did not include author information.
At DePaul University, the tip-off to one student’s copying was the purple shade of several paragraphs he had lifted from the Web; when confronted by a writing tutor his professor had sent him to, he was not defensive — he just wanted to know how to change purple text to black.
And at the University of Maryland, a student reprimanded for copying fromWikipedia in a paper on the Great Depression said he thought its entries — unsigned and collectively written — did not need to be credited since they counted, essentially, as common knowledge.
Professors used to deal with plagiarism by admonishing students to give credit to others and to follow the style guide for citations, and pretty much left it at that.
But these cases — typical ones, according to writing tutors and officials responsible for discipline at the three schools who described the plagiarism — suggest that many students simply do not grasp that using words they did not write is a serious misdeed.
For more…
By Paul Benneworth in, Times Higher Education
France is using governance reform and investment to push its universities up the league tables. Will it work? asks Paul Benneworth
In his new book A Chance for European Universities, Jo Ritzen, president of Maastricht University, sums up French institutions, along with those of Spain, Germany and Italy, as the mediocre face of the European academy. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, too, ticked off France for its sluggish higher education reforms in its Economic Survey of France 2009.
Even France is not immune to a preoccupation with its performance in international higher education league tables. And in the latest Times Higher Education World University Rankings, three of the four French institutions in the top 200 are not even universities, but grandes écoles, highly selective institutions that receive more than a quarter of science funding but educate less than one in 20 French graduates.
To read more…
by Suchitra Behal, in University World News
Career advancement prospects in Indian universities became more difficult last week with the University Grants Commission adopting a performance-based points system. From now on, lecturers will be graded annually on their performance and will be eligible for promotions based on their teaching, research and publication quality - not on seniority.
This is a move away from the earlier seniority-based promotions most universities relied on. The commission’s plans met with stiff resistance by many unions in the last two years but have finally been accepted by the Ministry of Human Resource Development, with the agreement of almost all the lecturers’ representative bodies.
To read more…
By David Jobbins, in University World News
The opinions of more than 13,000 academics will be used to build a picture of the standard of teaching and research in the world’s universities for the 2010 Times Higher Education World University Ranking.
Despite an increased sample size, the findings will account for 20% of final scores, compared with 40% under the methodology used from 2004 to 2009.
Meanwhile its main rival, QS, is introducing a rating system to better reflect the diversity of institutions by measuring their broader missions.
To read more…
By Linda Katehi, in The Huffington Post
Around the same time my parents’ generation was dreaming that higher education was in their children’s future, the California Legislature adopted the Master Plan for Higher Education, setting priorities for the University of California, California State University and community college systems. The Master Plan reflected California’s commitment to higher education as a public good. Recently, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger held a roundtable in Sacramento to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the California Master Plan for Higher Education — a plan that, even as we celebrate it today, is clearly at risk.
To read more…
From University World News
US research universities are under threat from the recession and social changes, Linda Katehi, Chancellor of the University of California, Davis, told scientists at a recent American Association for the Advancement of Science policy forum.
Katehi said the two factors were combining to undermine universities. State support for universities was shrinking; in California, for example, state funding for the University of California was half what it was 25 years ago in real terms.
The result was big increases in tuition fees and these could go higher still, making university education unaffordable to many people.
To read more…
From Scott Jaschik, in Inside Higher Ed
Denver — State support for higher education tends to be cyclical — a fact that’s been comforting to many who study or teach at public colleges and universities that have been facing budget cuts these past two years.
But research presented here Monday at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association suggests that while you can still assume that what goes down will come up, you can’t assume it will happen any time soon. The research asserts that the time it takes states to restore deep cuts has grown longer in the last 20 years. Further, the research suggests that states that imposed large tuition increases, have centralized governing boards, or are located in the West may have to wait a particularly long time for cuts to be restored.
To read more…
By Yojana Sharma, in University World News
Universities in Hong Kong and Japan dominate the upper echelons of the QS Asian university rankings released last Thursday, with universities in Singapore and South Korea also making a strong showing in the top 20. But mainland China’s universities have not performed as well as expected in the regional comparison.
The 2010 Asian rankings drawn up by QS (Quacquarelli Symonds), which also issues annual world university rankings, show the most economically developed countries of Asia also have the region’s top universities.
To read more…
Global Student Mobility in the Asia Pacific: Mobility, Migration, Security and Wellbeing of International Students, edited by Peter Kell and Gillian Vogl
Over 2.7m students study in a country other than their own. Most of those students come from the Asia-Pacific region and undertake study in universities in the developed world. This trend is predicted to grow exponentially but features many dilemmas. In the post-9/11 global environment, international students experience hostility and harassment as well as ambivalence about their value to the academy.
Some live an uncertain life of poverty and alienation. Many also struggle to come to terms with living and studying in a foreign land where there are concerns about international students eroding academic standards, having poor English language proficiency and being unable to “integrate” and contribute to their new communities. But some also seek to make new homes in their host countries.
To read more…
International Student Security: By Simon Marginson, Chris Nyland, Erlenawati Sawir, and Helen Forbes-Mewett
More than three million students globally are on the move each year, crossing borders for their tertiary education. Many travel from Asia and Africa to English speaking countries, led by the United States, including the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand where students pay tuition fees at commercial rates and prop up an education export sector that has become lucrative for the provider nations. But the ‘no frills’ commercial form of tertiary education, designed to minimise costs and maximise revenues, leaves many international students inadequately protected and less than satisfied. International Student Security draws on a close study of international students in Australia, and exposes opportunity, difficulty, danger and courage on a massive scale in the global student market. It works through many unresolved issues confronting students and their families, including personal safety, language proficiency, finances, sub-standard housing, loneliness and racism.
For more information…
From Geoff Maslen, in University World News
A private US foundation has proposed increasing the proportion of Americans with “high-quality degrees and credentials” to 60% of the population within 15 years. President and CEO of the Indianopolis-based Lumina Foundation, Jamie Merisotis, told a conference in Miami the goal was to boost the proportion of higher-education qualified Americans from the current 40% to 60% by 2025.
Speaking during a panel discussion at the Clinton Global Initiative University, Merisotis said Lumina was working on increasing completion rates via its funding commitments to college preparation, success and productivity.
To read more…
by Sabrina Tavernise, in The New York Times
LAHORE, Pakistan — The professor was working in his office here on the campus of Pakistan’s largest university this month when members of an Islamic student group battered open the door, beat him with metal rods and bashed him over the head with a giant flower pot.
Iftikhar Baloch, an environmental science professor, had expelled members of the group for violent behavior. The retribution left him bloodied and nearly unconscious, and it united his fellow professors, who protested with a nearly three-week strike that ended Monday.
To read more…
From Sarah King Head, in University World News
Students likely to benefit most from a university education are not those from socially advantaged backgrounds. Instead the opposite appears to be true, according to a report in the American Sociological Review.
A study by Dr Jennie E Brand of the University of California at Los Angeles and Dr Yu Xie of the University of Michigan suggests students from socially disadvantaged backgrounds, who completed university, changed their socioeconomic status in a more profound way than did those for whom higher education was culturally inevitable.
The authors based their research around a cost-benefit analysis of the long-term outcomes of students from the 1960s to the present day. They derived their data from two sources: the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 and the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study 1957.
To read more…
By William Branigin, in The Washington Post
President Obama signed into law Tuesday a package of revisions to his new health-care overhaul that includes a measure aimed at making higher education more affordable.
The provision ends what Obama called a long-standing “sweetheart deal” for banks in federally guaranteed student loans.
In a speech and signing ceremony at the Alexandria campus of Northern Virginia Community College, Obama said the health-care reform legislation and the revisions represent “two major victories … that will improve the lives of our people for generations to come.”
To read more…
From Cathleen McCarthy in Cal Alumni Association
Academics try to sift truth from subterfuge in the blogosphere.
Online, J. Bradford DeLong is, first and foremost, a liberal muckraker. His blog thrives when there is plenty of right-wing muck. Subtlety is not DeLong’s style, one reason other bloggers love to riff on his posts. As GOP resistance to Obama’s bills heated up, DeLong found his voice again. Last August found him authoring a series of posts on Republican subterfuge, including “Why the American Right Lies So Much” and in case we missed the point, “Republicans. Lying All the Time. About Everything. Because the Press Won’t Call Them on It.”
To read more…
From Yojana Sharma in University World News
With more than three million students studying outside their own countries, and rising, universities and governments are keen to know what kind of environment increases the inflow and outflow of students, and how countries compare in encouraging collaboration overseas.
A new index launched at the Going Global conference attempts to quantify how open to different ways of international collaboration a country’s higher education system is.
Developed by the British Council with the Economist Intelligence Unit, the index tracked policies in 11 countries to quantify international collaboration, overseas branch campuses, joint academic programmes, publications and patents, academic and student mobility, visa policies, quality, access and recognition of foreign degrees.
To read more…
From Jane Qiu, in Nature News
A survey reveals how Chinese scientists could be affected by the stand-off between their government and the search-engine giant.
“Research without Google would be like life without electricity,” says Xiong Zhenqin, an ecologist at Nanjing Agricultural University in Jiangsu province.
Xiong is not alone in thinking that Google is indispensable. Its search engine is a powerful tool for helping scientists to find academic papers and details of conferences or identify potential collaborators. And for most researchers around the world, access to Google — and all its related products, including the literature search Google Scholar — is as unfettered as their access to heat or light.
To read more…
From Sarah King Head in University World News
It may be that higher education is in greater demand during economic downturns but - after years of insidious cutbacks - American public institutions are struggling to maintain their traditionally high standards. Indeed, the Great Recession seems poised to wreak lasting damage on one of the most successful models of higher education in the world.
Higher Education Budgets and the Global Recession, a report published by the University of California at Berkeley’s Center for Studies in Higher Education last month, outlines the discouraging picture. The report’s author and a senior research fellow, John Aubrey Douglass, gives a global overview and explores - in particular - the situation in the union’s wealthiest and most populous state, California.
The report notes that, while other OECD nations are actually using the recession as an excuse to improve the quality of output in the post-secondary sector and to promote innovation, the US is witnessing uncoordinated cuts in funding at the state level.
To read more…
From University World News
The Trends 2010 report by the European University Association reviews implementation of the Bologna process and its impact over the past 10 years on higher education across 46 countries in Europe, in the context of broader reform processes affecting European higher education.
The report is based on questionnaire responses from 821 universities, 27 national university associations, and site visits to 16 countries. Its launch in Vienna last Thursday marked the official launch of the European Higher Education Area and the end of the first phase of the Bologna reform process that began in 1999.
The report is the sixth in the Trends series and considers new degree structures, credit transfer and accumulation systems, and the use of the diploma supplement since the outset. It also assesses progress towards the underlying aims of the Bologna process, such as improving quality of teaching, graduate employability and mobility of students and staff.
As well, the report considers some of the key challenges for policymakers as they look ahead to the next decade of higher education cooperation.
To read more…
From David Jobbins, in University World News
The parting of the ways between Times Higher Education and QS, its international league table number-cruncher for the past seven years, was bound to cause ripples when it was announced late last year. The two former partners are now vying with each other to capture hearts and minds for their diverging methodologies as they gear up for the 2010 rankings cycle.
QS, or Quacquarelli Symonds, the research and information specialists behind the QS World University Rankings, begins work this week on its academic and employer surveys for the 2010 rankings. It also continues a partnership with US News and World Report to reproduce the league tables alongside the magazine’s domestic rankings with the publication late last month of a mid-year update.
That there are now to be two rival northern hemisphere English-language rankings to spar with the Academic Ranking of World Universities compiled by the Shanghai Jiao Tong University will be bound to reinforce criticisms that international league tables favour universities in the European and North American mould and discriminate against institutions elsewhere, especially where academics tend to publish in languages other than English.
To read more…
From University World News
Europe produces more research papers than the US or Japan but needs an influx of venture capital to turn inventions into commercial success, according to Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, EU commissioner for research, innovation and science.
The Euractiv.com newsletter says that as the EU’s newly- installed innovation commissioner, Geoghegan-Quinn listed venture capital among a series of bottlenecks to innovation in Europe when briefing journalists on her first day in the job.
Venture capital has been creeping up the agenda in recent months and was highlighted by a panel of business exports who reported on the state of Europe’s innovation infrastructure for the European Commission last year, reports Euractiv.com.
The European Investment Fund (EIF) provides venture capital and loan guarantees to small businesses and has stepped up its activity since the outbreak of the financial crisis. Geoghegan-Quinn cited the example of the MP3 standard for compressing audio files which was invented in Europe but commercialised in the US.
To read more…
From University World News
The European Union plans to publish a worldwide ranking of universities next year that it hopes will rival existing global league tables. The aim is to boost the place of European universities in the Shanghai Jiao Tong and Times Higher Education ranking systems, both dominated by US institutions.
In the last Shanghai Jiao Tong ranking, the whole of continental Europe had only 23 universities in the top 100. Yet Europe has some 4,000 universities and colleges that enrol more than 19 million students and employ1.5 million staff.
The new European rankings are being developed following acceptance early last year of a tender from a German, Dutch, Belgian and French consortium called CHERPA, a European network of leading institutions in this field.
To read more…
From Andrew Trounson and Christian Kerr in The Australian
Australia is in denial on racially motivated attacks against international students and has failed to take action to deal with the issue, an internationally respected Australian academic has told a major conference in Switzerland.
Melbourne University professor Simon Marginson, delivering a keynote address to the World Universities Forum in Davos, said the Australian government was trying to spin itself out of crisis following this month’s murder of Indian accountancy graduate Nitin Garg in a west Melbourne park. “The Australian government is in denial,” Professor Marginson told the high-powered meeting of academics. “Racist targeting is involved (in the attacks). Indian students do have a special problem. And there isn’t enough official and civil concern about international student security in Australia.”
Garg’s unsolved murder has sparked diplomatic, government and public protests in India, further weakened one of Australia’s most important education export markets and prompted a defensive response from Australia’s political leaders and Victoria Police.
To read more…
From Craig Lambert, in Harvard Magazine
Near the University of Bologna—the world’s oldest, founded in 1088—is a medieval museum displaying carved memorial plaques that honor great professors of the past. “They all show the professor on the podium, with the students below,” says Thomas Forrest Kelly, Knafel professor of music. “Often the students are asleep, playing dice or cards, or fornicating.”
Much has changed since the Middle Ages, but one thing that persists is the lecture. The medieval university invented lecturing—the word comes from the Latin verb legere, to read—to cope with the scarcity of books: a lecturer would read the only available copy of a book to the gathering of students. “That was high technology in the thirteenth century,” says Kelly, “but not high technology for the twenty-first century!”
To read more…
From Sarah King Head, University World News.
Although a recent report applauded the fact that the number of foreign students attending American colleges and universities hit a new peak in 2008, a disaggregation of the data reveals worrisome underlying trends in undergraduate and graduate student numbers.
More than 670,000 foreign students enrolled in American colleges and universities in 2008-09, an 8% increase from the previous year, according to the Institute of International Education’s Open Doors 2009 report. Not only is this the largest percentage increase since 1980-81, it is the third consecutive year significant growth has occurred.
According to IIE president and CEO Allan E Goodman, “American higher education continues to be highly valued throughout the world. US campuses offer unparalleled opportunities for creativity, flexibility, and cultural exchange. Students from all over the world contribute substantially to their host campuses and to the US economy.”
To Read More…
From Geoff Maslen at University World News
A rapidly growing number of universities across the world are establishing branch campuses in other countries. In fact, the number has almost doubled to 162 in the past three years alone and has jumped eight-fold since 2002. Although the US continues to dominate with its offshore campuses scattered around the globe, more countries have become involved as hosts and providers.
A report by the Observatory on Borderless Higher Education* says that among the host countries, the United Arab Emirates is the clear leader, hosting a quarter of all international branch campuses in the world.
The report says that of the existing campuses, only 35 were operating before 1999. Since September 2006, at least 49 new campuses have been established - 30% of the current total - with three new ones to be opened soon. In the same period, five international branch campuses have closed.
To read more…
From Wagdy Sawahel, in University World News.
As a result of plagiarism and academic misconduct scandals associated with the country’s newly appointed Science Minister, Iranian professors in US-based universities and research centres have called on their peers at home to uphold high ethical standards, including safeguarding the integrity of the academy, curriculum, scholarly contributions and publications.
Despite questions being raised about his academic credentials, the Iranian parliament approved the nomination by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of 52-year-old space scientist Kamran Daneshjo as the country’s new Science, Research and Technology Minister.
Daneshjou, the former election chief who oversaw the disputed vote tally in June, is a professor at the Tehran-based school of mechanical engineering of the University of Science and Technology, the same institution from which Ahmadinejad graduated.
Read more…
By Philip Fine, Wagdy Sawahel and Maya Jarjour University World News
Women outnumber men in worldwide university enrolments and graduation rates, according to Unesco’s 2009 Global Education Digest. The number of female students in tertiary education rose six-fold between 1970 and 2007compared with a quadrupling of male enrolments during the same period. In terms of graduation, women outnumber men in 75 of the 98 countries, the Digest reports.
Tertiary enrolment ratios of men and women reached parity around the year 2003. Since then, the average global participation of females has been exceeding that of males. In 1970, the male-to-female enrolment ratio was 1.6. In 2007, it flipped, with the female-to-male ratio becoming 1.08.
In North America and Europe, a third more women than men are on campus. Latin America, the Caribbean as well as Central Asia also show high rates of female enrolments. In a number of countries, at least two females graduate for every male.
Read more….
From Keith Nuthall at University World News
A €3.2 billion programme of research spending that will try to pull Europe out of recession and into a sustainable economic recovery has been launched by the European Commission. At a ceremony in Brussels witnessed by more than 800 senior researchers and industrialists, the commission put scientists on notice that millions of research euros would soon start to pour out of three private-public partnerships funding R&D projects across Europe.
They will last until 2013 and will cover three topics:
* Developing innovative manufacturing technologies, materials and processes to produce more while consuming fewer materials, less energy, and producing less waste.
* Creating more energy-efficient buildings, improving new construction design and greening existing buildings through new materials and construction techniques.
* Building greener cars and smarter transport systems, including the electrification of road and urban transport, and research into hybrid technologies. More…
From The New York Times:
Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).
Widespread hiring freezes and layoffs have brought these problems into sharp relief now. But our graduate system has been in crisis for decades, and the seeds of this crisis go as far back as the formation of modern universities. Kant, in his 1798 work “The Conflict of the Faculties,” wrote that universities should “handle the entire content of learning by mass production, so to speak, by a division of labor, so that for every branch of the sciences there would be a public teacher or professor appointed as its trustee.”
More…
