The World View

“Korean students are everywhere on campus.” Korean students have become the largest group in international students at China’s academic institutions for a decade. In 2004, there were 43,617 Korean tertiary-level students in China, including 14,464 students in degree programs; in 2008, the total Korean students climbed to 66,806, including 25,701 students in degree programs. But along with the large scale participation of Korean students, there are several potential problems that should attract the attention of Korean students and their parents, the Korean and Chinese governments, Chinese universities, and other stakeholders.

Government policies from the late 1990s have stimulated competition between existing universities in England and lowered the barriers to entry for new providers. This process has been accelerated under the coalition government which took office in 2010 — its 2011 White Paper sets out a number of measures intended, apparently, to encourage greater private sector involvement in English higher education – for example, by making it easier to gain a university title, and to remove legal impediments to private companies buying existing universities.

Internationalization has become an indicator for quality in higher education. The growing importance of internationalization in higher education on the one hand and the diversity in rationales, approaches and strategies of institutions and programmes on the other hand, call for an assessment of the quality of internationalization and the realisation of a system of certifications to define the progress and status of the internationalization at the programme and institutional levels.

The university community in Russia has widely discussed a recent proposal of the Ministry of Education and Science to introduce obligatory professional qualification exams for all university graduates. While such systems exist in a number of countries, for Russia this idea is new and for some universities, scary. It is every teacher’s nightmare that he or she will be accountable for their students’ results as the exam seems certain to be implemented. Why does the Russian Minister of Education and Science, Andrei Fursenko, believe that this measure to be a promising one and why is now best time to introduce it?

Much has been said about the (potential) impact of recent higher education policies of the English government, particularly regarding the effects of the increased fees on student access and participation and on the higher education institutions’ budgets. Now closer to the date—from September 2012—it is worthwhile to take stock.

In our 28- country comparative study of academic salaries (See "Faculty Pay Around the World" by Scott Jaschik), we attempted to convey the value of different salaries by converting salaries to PPP, a mechanism that allowed us to compare the "buying power" of salaries in local economic context. The use of PPP has caused a lot of confusion. In this essay a member of the research team, Gregory Androushchak, attempts to clarify the value of using PPP for a complex comparative study like this one.

The United States is truly moving into the era of the commercialization of international higher education. International students, particularly, are being seen as “cash cows” that can bring in needed revenues at a time of austerity.

More modern higher education and innovation systems alone would not drive economic competitiveness. There is a wide, although gradual bridging of the East/West gap related to a multitude of factors including tax systems, legal systems and transportation infrastructure. Knowledge production in universities in the region cannot be assessed in isolation from the larger economic environment. Higher education institutions cannot be held solely responsible for low economic competitiveness, and higher education reforms cannot be expected to bear economic results as quickly as policymakers in the region expect.