HE News Brief 22.2.11

by Abby Chau

• The UK government’s plan on curbing foreign student numbers is lambasted by a recent study for the Higher Education Policy Institute (Hepi). Foreign students contribute approximately £5 billion a year to the economy. With devastating budget cuts planned for the sector, the study points out that the government plans to target visa abuse will only reduce crucial recruitment numbers, particularly if it targets the number of pre-university pathway courses, which is a set of English language courses and academic preparation courses used as a gateway for foreign students to study in the UK. The study also points out that the figures the government used to justify these new visa restrictions are based on unreliable statistics.Full Story: BBC News
• Last December, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg asked universities from anywhere in the world to submit a proposal to build an applied-science facility in NYC. Now the buzz is that Stanford University is preparing a proposal for the venture. Stanford president John Hennessy says that the institution was the epicentre for the success of Silicon Valley and that the type of progress achieved on the west coast could easily be replicated on the east coast.Full Story: Wall Street JournalMore: New York Observer
• According to an exposure in the Chronicle, with the establishment of Project 211 fifteen years ago, the Chinese government sought to carve out a niche in the landscape of world class universities,. Project 985, which was issued in 1998, narrowed the focus to 10 of the country’s institutions so that they may compete on a global level. Institutions such as Peking and Tsinghua received most of the funding and was influenced by the Soviet Union’s model of specialised institutional development.Full Story: Chronicle of Higher EducationMore: Xin Hua Net
• Kenya is joining the fray and has announced that its university fees structure is set to change. A committee will be reviewing university financing in order to align the country with global trends. At the moment, the government funds students in public universities. The committee will review the costs of different courses and may suggest charging more for courses such as medicine and engineering, which are considered more costly to administer.Full Story: Daily Nation
• The governor of a district in Shanghai has ambitious plans to attract ivy league institutions to the city by 2015. Governor Mo Fuchun has been in talks with Cornell University and is reportedly eyeing up Columbia to establish a foreign branch. Shanghai is poised to host foreign institutions such as the University of Nottingham which has been invited to establish a new campus. New York University has already agreed to set up shop in Shanghai’s financial district starting in 2013.Full Story: University World News
• The Saudi Higher Education Ministry recently announced interest in establishing an e-university. Deputy minister for education affairs Muhammad Al-Ouhali said that distance learning is a good avenue to reach diverse students, particularly for mature students, and those who do not live close to a institution. Riyadh will play host to a conference on distance learning in the next few days.Full Story: Arab News
• The recent French higher education reforms is taking shape in unexpected ways: merchandising. Since the standardising of degree programmes in 2002 and the recent reforms initiated by President Nicolas Sarkozy which will make institutions more autonomous, France’s higher education institutions are finding that they must now compete for students, something they are relatively unfamiliar with according to Jean-Marc Lehu, director of communications at Panthéon-Sorbonne. He says that public institutions in particular are now having to look into branding and marketing practices such as university merchandising and gift shops.Full Story: New York Times