What International Students Want to Study

Yojana Sharma
Predicting where future international students will come from and what subjects they go abroad to study has become a mini-industry in receiving countries such as Britain and Australia, where some courses are highly dependent on overseas student fees.
Delegates and experts at the British Council's Going Global conference, held in Hong Kong from 11-12 March, agreed that demand for overseas courses from Asian students will carry on rising.
"Overall demand for international education will continue to grow in the low single digits in the next decade," said Tony Pollock (pictured), Chief Executive of IDP Education, an international student placement service.
However, subject choices may be changing as sending countries like China and India become more affluent, students from Singapore prefer to study at their own excellent universities and Malaysia reduces the number of government scholarships for students on expensive overseas courses.
Medicine and related courses in the West have long been popular with students from India, Malaysia and Hong Kong, while business-related degrees and engineering have been the top choice for students from China, Taiwan and Vietnam.
This is according to a survey of 5,000 prospective international students in 14 countries by Hotcourses, a web-based company that advises students on course choice internationally.
More on the University World News site
Source: University World News, Issue No: 0163, 20 March 2011

New Thinking Needed on Innovation Infrastructure

Arnoldo Ventura
Rapid technological changes and more sophisticated societies generate changing needs in developing countries and old methods, technologies and choices are not coping. More innovative approaches are required to tackle social conundrums and to clear paths for progress. The ingredients for these must be the information, experiences and skills people get through higher education.
Full SciDev.net article on the University World News site
Source: University World News, Issue No: 0067 15 March 2009

Israel-Palestine: Operation ‘Cast Lead’ Shuts Universities

Helena Flusfeder
Universities in Israel and Gaza have been caught up in the savage conflict now raging in the Palestinian territory. All five universities in Gaza have been shut down while two were closed in southern Israel. “The academic situation in Gaza is collapsing. People’s main preoccupation is to get food and stay alive. They feel that everywhere in Gaza is not safe,” said one Palestinian professor.
Full report on the University World News site
Source: University World News,Issue No: 0058 11 January 2009

Keberdayaan Masyarakat Peternak dalam Perspektif Sosiologi Berparadigma Fakta Sosial

Nugraha Setiawan
Jurnal Sosiohumaniora, Vol.10, No.1, pp.58-67

Abstract.
The study is aimed at understanding of peasant community power phenomena in rural of Indonesia. The anlyzing used sosiological approach with “social facts” paradigm, what argued that its were external to, and coercive over, individuals, and then analyzed by the force relations phenomena of power theory of Foucault. The result of the study showed, peasant still has been powerless, because the dominating of urban community and institution of rural outsider. The conditions made peasant powerless more and more..
Keywords: power, peasant, rural, social fact.

Abstrak.
Tulisan ini bertujuan untuk memahami fenomena keberdayaan masyarakat peternak di wilayah pedesaan Indonesia melalui pendekatan sosiologis. Analisis dilakukan dengan memakai paradigma “fakta sosial” yang memandang masyarakat sebagai kenyataan atau fakta yang berdiri sendiri terpisah dari individu, namun mempengaruhi individu tersebut, kemudian dikaji lebih jauh melalui pemahaman mengenai force relations dengan memakai teori kekuasaan Foucault. Hasil studi menunjukkan, telah sejak lama bahkan hingga saat ini, masyarakat peternak di pedesaan masih menjadi objek dan sasaran kekuasaan dari masyarakat kota maupun pranata-pranata dari luar wilayah pedesaan. Keadaan tersebut menyebabkan mereka makin terkungkung dalam kondisi tidak berdaya dalam kehidupan sosial-ekonominya.
Kata Kunci: keberdayaan, peternak, pedesaan, fakta sosial.