QSIU HE Digest - International Trends for Branch Campuses

5 Trends for Branch Campuses

Maghreb Countries to Launch Joint University

HE will suffer if UK withdraws from EU

Foreign universities find it hard in China

5 trends that can potentially affect international branch campuses in 2013.

Greater push-back from home campusesA shift from expansion to qualityGlobal competition to be education hubsFocus on economic developmentIncreasing diversity of programsFull Story:

A new pan-Maghreb university and science academy will soon be established, MAP quoted Libyan Education Minister Mohamed al-Faitouri Soualem as saying Wednesday (December 26th) in Rabat.

The announcement came after an Arab Maghreb Union (AMU) ministerial committee meeting with Moroccan Prime Minister Abdelilah Benkirane. Education ministers from AMU member states Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia discussed ways to harmonise basic education methods and facilitate student and teacher mobility in the Maghreb.

Full Story: All Africa

The British attitude to Europe often seems sad and unnecessarily destructive.

The idea of withdrawing from the European Union is profoundly mistaken, promoted by a ragtag of interests and members of the national press who often seem to confuse Europe with immigrants and run stories with two variants: “They’re taking our money” and “it’s just a crazy bureaucracy.” The result is clear enough: Britain has become more and more marginalized within Europe, a stance that can only make it more and more marginal to the world at large.

Full Story: Chronicle

Britain’s Lancaster University, New York’s Juilliard School, which specialises in music, and Duke University in North Carolina, are just the latest foreign institutions to pile into an already crowded marketplace.

Other co-operative and exchange programmes in higher education are being announced almost every month. None of them finds it easy to work with an academic system whose standards and values are so different from those in the West. Not least of the hurdles is maintaining scholarly independence in China’s restrictive political environment. The collapse of a Beijing-based undergraduate programme jointly run by two elite institutions—Yale University in America and Peking University—has highlighted some of the difficulties.

Full Story: The Economist