22 Februari 2011

Higher Education Becomes More Costly

Geoff Maslen
University students are having to meet more of the cost of their higher education in countries with existing mass higher education systems and "ageing demographics" - and the trend towards reduced public spending on universities looks set to continue. A new report, released last week, says governments facing budget-balancing exercises, such as Britain and some US states including California, are already imposing cuts.
Meanwhile, in emerging countries with burgeoning higher education systems, such as China, India and Brazil, the report says efforts are being made to expand access quickly to new student populations.
Tuition Fees and Student Financial Assistance: 2010 Global Year in Review was prepared by Higher Education Strategy Associates, a Toronto-based company set up last year as an extension of the Canadian Education Project.
The 60-page report reviews the situation facing higher education institutions in 39 countries, including a dozen in Europe and 13 in Asia. It says that although the global situation for tuition and student financial aid policies did not change drastically last year, "major changes to the affordability and accessibility of higher education around the world are on their way".
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Source: University World News, Issue No: 0159, 20 February 2011

New Director for Developing World Academy

Munyaradzi Makoni
TWAS, the academy of sciences for the developing world, has a new executive director. Physicist Romain Murenzi is credited with spearheading science-based programmes and development in Rwanda after years of civil war and genocide in the 1990s.
Murenzi replaces Mohamed HA Hassan, who is retiring after almost 30 years of service. He will be based at the academy's secretariat in Trieste, Italy, on the campus of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics, and will take up the post in the next few months.
TWAS, which promotes scientific excellence for sustainable development, has close to 1,000 scientist members from 90 developing countries. It runs capacity building programmes in the developing world, operating under the administrative umbrella of Unesco and receiving core funding from the Italian government.
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Source: University World News, Issue No: 0158, 13 February 2011

The Corruption of Ethics in Higher Education

Corruption in higher education is as endemic as in other institutions. One way to cut down on it, argues STEPHEN P HEYNEMAN in the latest edition of International Higher Education, is to survey students and faculty regularly.

Once the dean called me about a grade for the daughter of the rector. The rector was in the hospital. The dean said that he has suffered enough already and that I should not make him suffer any more, so I should give his daughter a good grade. - Assistant professor in Kazakhstan. Admissions were a way to make money. Big money. - Administrator in Georgia.
Universities are commonly thought to be a haven for young adults. No matter how unstable the polity or how dismal the prospects for the economy, education investments are treated as sacrosanct.
Recently, however, it has been discovered that education systems can be as corrupt as other parts of government and the economy; and that values of fairness and impartiality, once thought to be universal characteristics of university systems, can be supplanted by the interests of specific individuals, families, ethnic groups and institutions.
Such misconduct includes the abuse of authority for both personal and material gain. Higher education can be corrupt through: the illegal procurement of goods and services; cheating in the provision of its normal functions (admissions, grading, graduation, housing and academic products); professional misconduct (favouring of family members, sexual exploitation, bias in grading, research plagiarism etc); and cheating in the paying of taxes and the use of university property.
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Source: University World News, Issue No: 0157, 06 February 2011