The World View

Every year the Office of Teaching and Learning handed out awards with substantial monetary awards to excellent teachers and innovative programs. Getting nominated was a big deal.

Historically, Northern institutions are manifestly dominant in North-South partnerships— with limited input from Southern partners.

International education in the U.S., as in Australia and Britain, has apparently become an industry, in which international marketing and recruitment is increasingly outsourced to commercial operators.

While most studies lament the damaging effects of the rankings on higher education, the diversification of the ranking industry may better account for the multidimensional features of academic quality and challenge the prevailing hierarchies of prestige in higher education.

Although highly controversial, new forms of private higher education have been used by both right and left regimes in Latin America.

Students, especially those who come from corrupt environments where plagiarism is prevalent, but ignored, or seen as a trivial offense, need better guidance.

A few weeks ago, the Times Higher Education published a new ranking of “top attractors of industry funds." In these two essays Alex Usher and Phil Baty offer two perspectives on the usefulness and validity of this newest ranking.

The poor quality of higher education in sub-Saharan Africa has been the subject of many articles, reports and papers. The situation has significantly improved; but more, much more remains to be done.