Obstacles to Social Mobility

It is easier to climb the social ladder and earn more than one's parents in the Nordic countries, Australia and Canada than in France, Italy, Britain and the United States, according to a new OECD study. But weak social mobility can signal a lack of equal opportunities, constrain productivity and curb economic growth, says a report on the study.
"A Family Affair: Intergenerational social mobility across OECD countries" says climbing the social ladder depends on a range of factors such as individual ability, family and social environments, networks and attitudes. But public action - particularly education and to some extent tax policies - can play a key role in helping people achieve a higher income and social status than their parents.
Across all countries family and socio-economic background are a major influence on a person's level of education and earnings. But the impact of parental education, or lack of it, on a child's future prospects is particularly marked in southern European countries and the UK.
The report says in these countries people whose fathers have a university degree earn on average at least 20% more than children of men whose education ended at upper- secondary level, and well over a third more than children of men who had not reached upper-secondary education.
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Source: University World News, Issue No: 0112, 21 February 2010

Plagiarism Dilemmas in University Management

Wendy Sutherland-Smith
Paper in the Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management
Universities face constant scrutiny about their plagiarism management strategies, policies and procedures. A resounding theme, usually media inspired, is that plagiarism is rife, unstoppable and university processes are ineffectual in its wake. This has been referred to as a ‘moral panic’ approach and suggests plagiarism will thwart all efforts to reclaim academic integrity in higher education. However, revisiting the origins of plagiarism and exploring its legal evolution reveals that legal discourse is the foundation for many plagiarism management policies and processes around the world. Interestingly, criminal justice aims are also reflected in university plagiarism management strategies.
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Paper in the Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management
Source: University World News, Issue No: 0111, 14 Februari 2010

The Rise of Asia’s Universities

Richard C Levin
At the beginning of the 21st century, the East is rising. The rapid economic development of Asia since the Second World War has altered the balance of power in the global economy and hence in geopolitics. The rising nations of the East all recognise the importance of an educated workforce as a means to economic growth and understand the impact of research in driving innovation and competitiveness. In the 1960s, 70s and 80s the higher education agenda in Asia’s early developers – Japan, South Korea and Taiwan – was first and foremost to increase the fraction of their populations provided with postsecondary education. Their initial focus was on expanding the number of institutions and their enrolments, and impressive results were achieved. Today, the later and much larger developing nations of Asia – China and India – have an even more ambitious agenda.
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Yale President’s lecture to The Royal Society, UK
Source: University World News, Issue No: 0111, 14 Februari 2010

More Academics and Students Suffer Attacks

Brendan O’Malley
Unesco’s new global study, Education under Attack 2010, reports that in a hard core of countries, academics and students are suffering serious human rights violations, ranging from assassination to torture and death threats, mainly at the hands of government or government-backed forces. The study was launched in New York last week and presented to US policy makers in Washington. A new alliance of education, human rights and child protection agencies, held in New York at the offices of Human Rights Watch, sought a common agenda of co-operation to prevent attacks on education and ensure that perpetrators are punished.
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* See also a case study from the Unesco report of a Zimbabwean academic who escaped death threats from the Mugabe regime.
Source: University World News, Issue No: 0111, 14 Februari 2010

Measuring Student Learning, Globally

Nearly two years after the Bush administration said it would not participate in an international experiment aimed at developing a global assessment of student learning, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development on Wednesday formally announced the launch of the effort - with the full participation of the United States and the Obama administration - reports Doug Lederman for Inside Higher Ed.
The Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes (AHELO) project aims to gauge whether it is possible to develop "reliable and useful comparisons of learning outcomes" that are valid across countries with different cultures and languages, said Richard Yelland, who heads the Education Management and Infrastructure Division at the OECD. The experiment will focus on producing three separate measures: one designed to measure general skills, and two in disciplines, economics and engineering. The Australian Council for Educational Research will lead a consortium that will develop the discipline-specific tests.
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Source: University World News, Issue No: 0109, 31 Januari 2010

Survey Finds More Students Worried about Finances

Family unemployment and a growing student loan burden are making American college students increasingly anxious about finances, according to a national survey by University of California - Los Angeles researchers, writes Larry Gordon for the Los Angeles Times. Nearly 67% of freshmen at four-year colleges and universities said they had at least some concerns about paying their tuition bills, the highest percentage expressing such anxieties in a dozen years, the annual study found. And with unemployment affecting many families, about 53% of freshmen who took part in the survey last autumn said they carried student loans, up about 4% from the previous year and the highest in nine years.
The report, considered the nation's most comprehensive assessment of college student attitudes, found that 4.5% of the students' fathers were unemployed, the largest jobless proportion among fathers since the survey began 44 years ago. Nearly 8% of the respondents' mothers were jobless, the most in 30 years.
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Source: University World News, Issue No: 0108 24 Januari 2010

More Women Out-earning, Out-learning Husbands

Bringing home the bacon is less and less a man's job in the US these days, writes Nicole Santa Cruz for The Los Angeles Times. According to a Pew Research Center study released on Tuesday, a larger share of men are married to women whose education and income exceed their own. In 1970, 4% of husbands had wives who made more money than they did. In 2007, that share rose to 22%.
"As women have made these extraordinary gains in working and education, men have been able to share in these gains through marriage," said D'Vera Cohn, a senior writer with Pew and a co-author of the study. "With so many women working and achieving higher income, it's increasingly a way for men to achieve economic security."
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Source: University World News, Issue No: 0108 24 Januari 2010