The World View

Despite our presumption that the U.S. hosts the world’s best universities, we do not (or very soon will not) have the world’s best educated population.

During the 2000s, the number of international students attending public and private universities in Argentina increased considerably.

The unprecedented expansion of higher education in Africa is often described as “massive.” Still, the enrollment rate hovers around 5-6 percent.

“And they lived happily ever after.” No one should expect that it could be an appropriate start for a story about university mergers in Russia.

When the Swedish Language Council released a list of words that are not in the Swedish dictionary but are used in common parlance, on it was “ogooglebar” which roughly translates as “ungoogleable” in English, and gave its meaning as “something that cannot be found with a search engine”. Google objected to that definition arguing the word Google is trademarked and therefore if it is ungoogleable it means that it cannot be found on the web by using Google. The interesting part of what is essentially a specific aspect of the internationalisation of language and knowledge transfer is that Google is claiming it has trademarked an activity as well as a company.

For the past 7 years, the Russian government has actively sought ways of enhancing the performance and contribution of its leading universities, in many cases setting up new federal universities that resulted from mergers.

An important requirement for a country to successfully promote transnational education (TNE) and seek to become a knowledge hub is to have a strong, local higher education sector. This is the situation for countries such as Hong Kong (China), Malaysia and Singapore that have successfully developed knowledge hubs. But what about countries such as Botswana, Mauritius and Sri Lanka, aspiring to create knowledge hubs? Is their higher education sector robust enough to compete with TNE institutions? Will TNE in those countries help to strengthen the local sector, or weaken and marginalize it?

Comprehensive reforms of Polish higher education and research systems started in 2010-2011. Their major part was the 2010 law on a new national research council called the “National Science Centre” (NCN). The rationale behind its establishment was twofold: to leave decisions about research funding for fundamental research to the academic community and to increase the competition for research funding. The competitive funding made available through the NCN will gradually lead to the emergence of a new class of Polish research-intensive universities.