The World View

For the last several months, the Brazilian federal universities have been paralyzed by strikes, and, in an independent development, last week the Congress approved legislation requiring that 50% of the vacancies in these institutions should be destined to students coming from public schools, and distributed according to race.

China now enrols more than 260,000 international students, and has set ambitious targets to double that over the coming years. Malaysia now has more than 60,000 international students enrolled, both from within the region, and beyond. Singapore, with a population about the same as Sydney, now has around 90,000 international students. Now Taiwan is seeking to enrol thousands of international students, and is mainly targeting the South East Asian market. Its Minister has announced that Taiwan’s higher education system has key features that should be used as a basis to attract international students.

On July 17, 2012, the fight to block the deeply tainted Equatorial Guinea International Prize for Research in the Life Sciences has been lost. Despite numerous powerful voices and massive criticism, the UNESCO Executive Board went ahead with awarding the prize.

The OECD reports that four out of ten university graduates in the world will come from China or India by 2020 — and a major part of global enrolment is taking place in these two countries. This trend is an inevitable and entirely natural result of the global expansion of higher education — massification, population trends, and the growth of the economies of both countries.

Why do universities want foreign students? If institutions are willing to pay a commission for them, then it feels a lot like a business transaction with the expectation of a good ROI (return on investment) — pay a commission and expect an ROI in the form of full tuition and fees.

The increasing intensity of the competition on the college entrance examination is a reflection of mass higher education. Since 1999, China’s higher education system has experienced rapid expansion. With more than 2500 institutions of higher education and more than 30 million tertiary-level students, China is the largest higher education system in the world in its scale. In June 2012, 9.15 million students took the gaokao, the college entrance examination.

Some observers have argued that distance education and the Internet will fundamentally change the nature of higher education in the coming decades. This is highly debatable for the system as a whole. But for the top tier universities, their traditional missions and the campus-based undergraduate experience is unlikely to change much.

It’s an epidemic. Indeed, it’s probable that when spamming scholars, the owners of sham periodicals pay attention to whether the recipients’ academic interests are relevant to the journal’s disciplinary focus. Some scholars are even placed on editorial boards even though they have not given their consent.