29Th August 2014

MARKET NEWS AND MEDIA REVIEW BULLETIN: 13TH AUGUST – 29TH AUGUST 2014

Compiled by Jamie Aston

Contents

Summary Section - UK

- USA and Canada

- Australia and New Zealand

- Asia

- International

Full Articles - UK

- USA and Canada

- Australia and New Zealand

- Asia

- International

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Summary Section

UK Back to top

Top universities urge scrapping of free-for-all student recruitment plan – The Guardian – 7th August

The Russell Group of leading universities has called on the government to drop plans for a free-for-all in undergraduate recruitment next year, following publication of a report that suggests the policy could have disastrous financial consequences.

Competing for the university vote – BBC – 29th August

Like a monster re-awakening from a deep freeze, the debate about tuition fees in England and the future of universities seems to be coming back to life.

International and postgrad fee survey, 2014 – Times Higher Education – 21st August

You could think of the £9,000 cap on undergraduate tuition fees in England as a dam holding back universities from charging UK undergraduates even larger amounts. If you did, you would see a structure that is coming under more pressure than ever before – and some vice- chancellors are hoping that it will burst before long.

Public against cutting back on overseas students, poll finds – Times Higher Education – 25th August

An ICM poll for thinktank British Future and Universities UK finds that 59 per cent of the public believe the government should not cut international student numbers, even if that limits the government’s ability to cut immigration numbers overall. Only 22 per cent took the opposing view, the report says.

Lord Heseltine: cut foreign students from figures to lower net migration – The Guardian – 25th August

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Michael Heseltine, the former Conservative deputy prime minister, has backed calls for foreign students to be excluded from the government's target to cut net migration.

USA and Canada Back to top

Urban Geography of Foreign Students – Inside Higher Ed – 29th August

Seoul is the largest city of origin for international students coming to the United States and China, of course, the largest source country. The New York City metro area is the top destination for international students, but Ithaca, home to Cornell University, has the highest concentration of international students approved for F-1 visas relative to the overall student population. Metro areas with the fastest increases in F-1 students pursuing bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in recent years include Corvallis, Ore., home to Oregon State University; Dayton, Ohio, home to Wright State University; Tuscaloosa, Ala., home to the University of Alabama; Louisville, Ky., home to the University of Louisville; and Eugene, Ore., home to the University of Oregon.

Can universities use data to fix what ails the lecture? – University World News – 15th August

John R Barker paces the front of the lecture hall, gesturing at slides with a laser pointer and explaining to a room full of undergraduates how scientists use data to make predictions about global climate change. At the moment Barker, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Michigan, is facing a climate crisis of his own: the atmosphere in this lecture hall is dead.

Surge of Indian Grad Students – Inside Higher Ed – 21st August

Foreign applications to U.S. graduate schools and initial admission offers to international students continue to increase, driven by a surge of interest from India and despite a slight drop in applications from China, according to a new survey on international graduate admissions from the Council of Graduate Schools. International student applications increased by 10 percent at American graduate schools this year – the ninth consecutive year of growth – while initial admission offers rose by 9 percent, marking the fourth straight year of 9 percent increases.

Australia and New Zealand Back to top

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Foreign accounting students put in ‘too hard’ basket – Financial Review – 13th August

Hiring international accounting graduates on temporary visas is in the “too hard” basket for many local businesses, says a veteran education agent.

But he adds that foreigners also have an obligation to improve their English skills and get out of their comfort zone to secure jobs, rather than seek the security of migrant communities.

Call for response to Chaney as overseas student numbers rebound – The Australian – 13th August

The international education •industry has rebounded with more than 422,000 overseas students enrolled in a course of study in the year to June.

New Zealand becoming popular with Indian students – IANS Live – 23rd August

Mumbai, Aug 23 (IANS) New Zealand has emerged as a popular destination for Indian students, the country's high commissioner to India has said.

Controversial higher education reforms in doubt – University World News – 22nd August

In a universally unpopular budget last May, Australia’s deeply conservative government of Prime Minister Tony Abbott announced savage cuts to federal spending on universities, higher fees for students and a revised loans system that would have imposed increased costs on students.

Asia Back to top

More international schools and pupils in the UAE than anywhere else, report says – The National – 12th August

The UAE has more international schools and pupils than any country in the world.

The business generates US$2.5 billion a year in fees, more than Dh9bn, and accounts for 7 per cent of global tuition-fee income.

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US tops Shanghai university rankings, China on rise – University World News – 15th August

American universities have again outranked more than 1,250 other higher education institutions around the world in the annual Shanghai Jiao Tong listing of the global top 500 universities. And for the 12th year running, Harvard was placed number one.

International Back to top

Why tuition fees for international students won’t work – University World News – 15th August

For a few years now there has been debate about setting tuition fees for international degree students in Finland. Developments concerning the ongoing tuition fee trial for non-European Union and European Economic Area students (2010-14) have been reported by University World News a couple of times.

Pilot global quality platform for ‘non-traditional’ HE – University World News – 16th August

A global quality platform to review non-institutional education providers is to be piloted by America’s Council for Higher Education Accreditation and its International Quality Group. The platform is aimed at protecting students and is a response to the explosion of non-traditional provision – including MOOCs – and increasingly international higher education.

Are International Students Satisfied? – Inside Higher Ed – 20th August

An analysis of satisfaction surveys from 60,000 international students at 48 universities in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia reveals that students are, by and large, satisfied, but that satisfaction levels vary by country of origin and that large proportions of undergraduate international students from a single country can inhibit integration.

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Full Articles

UK Back to top

Top universities urge scrapping of free-for-all student recruitment plan By Richard Adams – The Guardian – 7th August http://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/aug/07/russell-group-universities-scrap-free- for-all-undergraduate-recruitment

Although the government expects undergraduate enrolments to rise in 2015 once existing caps on student recruitment are removed, the report said evidence from the same policy in Australia saw student numbers balloon well beyond official forecasts, forcing the government there to spend hundreds of millions of dollars more on higher education.

"One of the things no one knows with absolute certainty is how many students will roll up when the number caps come off," said Hillman, a former special advisor to David Willetts as higher education minister and director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, which compiled the report.

"It would be naive to think the policy will be simple to roll out, especially if higher education suffers further cuts after the 2015 election," Hillman warned.

The change – announced by chancellor George Osborne in the autumn statement – allows universities in England to recruit as many students as they want from September 2015. Osborne said the expansion would be funded by selling off student loans – but that policy has recently come into question, with business secretary Vince Cable saying the sale would not go ahead.

Wendy Piatt, director-general of the Russell Group of universities – which represents research-intensive universities such as Oxford and Manchester – said the HEPI report on Australia's experience raised "serious concerns" about the ending of firm controls on student numbers.

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"Now that the government no longer intends to use the sale of the student loan book to fund the uncapping of student numbers in England, we would urge it to abandon the policy or at least consider much more robust ways of controlling costs and quality," Piatt said.

"We would be extremely concerned if the substantial funds required to pay for additional students were taken from the already very stretched budget for research and higher education. It would be very worrying if this policy leads to less funding per student. Good teaching requires proper levels of investment."

While Australia spent years preparing the groundwork for open enrolments in its universities, the English approach "was put together quickly and remains fuzzy," according to Hillman, including the Treasury's forecast of an additional 60,000 students a year.

"It's as good a guess as anyone else's guess – but it is a finger in the air. When the Australian government went through a similar process, they ended up underfunding the policy," Hillman said.

"Even if only 60,000 people extra turn up in 2015-16, as the sector works out how the system works, they'll look for new opportunities, and one of those opportunities is offering more access to higher education courses and getting people in that way."

The Department for Business, Innovation & Skills did not reply to requests for comment.

Professor Steve West, chair of the University Alliance group of newer universities such as University of Portsmouth and Coventry University, said Australia's example was "incredibly important" for England.

"We need to set out a longer-term plan for solving the problem and creating a sustainable higher education system," said Prof West, vice-chancellor of the University of the West of England, in Bristol.

"The UK needs to ensure it is able to grow the graduate population, as our global competitors continue to do, and to encourage talent from right across society."

The report by Australian academic Andrew Norton, who co-wrote a review of the policy for the Australian government, also suggests that "fee deregulation" is a logical progression from opening up enrolment without limit on numbers or qualifications. That would potentially allow universities to compete on tuition costs, with the more prestigious universities able to charge more while others opted to attract students through lower fees.

The Australian experience also showed a drop in the average level of qualifications of students enrolling – offering more access opportunities for students who currently struggle to find places in universities.

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The new policy opens up unexplored possibilities for private institutions and colleges offering access to higher education courses, designed to prepare students without appropriate qualifications for undergraduate study.

Pam Tatlow, chief executive of Million+, a think-tank supported by universities, said the Australian experience showed deregulation created risks for students, taxpayers and universities. "A free-for-all approach may be attractive in principle but as Australia shows only too clearly it is by no means plain sailing," Tatlow said.

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Competing for the university vote By Sean Coughlan – BBC – 28th August http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-28968989

Like a monster re-awakening from a deep freeze, the debate about tuition fees in England and the future of universities seems to be coming back to life.

If there was a top 10 of education stories in the life of this Parliament, it would be hard to think of anything bigger than the ferocious dispute over raising tuition fees.

There were riots in the streets and rebellions among MPs. There was unprecedented interest in what had been the backwater of higher education funding.

But then it all went quiet. No one seemed to want to disturb the sleeping dragon.

The calm seems to be being broken, as universities are rapidly emerging as a political battleground, with competing visions.

Aspirational vote Political parties like to align themselves with people's aspirations - and for more families than ever universities are a significant aspiration.

One lesson of the fee increase has been that there is a deep-rooted, rising demand for higher education. Despite trebling fees, after a brief dip, applications are almost undiminished, with every sign of long-term growth.

Record numbers will be starting university this autumn.

But alongside this big social change there is anxiety about affordability.

This week Labour has called for a more diverse higher education system, with more options for young people who do not want a traditional three year academic degree.

There are proposals for technical universities, promoting links with industrial research, where people can "learn while they earn".

Universities spokesman Liam Byrne has raised the spirit of the 1960s and the "white heat of technology", setting out a higher education system which would harness the hi-tech digital industries to support a high-wage economy.

Unlimited places The Conservatives are also making a strong play on higher education, positioning themselves as the party of university expansion.

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They have announced plans to scrap limits on university places, tapping into the ambitions of parents for their children.

Alongside these optimistic plans is the much tougher and still unanswered question about what will happen to tuition fees.

Labour's last position was to reduce fees to £6,000. There might be some more clarity on this at the party conference - and maybe an even bolder position on reducing fees further in the longer term.

But any such reduction will produce a growl of concern from universities who will worry about a looming funding gap.

The Conservative plan to remove the limit on university places is also worrying universities, who are concerned that it will mean more students with same funding being stretched more thinly.

And would a move to a less regulated market in places mean a less regulated market in fees? There are already rumblings that top universities would like to be able to charge much more than the £9,000 limit.

It isn't just the headline figure that will need to be reconsidered. The repayment terms on student loans are an important part of the jigsaw.

In the angry battle over raising tuition fees there were strenuous efforts to damp down the impact.

And it might be that this current phase of £9,000 fees on generous terms will be seen as something of a phoney war - and that a much tougher set of repayment terms will apply to future students.

Such debates are much more difficult territory for the Lib Dems, who became the lightning rods for so much of the anger over tuition fees.

But the future of universities, as a touchstone of opportunity and ambition, looks like it could be an increasingly important dividing line.

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Public against cutting back on overseas students, poll finds By John Morgan – Times Higher Education – 25th August http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/public-against-cutting-back-on-overseas- students-poll-finds/2015363.article

And 66 per cent of Conservative voters are opposed to reducing international student numbers, the polling found.

Tory MP Mark Field, chairman of Conservatives for Managed Migration, says in the foreword to the British Future and UUK report that it was “always a mistake to include the student migrant flow within a target to reduce total immigration numbers”.

In government, the Conservatives have pursued a policy to cut net migration to the “tens of thousands”. The Conservative leadership has so far rejected calls to remove students from the net migration figures, thus sparing universities from the effects of the drive to reduce immigration.

The report, titled International Students and the UK Immigration Debate, is likely to be an attempt by UUK to influence Conservative thinking amid the development of the party’s election manifesto.

The report recommends that the government “should remove international students from any net migration target”; should launch a campaign overseas to “attract more international students to Britain”; should “communicate a consistent message that Britain welcomes international students”; and should “enhance opportunities for qualified international graduates to stay in the UK to work and contribute to the economy”.

In terms of the post-study work visa – scrapped by the government and viewed as particularly important to attracting Indian students – the polling found that 75 per cent of respondents said international students “should be allowed to stay and work in Britain after graduating from British universities…for at least a period of time”.

Sixty-one per cent said that “Britain’s universities would have less funding to invest in top- quality facilities and teaching without the higher fees paid by international students. Only 7 per cent disagree.”

Christopher Snowden, UUK president, said: “The poll is clear that the public sees international students as valuable, temporary visitors, not immigrants.”

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He added: “With international students being caught up in efforts to bear down on immigration, there is a perception internationally that the UK is closed for business and does not welcome students. The call to remove international students from any net migration target has clear public support.”

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Lord Heseltine: cut foreign students from figures to lower net migration By Andrew Sparrow – The Guardian – 25th August http://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/aug/25/heseltine-cut-foreign-students-figures- lower-net-migration-conservatives

Michael Heseltine, the former Conservative deputy prime minister, has backed calls for foreign students to be excluded from the government's target to cut net migration.

He said that while he supported rigorous immigration controls, members of the public did not view students as immigrants and having foreign students in the UK brought considerable benefits.

Lord Heseltine spoke out following the publication of polling suggesting 59% of people think the government should not reduce the number of international students, even if that makes reducing immigration numbers harder. Among Conservative supporters, the figure was even higher, at 66%.

The poll, part of a report by the British Future thinktank and Universities UK, the body representing universities, also found that only 22% of people regard foreign students coming to the UK to study as immigrants.

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When people are told that students do count as immigrants for the purposes of the government's target, "the most common reaction is surprise and even bafflement that international students are classified as immigrants at all", the report found.

The Home Office said foreign students were included in the figures because they had "an impact on our communities and on our public services" and because this was the practice followed by Britain's competitors and by the UN.

But Heseltine told the BBC: "The public do not see students who come and go as part of the immigration problem."

He said that students contributed to the prestige of British universities and played an ambassadorial role when they left, promoting British higher education abroad. They also brought "huge financial stability" to universities, he said, "enabling them to maintain their standards of excellence".

Heseltine's comments bring him into line with Labour, which also favours excluding students from immigration targets. The Home Office said: "While our reforms are cracking down on the abuse of student visas, which was allowed to continue for too long, we have seen applications to study at UK universities go up by 7% last year, and by even more for our world-leading Russell Group universities."

David Cameron wants to get annual net migration below 100,000 by 2015, although it is widely accepted in government that this target will be missed.

The Tory MP Mark Field, chairman of a group called Conservatives for Managed Migration, also backed the findings of the British Future/Universities UK report. "Politicians are rightly expected to engage with public concerns about immigration, and the government has done so admirably, but it is time politicians recognised that there are different types of immigration," he said.

"This report shows that the public already makes those distinctions and in fact has a pragmatic and nuanced view about the kinds of migration that best reflect our nation's interests and values. It demonstrates there is a broad public consensus that international students are good for Britain."

Migration Watch UK's chairman, Sir Andrew Green, said: "Nobody is against genuine students who return home but Lord Heseltine has not realised that only one third of non-EU students actually do so.

"The student route has become a massive hole in our immigration system. That is why the Government must stick to their guns on this matter."

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USA and Canada Back to top

Urban Geography of Foreign Students By Elizabeth Redden – Inside higher Ed – 29th August https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/08/29/new-analysis-international-student-visa- approvals-traces-migration-patterns

A new analysis of international student visa approvals from the Brookings Institution traces where international students on F-1 visas are coming from and where they are going at the level of the city. The report, "The Geography of Foreign Students in U.S. Higher Education: Origins and Destinations," analyzes data on F-1 visa approvals included in the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS) database, obtained by Brookings via a Freedom of Information Act request. F-1 is the most common form of visa for international students in the U.S., but, notably, the report does not include data on international students coming to the U.S. on the less common J-1 or M-1 visas.

The new analysis differs from many others, which typically focus on countries that send students to the United States, not cities.

The Brookings report also analyzes government data on work authorizations for students on optional practical training, a period of 12 to 29 months post-graduation in which students are permitted to stay in the U.S. and work in their field of study. The analysis found that 45 percent of international students pursue OPT in the same metro area as their college or university, with the proportions being much higher for big cities like New York and cities with specialized labor markets like Honolulu and Las Vegas (both major destinations for hospitality students), and lower for smaller metro areas like Erie, Penn. and Binghamton, N.Y.

An interactive online feature provides statistics on the foreign student population and OPT authorizations for 118 metro areas (large and small) in the U.S. and 94 global cities of origin, in addition to country-level data.

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“Foreign students are the bridge between their home towns abroad and their new home towns,” said Neil G. Ruiz, the report author and an associate fellow for Brookings’ Metropolitan Policy Program. Per the list below, international students in the U.S. are primarily coming from large or mega-cities in countries with emerging economies.

Top Hometowns for F-1 Students in the U.S., 2008-12 City Share of Total F-1 Student Enrollment 1. Seoul, South Korea 4.90% 2. Beijing, China 4.30% 3. Shanghai, China 2.50% 4. Hyderabad, India 2.30% 5. Riyadh, Saudi Arabia 1.50% 6. Mumbai, India 1.50% 7. Taipei, Taiwan 1.40% 8. Hong Kong 1.10% 9. Kathmandu, Nepal 0.90% 10. Jeddah, Saudi Arabia 0.90% 11. Nanjing, China 0.80% 12. Chennai, India 0.80% 13. Singapore 0.80% 14. Bangalore, India 0.80% 15. Delhi, India 0.80% 16. Guangzhou, China 0.70% 17. Chengdu, China 0.70% 18. Wuhan, China 0.70%

19. Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam 0.70%

20. Shenzhen, China 0.70%

“In the short term, universities love foreign students because of the money they provide, but in the long term the local economies benefit from them if one or a few of them help to bridge with economies that are emerging in fast-growing Asia, or anywhere around the world,” Ruiz said.

By drilling down to the city level, Ruiz found some surprises. One striking anomaly involves students from Hyderabad, a hub for the information technology industry in India: the Brookings analysis found that their top five destination universities from 2008-12 included several unaccredited institutions that have been targets of investigations by U.S. immigration officials, specifically the now-defunct Tri-Valley University, whose founder and president was convicted in March on charges of visa fraud; Herguan University; and the University of Northern Virginia. By contrast, the top destination universities for students from Delhi are all well-known doctoral-level research universities: Carnegie Mellon, Columbia and Purdue Universities and the Universities of Illinois and Southern California.

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The Brookings analysis found that the University of Southern California had the largest overall number of F-1 visa approvals for students seeking bachelor’s degrees or higher from 2008 to 2012, followed by Columbia, Illinois, New York University, Purdue, the City University of New York, Northeastern University, the University of Michigan, the University of Washington, and Indiana University.

Other main points in the report include the finding that the number of international students on F-1 visas grew dramatically from 110,000 students in 2001 to 524,000 in 2012, that they are concentrated in U.S. metropolitan areas, and that they disproportionately study science, technology engineering and mathematics (STEM) and business fields. In these regards, the Brookings findings are consistent with those documented in the annual Open Doors survey of international student enrollments conducted by the Institute of International Education, said Rajika Bhandari, IIE’s deputy vice president for research and evaluation and director of its Center for Academic Mobility Research and Impact. The specific numbers vary due to differences between Open Doors survey data and SEVIS data, but Bhandari said that overall the two data sets point to similar trends.

“We were very pleased to find that this new analysis really reiterates some of the key findings about international students in the U.S. that we have been releasing over the past few years, which include the fact that we know the number of international students in the U.S. has been rising consistently; we know that international students are drawn to large metropolitan areas and that they’re drawn to the STEM and business fields,” Bhandari said. “I’m glad to see that this detailed report supports those findings and it’s also interesting that we now have additional analysis on where students are specifically pursuing their OPT work and also which specific cities they’re coming from. That piece is a very useful complement to the findings that we release through Open Doors each year."

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Can universities use data to fix what ails the lecture? By Steve Kolowich – University World News – 15th August http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20140814161321963

[This is an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education, America’s leading higher education publication. It is presented here under an agreement with University World News.]

The students are supposed to be following along with the slides on their computers while taking notes using a program called LectureTools. It was designed to collect data on how students are reacting to lectures – in theory, giving professors a window into what is going on in the heads of their students.

Today the data collection seems to be going poorly. Few students appear to have LectureTools open on their monitors, and even fewer are using the program to take notes. One student is watching a soccer match. Another is surfing message boards on Reddit. Several are wearing ear buds.

The majority watch Barker with inscrutable expressions. Occasionally he asks: "Are there any questions about this?" Silence. Are the students learning anything? He does not know.

Mounting pressure to show what students learn

This lack of awareness has become unacceptable in some corners of higher education.

Colleges face mounting pressure to show that students walk away with more than millstones of debt. Traditional universities, especially prestigious ones like Michigan, face less scrutiny than newer institutions that run big online programmes and operate like upstart businesses.

But traditional universities also may be less well set up to adapt to a culture of accountability. At research universities in particular, professors face less pressure to use technology to measure and modify the classroom experiences they are delivering to students.

LectureTools is supposed to help Michigan’s professors become more data-driven in their teaching. The software is the creation of Perry J Samson, one of Barker’s colleagues in the department of atmospheric, oceanic and space sciences.

Samson’s idea was to invent a system that could spur his colleagues to squeeze data out of the thin air of the lecture hall – data they might use to become better teachers.

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On this drizzly April morning, from where Samson sits in the back of the lecture hall, it doesn’t seem as if his system is changing anything.

Traditional universities at a disadvantage

If data-driven teaching is the future of higher education, traditional universities are at a disadvantage.

In virtual classrooms, the subtlest gestures are preserved in digital amber. Colleges that are largely online, like the University of Phoenix and Southern New Hampshire University’s College of Online and Continuing Education, sit atop vast deposits of data describing students’ interactions with instructors, peers, readings and quizzes.

Those data can be mined for insights about teaching techniques that are not working and concepts that students are failing to grasp. They also can be used to design software that adapts on the fly to the needs of individual students, an approach that many advocates see as online education’s trump card against traditional instruction.

At Michigan, however, many undergraduate courses operate as they have on campuses for centuries. Classroom discussions, if they happen at all, are ephemeral. Professors rely on grades, student evaluations and other old-fashioned methods to figure out whether they are any good at teaching the things they have devoted their lives to knowing.

The university is doing what it can to become more data-driven. Over the past two decades, Michigan has built an infrastructure aimed at making it easier for administrators, researchers and professors to use data to do their jobs better.

Laura M Patterson, chief information officer, remembers arriving on campus in 1993 to take a job as registrar. At the time, the university was still using a decentralised, ink-and-paper filing system.

“I had a staff of about 86 people who typed information onto paper records and then made photocopies of 40,000 records every term and delivered those photocopies out to every school and college," says Patterson. "Then they’d go in filing cabinets."

Changes afoot

But things were beginning to change. That same year, Michigan created a central data warehouse that has become a giant digital filing cabinet for all of the data collected by the university’s 19 schools and colleges. And soon university-wide management software vastly increased the amount of data flowing into that central warehouse.

More recently, Michigan has piped in data from its learning management system that not only identify students and the courses they are taking, but also indicate how frequently they log in to the system, download digital course materials, and submit online assignments.

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All of this has allowed the university to keep pace with colleges that are using student data collected outside the classroom to predict which students might need help and nudge them in the right direction.

Now Michigan is building an ‘early warning’ tool, called Student Explorer, that keeps advisers apprised, throughout each term, of how their students are doing relative to others in the same course, says Stephanie Teasley, a research professor at Michigan’s School of Information. If most students have submitted 10 assignments, and one student has turned in only five, her adviser will know something is amiss.

Timothy McKay, a physics professor, has built another tool, called ECoach, that provides similar real-time feedback directly to students.

ECoach takes information about them, collected via a voluntary survey at the beginning of the semester, and combines it with academic and demographic data from the warehouse to generate advice based on students’ backgrounds and where they stand in their courses. The tool is now being used in several large, introductory courses.

Lecturers not so keen

But collecting data on what happens inside lecture halls is a trickier feat, and harder to manage centrally.

Michigan’s leaders believe the university needs to become more data-savvy in order not to be left behind. Whether that belief will extend to the teaching mission remains in the hands of the faculty.

Data storage at Michigan has been centralised, but the authority over teaching techniques remains distributed. Deans, departments and professors are largely left on their own, and many prefer to devote their time and brainpower to winning research grants and publishing articles rather than to reworking their teaching methods with new, unfamiliar technologies.

They are under little external pressure to do so.

While for-profit institutions and community colleges face intense scrutiny of their programmes and teaching methods – especially online – research flagships and their lecture halls remain in good standing with regulators, accreditors and prospective students.

Hunter R Rawlings III, president of the Association of American Universities or AAU, says this holds true for its membership of top research institutions. “Most of the pressure, where there is some, at the AAU schools is self-imposed,” he says.

Martha E Pollack, the Michigan provost, says the university is “committed to using data to understand learning”. But she also says she is not about to try to make professors do anything they don’t want to do: "Orders don’t work at a university."

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In lieu of mandates, the provost has tried to create a hospitable environment for professors to experiment with data-driven teaching – in the hope that they can persuade colleagues to follow suit.

Whether data-driven teaching actually spreads at Michigan may depend on whether professors like Samson are able to get others to use such technology, and use it well.

Samson, who has been at Michigan since 1979, wears a white goatee and glasses and an expression of low-level amusement. He describes himself as a “lazy” ex-hippie who skipped Woodstock because he didn’t want to deal with the traffic.

He is not shy about admitting where teaching falls on the list of priorities for most of his peers: a distant third, after publishing articles and landing research grants. "Instructors want to do the right thing," he says. "They’re just busy guys, and they don’t sense that the bean-counting is heavily weighted toward the teaching."

In 1993, while the university was devising its data warehouse, Samson was conducting his own experiments in data collection. He co-founded a digital weather service, called the Weather Underground, that helped members of certain computer networks get data from the National Weather Service in real time instead of having to wait for a report on the news.

New data frontier – The lecture hall

With LectureTools, Samson hopes to explore another frontier of data collection: the lecture hall. He does not believe Michigan’s lecture halls are going to be decommissioned anytime soon. But he does not think they are doing students any good.

"I think that universities are doing students a disservice," he says, "because in order to make our ends meet, we have these large intro courses that are just terrible environments for learning."

LectureTools is supposed to improve those environments by helping professors trawl their lecture halls for data. This involves getting everybody literally on the same page, with students opening LectureTools and following along with the professor’s slides on their own screens.

Students can take notes in the margins of the slides. They can respond to questions the professor builds into the lecture. They can click a button that says: ‘I’m confused.’ Every time they do, they produce data that begin to make sense of those Sphinxlike stares.

Samson is not the first professor to try to snatch data out of the ether in traditional classrooms.

For several years, Arizona State University has been teaching some of its maths courses by sitting students in front of computers and tracking their progress with electronic tutoring software; a professor walks the aisles offering human intervention when necessary.

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Other professors have tried collecting real-time data in traditional classrooms by using student response systems, often called ‘clickers’ because of the remote controls that come with some products. Clickers essentially allow professors to keep a running tab on the collective comprehension of their students during lectures.

LectureTools

By aggregating signals of confusion (like the ‘I’m confused’ button) and apathy (like declining to take notes) from the classroom, Samson says, LectureTools might be able to identify at- risk students more effectively than counting log-ins and assignment submissions. "We have a lot more data on what students actually do in class," he says.

Other features are being developed. In the future, the software also might intervene pre- emptively if a sleep-inducing lecture seems to be in progress. Or if a professor is uploading too many slides and not enough surveys or quizzes, then LectureTools could nudge him with a message, says Samson.

Rather than disrupt traditional higher education, Samson’s idea is to disrupt the lives of professors as little as possible. "We don’t have time to go to meetings in the centre for teaching and learning," he says. "We have research to do."

He makes no apology for this, nor does he believe that universities should leave instruction to adjunct instructors and teaching assistants.

Every professor wants to be a good teacher, he says, but there are structural aspects of research universities – the pressure to win research grants, the size and format of many undergraduate courses, everyday inertia – that can make it difficult for them to improve.

Technology does not have to destroy those structures in order to improve undergraduate instruction, says Samson; it just has to help professors work more efficiently within them.

And a system of hints and reminders is more efficient than trusting professors to read and apply the lessons of education research. "If you can get the information when you need it," he says. "You don’t need to read the damn article."

The professor has had some success getting his colleagues to try using LectureTools in large introductory courses. In the spring, the software was being used in about 40 classrooms at Michigan, he says.

Adoption elsewhere has been scattered. In 2012, Samson sold LectureTools to Echo360, an education technology company, which has started marketing it to professors at other universities. The program is being used in at least one classroom at 1,100 institutions, according to Samson, who has kept his title of chief executive of LectureTools. But only 80 are using the software in 10 or more courses.

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Those data are, in any case, superficial. Just as traditional universities rarely mandate that professors use specific technologies to teach, they do not require professors who adopt a certain technology to use it in a particular way.

At Michigan, the question of whether such tools are making professors more data-driven can be answered only one classroom at a time.

When John Barker lectures about climate change, he knows what he’s talking about. He has published papers, edited journals and won several awards from his department, including two for excellence in teaching.

And yet, when it comes to teaching, Barker does not flatter himself. "I consider myself to be kind of an average professor," he says. "I’m sort of typical. We have a lot of things going on. Teaching is kind of not at the forefront."

Several years ago, when Samson started proselytising for LectureTools among his Michigan colleagues, he pegged Barker as a member of a crucial demographic: the silent majority of faculty members willing, if not necessarily eager, to try out a new teaching tool so long as it does not put them out too much.

"I figured," says Samson, "if I could get this guy to start using it, I could get anybody to use it."

On this April morning, Barker is not relying heavily on LectureTools. His lecture has a lot of slides, and some of them are so jam-packed with graphs and figures that the fine print is difficult to read. Occasionally he pauses to ask if anybody is lost. But nobody speaks up, and he does not use the LectureTools polling feature to solicit anonymous answers.

"This is the problem," whispers Samson. "John still teaches in the same way when he just uses his slides. It’s not as engaging. But the hope is that, having the tools, we can push him to use them."

Barker is not a novice with LectureTools. This is his third year using the program. He used to treat the software as a back channel for students who wanted to ask questions and receive answers from his teaching assistant while the lecture was in progress.

These days he relies on the program mainly to collect answers to in-class assignments, which he occasionally uses to break up the lectures.

At the end of each class, LectureTools sends Barker an email message with a summary of participation data: how many students logged in, who took notes, which slides students flagged as unhelpful.

Barker says he has tweaked slides on the basis of student feedback, but he does not pore over the data his course now produces. After all, they paint an incomplete picture. "The way I view LectureTools is, it’s a resource," he says. "I don’t require students to use it."

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Professors who are accustomed to academic freedom can be hesitant to forcibly standardise the experience of their students. Barker is one of them. Samson is another.

"I don’t like the word ‘make’," says the LectureTools founder. "Just like faculty, it’s hard to make students do something. It’s on us to help students find value in using this."

HE changes unevenly

The global climate changes gradually and unevenly. So does higher education.

In teaching, the most noticeable changes will happen where "there’s pressure coming from both the top and the bottom toward more innovative teaching methods," says Charles Henderson, a physics professor at Western Michigan University who studies research-based instructional strategies.

"That’s really the only way large-scale change is ever going to happen," he says, "if it happens at all."

Of course, students are hardly enrolling at Michigan on the basis of professors’ use of classroom data to inform their teaching. The draw of a university, especially one highly visible in popular culture, is much broader than that.

"They’re not picking between the University of Michigan and the University of Phoenix," says Henderson.

Carrots not sticks

As for pressure from the top, the administration at Michigan has opted to use carrots, not sticks, to steer instructors toward innovative teaching techniques. Pollack, the provost, has appointed a task force to support faculty members who are using data to shape their teaching.

The task force has created a series of grants that will offer as much as US$3 million to professors who propose ‘large-scale changes to instruction and-or infrastructure’ that enable their colleagues to ‘implement new learning approaches for sustainable and replicable adoption’.

It has also made smaller grants available to professors with ‘shovel ready’ projects that put teaching-and-learning tactics under a microscope.

Pollack says she hopes that framing data-driven teaching as a research opportunity will harness the instincts of professors.

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"The faculty here are very smart, and they’re very competitive," she says. "When they see experiments that work, they want to be on the cutting edge, too. So if you created an environment that’s hospitable to experiments, and those experiments bear fruit, then other people come along."

The provost acknowledges that online colleges have an advantage over traditional universities when it comes to capturing ‘click by click’ data from classroom exchanges. But she does not think that universities necessarily need to be collecting that fine-grained data in order to become as evidence-driven as they need to be.

"I still think there is an enormous amount of data that you can capture and analyse" without turning classrooms into controlled laboratories, says Pollack. "My goal is not to ensure that every single faculty member changes the way they teach. My goal is to have a group of people who are excited about innovation and who are trying out new sorts of things."

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Surge of Indian Grad Students By Elizabeth Redden – Inside Higher Ed – 21st August https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/08/21/new-report-international-admissions-us- graduate-schools-shows-continued-growth-and

In short, one big takeaway from the CGS data is “more of the same,” at least as far as the last two years are concerned. The findings are consistent with those included in recent reports from the council documenting modest declines in applications from China after years of significant growth and big gains in students from India, the two largest countries of origin for international students in the U.S.

For China, which until very recently was a booming market for U.S. graduate schools, final application numbers declined 1 percent this year while initial offers of admission stayed flat. This marks the first year since 2006 that graduate admission offers to students from China did not increase.

For India, applications and admission offers are up by 33 and 25 percent, respectively. As the report notes, the fact that this is the second straight year for such double-digit increases for India is especially important given that enrollments from India have historically been prone to fluctuations (a fact that’s not lost on universities in England, which have recently seen sharp drops in their numbers of Indian students).

Applications and initial admission offers for students from Brazil also increased dramatically, by 61 and 98 percent, respectively, but from a much smaller base (students from Brazil account for only 1 percent of the total offers of admission to U.S. graduate schools). Other countries and regions that saw increases in terms of initial offers of admission include Canada (4 percent), Africa (3 percent), Europe (2 percent ), and the Middle East (9 percent), while countries with decreases include South Korea (-9 percent), Taiwan (-6 percent) and Mexico (-1 percent).

Percent Change in International Offers of Admission by Country or Region of Origin

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Final Offers Final Initial Offers Final Offers of of of Admission, Offers of Admission, Admission, 2011-12 2013-14 2010-11 Admission,

2012-13 Intl. Total 9 9 9 9

Country of

Origin

China 21 20 5 0 India 2 0 27 25

South Korea -2 0 -10 -9

Taiwan -- -4 -3 -6 Canada -- 9 -1 4 Mexico -- 6 0 -1 Brazil -- 6 46 98

Region of

Origin

Africa -- 10 7 3 Europe -- 2 0 2

Middle East 16 17 12 9 ***Data for Taiwan, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Africa and Europe were not collected prior to 2011-12.

“We’re encouraged that the applicant pool remains robust,” said Suzanne Ortega, president of the Council of Graduate Schools. “I think we continue to wonder what the flattening in Chinese applications and admissions means. We know in part it’s the growing strength of Chinese institutions themselves, but the overall picture just reminds us that a strategy that is heavily reliant on recruiting efforts and partnerships in only one country is a risk in the sense of having predictable growth in enrollments.”

The data show that growth in international admission offers was highest at institutions with smaller numbers of international students. While initial offers of admission increased by 8 percent at the 100 largest institutions in terms of their international enrollment, they increased by 12 percent at institutions outside the largest 100, where the growth in Indian student admissions was especially strong. The CGS data don’t account for the reasons behind these differences, but Ortega speculated that anecdotal reports of an increase in international student interest in master’s programs may be contributing to the gains at graduate schools that historically have had smaller numbers of international students. The CGS data are not broken down to distinguish master’s versus Ph.D. degrees.

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In terms of field of study, there were increases in applications in every broad field save for the life sciences (down 1 percent), while initial offers of admission increased in all fields (arts and humanities, up 5 percent; business, up 6 percent; education, up 1 percent; engineering, up 11 percent; life sciences, up 6 percent; physical and earth sciences, up 13 percent; social sciences and psychology, up 6 percent; and "other," up 7 percent).

The survey also collected information on international experiences at U.S. graduate schools. Respondents were asked to identify which types of international experiences were in place or in the planning stages at their institutions (see chart below) and identified issues related to financial support, family-work-life challenges, and concerns about finishing the degree in a timely fashion as the top three factors hindering graduate students from having international experiences. More than half (59 percent) of graduate deans responding to the survey reported that none of the graduate programs at their institution had an explicit requirement for international experiences.

Prevalence of International Experiences in U.S. Graduate Education Percent of Graduate Deans pe of Experience Reporting that Experience is in Place or Planned Short-term study abroad (six 61 weeks or fewer) International research 61 opportunities Field research 58 Joint or dual degree program 48 Mid-term study abroad (between six weeks and three 42 months) Long-term study abroad (three 40 months or longer) Language study outside of 29 country Other 10

A total of 299 universities responded to the Council of Graduate Schools survey for a response rate of 59 percent. The council estimates that the 299 institutions confer about 66 percent of the graduate degrees awarded to international students in the U.S. This is the second phase of a three-part survey of international applications, admissions and enrollments that the organization administers annually. The first installment, with preliminary application numbers (since revised for this newest report) was released in April; the third and final installment, due to be released this fall, will include revised, final numbers regarding international admission offers and data on enrollments.

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Australia and New Zealand Back to top

Foreign accounting students put in ‘too hard’ basket By Edmund Tadros – Financial Review – 13th August http://www.afr.com/p/national/professional_services/foreign_students_put_in_too_hard_gjW gz7YLBcd6TXzwBIWmlL

Hiring international accounting graduates on temporary visas is in the “too hard” basket for many local businesses, says a veteran education agent.

But he adds that foreigners also have an obligation to improve their English skills and get out of their comfort zone to secure jobs, rather than seek the security of migrant communities.

“Visa status is a key consideration for prospective employers,” said John Findley, a registered migration agent and •education agent for the University of Newcastle.

To hire people on temporary visas and avoid penalties employers have to run continual checks against the federal government’s database.

“A temporary resident’s status can change quickly and without notice to an employer,” Mr Findlay said.

Many young international students have work rights but firms consider it too risky to hire someone who may not get permanent residence, he said. Hurdles posed by the visa process have not completely deterred big professional services firms, such as Ernst&Young and PwC, from hiring such students.

But the chance of gaining employment with such firms is slim for foreign graduates. EY hired three international students this year, out of an annual intake of roughly 300. One is due to join the firm in 2015.

“International students studying in Australia that apply for the graduate program at EY usually intend to apply for Australian permanent residency once they finish their studies. This is a condition of their employment offer,” EY Australia spokeswoman Katherine Meier said in a statement.

REVISED ENGLISH REQUIREMENTS Deloitte hired 14 international graduates in 2013 but required them to have permanent residency as a condition of employment. “We’d like to hire more but students are telling us the immigration department’s revised English requirements make it extremely difficult to gain permanent residency,” a spokeswoman for the firm said.

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EY is the only one of 55 companies in NSW listed on the Chartered •Accountants Employment Guide 2014 work placement opportunities guide open to applications from •international students.

PwC and KPMG have hired international students this year but won’t say how many. “If the individual is a graduate on a temporary visa and is the best person for the role then we help them to understand the government’s requirements,” a PwC spokesman said.

Mr Findlay said: “Businesses are in the business of generating profit not constantly checking the legal status of employees. Employing temporary workers goes into the too hard basket [unless they absolutely have to].”

His comments reinforce The Australian Financial Review analysis highlighting the difficult job market for local and international accounting graduates, and amid a push by Labor to remove accounting from a list of in-demand occupations for migrants.

International accounting graduates who have managed to get work say work experience and getting involved in local culture is key.

Mr Findley has worked as an education agent for more than 12 years, mainly in China, and said he had recruited about 1000 students to various Australian education institutions.

BROAD THINKING He said international graduates need to think more broadly about their job options, improve their English skills and be willing to move.

“They lack adventurous spirits, they won’t look outside the field,” he said.

“The scope of the occupations that accountants can go into is broad.”

Mr Findley said migrants also need to be willing to go to where the work is and not just stay in capital cities. He criticised some students for not doing more to improve their English skills during their course.

“They’re not putting enough effort into their English when they get here,” he said. “They all want to go to live in Melbourne or Sydney where there are large [migrant] communities. In that environment you can live your whole life in Sydney and not speak English.

“When they go to get the job, their English isn’t good enough.”

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Call for response to Chaney as overseas student numbers rebound By Julie Hare – The Australian – 13th August http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/international-students/call-for-response- to-chaney-as-overseas-student-numbers-rebound/story-fnahn4sk-1227022198044

The international education •industry has rebounded with more than 422,000 overseas students enrolled in a course of study in the year to June.

After five years of shrinking enrolments, the country’s fourth largest export sector saw its value rise by $1.2 billion to $15.7bn, representing an 11.5 per cent increase in student enrolments.

But a key report by businessman Michael Chaney setting out a five-year strategy for the sector is yet to see the light of day. The report, which was commissioned by the Gillard government in 2011 and handed over to then education minister Chris Bowen in February last year, is expected to deliver a whole-of-government •response to the international sector which, unlike the tourism •industry, lacks a dedicated minister or co-ordinating body.

Mr Chaney yesterday expressed frustration at the delay in the release of the government’s response to his report. “I understand that the response has been prepared and it would be helpful if the government released it,” he said.

Phil Honeywood, head of the International Education Association of Australia, said the turn around in student enrolments in the past year was exactly as predicted by Mr Chaney, but warned that competitor nations, including Canada and the US, were putting in place strategies to grab a bigger slice of the increasingly mobile student market.

Mr Honeywood said Australia’s maturity as an international education destination was standing it in good stead after five years of turmoil during which time the high Australian dollar, racist •attacks on students in Melbourne, stricter visa requirements after widespread rorting of permanent residency rules and the closure of dodgy colleges had seen $3bn ripped out of the sector between 2009-12.

“The upturn is a happy a confluence of circumstances which includes active marketing in new source countries, stability in the dollar and greater understanding of our new student visa regime,” Mr Honeywood said. “But we are still in a hiatus as we wait for the government’s long overdue response to the Chaney report.”

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New Zealand becoming popular with Indian students By (Not stated) – IANS Live – 23rd August http://www.ianslive.in/index.php?param=news/New_Zealand_becoming_popular_with_India n_students-439710/INTERNATIONAL/13

Mumbai, Aug 23 (IANS) New Zealand has emerged as a popular destination for Indian students, the country's high commissioner to India has said.

There was an increase of 83 percent in the number of student visas issued to Indians between January and July this year, compared to the same period last year, Grahame Morton said here on Friday.

According to latest figures released by the state-run Education New Zealand (ENZ) department, first-time student visas issued to Indians for studying in that country shot up by a staggering 123 percent in 2014.

"New Zealand's economic future is very much tied to our key relationships. India is a key export market for New Zealand, and is one of the fastest growing large economies in the world," Morton said.

In 2013, 11,984 Indian students were studying in New Zealand, representing a 12-percent chunk of the international student population in that country.

This year, the first-time student visas shot up by 123 percent - or 4,195 between January and July - while the total student visas (first timers and renewals) increased by 83 percent, compared to the same period last year.

In the past 10 years, there has been a 700-percent increase in Indian students preferring to pursue academics in New Zealand.

Management and commerce (38 percent) were the top favourites among Indian students, followed by information technology (15 percent), engineering and health (10 percent each).

ENZ regional director Ziena Jalil said education fairs would be held in Mumbai on Aug 23, Chennai on Aug 24 and New Delhi on Aug 30, all to be inaugurated by New Zealand's former cricket captain Stephen Fleming.

The fairs will enable students get admission to various programmes and universities there.

Immigration New Zealand area manager Nathanael Mackay said the country has made changes to its work rights programme which permit more international students to earn and learn.

Besides, there are a range of scholarships for people interested in studying there, including the recently announced New Zealand-India Sports Scholarships.

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Controversial higher education reforms in doubt By Geoff Maslen – University World News – 22nd August http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20140819160304485

But, lacking a majority in the senate, the government has been forced to back down – with the outcome likely to be known when parliament resumes in the coming week.

In fact, after almost a year since it convincingly won the federal election, Abbott and his ministers have failed on several fronts to get key reforms adopted. The government has certainly failed to persuade senators who hold the balance of power in the upper house to approve its so-called ‘reforms’ to higher education.

These were enthusiastically promoted by the government’s bumptious Education Minister Christopher Pyne, who highlighted the success of top American universities in various ranking systems, contrasting them with the position of Australian universities on the lists.

Pyne argued that Australia should model its higher education system on that of the far more competitive US model, claiming that increased competition between universities would boost their performance.

The government’s plans

Under the government’s plans, the present federal limit on the fees that universities can impose would be lifted, allowing them to charge whatever rates they believe students would be willing to pay.

At the same time, funding for universities would be cut by an average of 20% – but up to nearly 40% – while students would face increased charges when repaying their government loans that could cost them thousands of dollars more and take years longer to repay.

Of even more concern to his critics than these proposed changes is Pyne’s plan to allow private universities and other higher education providers to compete with public universities for government funding.

Pyne wants “the most significant change of policy direction in years” to be in place by 2016, allowing the private sector to access government grants to support their students and therefore charge lower fees, so competing directly with the public universities.

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Several state governments have already adopted this approach in funding their vocational education colleges with the result that public institutions have lost millions of dollars to the private sector.

Because they can choose to offer the most lucrative courses and have no public obligations to poor, indigenous, remote or disabled students, private colleges have expanded while public institutions are losing money and students.

Opposition

The Labor Party and the Greens are strongly opposed to Pyne’s plans and warned that they will not support them in the senate.

A new party run by an eccentric Queensland mining millionaire, Clive Palmer, won three senate seats in last September’s election and the Palmer senators have also said they will vote against the government in the upper house where it lacks a majority.

“The minister should not be surprised that no one in the higher education sector has given the package unqualified support,” said Labor senator and former research minister Kim Carr.

“Even the Group of Eight vice-chancellors, who like the idea of removing the cap on fees, resent the scale of the package’s cuts to government-supported places.

“All stakeholders have recognised the fundamental inequity of imposing real interest rates on [student loans]. The result would be a crippling burden, taking decades to repay, and almost certainly deterring many young Australians from undertaking higher education at all.”

Carr noted that independent modelling had suggested that fees would rise by as much as 60% in some universities as they tried to make up for the funding cuts. This meant there was a real prospect of students eventually being charged A$100,000 (US$93,000) for degrees.

“The consequences of allowing this to become law would be the unravelling of equality of opportunity in access to higher education, and a loss of quality in many universities,” Carr said.

“At most, a couple of the already wealthy sandstone universities might become slightly better off, though only by raising fees to levels that would further restrict equitable access.”

He referred to the most vocal of the university critics – the smaller metropolitan and regional universities.

These already struggle to compete with the larger metropolitan institutions for students and resources but Carr warned they would fall even further behind because they did not have the same ability to raise fees, with a greater proportion of students from low-income households.

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“So they will have to decide what to cut: course offerings and research will contract, and some campuses may close... The minister’s suggestion that smaller and regional universities might lower fees to become more competitive is a crazy fantasy.”

Another outspoken critic of the Pyne reforms is Dr Jamie Miller, a postdoctoral fellow in history at Cornell University.

Writing in The Conversation, Miller suggested the real motive behind the government’s plans was to attract more international students and that the reforms were driven not by education but by business interests.

“In 2012, international education was Australia’s fourth-largest export, generating about A$14.5 billion in revenue. There are currently 233,099 international students in Australia, or 22.3% of the total, the highest proportion of all OECD countries,” Miller said.

“The government has strenuously avoided acknowledging in public that the ‘demand’ it was really interested in was foreign rather than local. But the budget papers are explicit: ‘We are vying for students in a fiercely competitive international market… Currently, our universities have limited prospects of competing with the best in Europe and North America and the fast- developing universities of Asia’.”

Miller said the government knew that if the public realised Australian students would end up paying the same high fees as foreign students, instead of the latter effectively subsidising locals as was currently the case, then the government’s policy would be “dead in the water”.

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Asia Back to top

More international schools and pupils in the UAE than anywhere else, report says By Nadeem Hanif – The National – 12th August http://www.thenational.ae/uae/education/more-international-schools-and-pupils-in-the-uae- than-anywhere-else-report-says

The UAE has more international schools and pupils than any country in the world.

The business generates US$2.5 billion a year in fees, more than Dh9bn, and accounts for 7 per cent of global tuition-fee income.

China has substantially fewer international pupils but they bring in about the same amount in fees because schools there charge more than double the average in the UAE.

“The markets in Dubai and Abu Dhabi have grown rapidly during the past decade and further growth is inevitable,” says a new report by the International School Consultancy Group.

Of the seven emirates, Dubai has the highest proportion of expatriates and therefore the highest concentration of international schools, with 98,000 pupils per million population, the consultancy group’s report says.

The UAE has 439 international schools with 389,000 pupils, Saudi Arabia has 195 international schools and Qatar has 130.

Qatar has also approved the construction of a further 26 new private schools out of the 90 applications it received, says the report.

Kuwait has 80 international schools with 90,000 pupils, and Oman has 58 with 60,000 pupils.

The number of pupils attending schools in Dubai is expected to continue to increase, as is the number of schools, with six already opened in the first three months of this year.

“The Knowledge and Human Development Authority anticipates an increase of 7 per cent per annum in enrolment at international schools during the next five years,” says the report.

“It is planning for 90,000 additional school places in 60 new and expanded schools and it is thought to be evaluating a substantial number of applications for new schools.”

Many countries allow international schools to set tuition fees with little or no government control.

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However, those in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Qatar have fees regulated by government agencies, which control the amount by which schools are allowed to increase their fees.

“International schools in Dubai are not allowed to increase fees without approval by the Knowledge and Human Development Authority, and fee increases are related to school performance,” says the report.

“The authorities’ powers to control fee increases has caused serious problems for some schools, pushing them to the brink of closure.”

In Qatar, the Supreme Education Council must approve fee increases before schools are allowed to implement them.

Growth of international education in the Arabian Gulf region is the second fastest in the world, with 982 schools and more than a million pupils paying a total of $6bn a year in fees.

And growth of international schools across Asia, including the Middle East, has been much higher compared with other regions.

There has been a 10.5 per cent a year rise in enrolments and a 15 per cent annual rise in tuition fee income since 2009.

“The strongest growth has been in Eastern, South-Eastern and Western Asia and these are the subregions which will drive further expansion of the global international schools market in the near future,” says the report.

The report defines international schools as those that deliver a curriculum to any combination of infant, primary or secondary school pupils, wholly or partly in English outside an English- speaking country.

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US tops Shanghai university rankings, China on rise By Geoff Maslen – University World News – 15th August http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20140813160430396

The global Academic Ranking of World Universities, or ARWU, was released on Friday with the usual long list of United States universities taking 16 places in the top 20, 52 in the top 100 and 146 in the top 500.

Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, Princeton, Caltech, Columbia and Chicago – in that order – were in the top 10 while American institutions also occupied the top five places in four of the five broad subject fields where Shanghai ranks the top 200 universities.

Britain came second with three of its universities in the top 20 – Cambridge at number five, Oxford at number nine and University College London at 20. The UK also had eight universities in the top 100 and 20 in the top 200 with a total of 38 at the 500 point.

That was one behind Germany, which had 39 universities in total in the top 500 but none in the top 20. France and Italy each had 21 universities in the top 500, as did Canada, and they were followed by Australia and Japan with 19 each.

Switzerland’s science and engineering university, ETH Zurich, joined the elite top 20 group for the first time, in the 19th spot, placing the university first among European institutions.

ETH was followed by France’s Pierre and Marie Curie University at number 35, while the University of Copenhagen, in 39th position, overtook Paris-Sud as the third top university in Europe.

The Swiss-based École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne or EPFL made its first appearance in the top 100, increasing Switzerland’s representation to five – the third highest of all countries in the ranking but with seven in total.

China, with 44 universities ranked in the top 500, continues to make rapid advances up the table even though its institutions only managed to get as far as having nine in the top 200. Even with 44, though, China still had 102 fewer of its institutions placed in the rankings than the US.

Elsewhere in Asia, the University of Tokyo at 21 and Kyoto University at 26 topped all others in Asia while the University of Melbourne in 44th position became the highest ranked university in Australasia in the history of the ARWU.

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Overall, 16 countries had at least one university in the top 100 while 42 nations were represented in the top 500, with nine managing to have one listed and six having two. This year, 25 universities broke into the top 500, including Deakin University in Melbourne plus another nine that also made their first appearance.

South Africa and Egypt were the only countries on the African continent to be represented in the top 500: South Africa with the universities of Cape Town, the Witwatersrand, KwaZulu- Natal and Stellenbosch, and Egypt with the University of Cairo.

The ranking

The Center for World-Class Universities at Shanghai Jiao Tong first launched the precursor of the now too-numerous university ranking systems in 2003.

It has been criticised in the past for its heavy reliance on science-oriented sources, using indicators such as the number of alumni and staff winning Nobel prizes and Fields Medals, and the number of articles published in Nature and Science.

The ranking also uses the Science Citation Index and the Social Sciences Citation Index, as well as each university’s ‘per capita performance’ in determining a university’s place in the rankings.

The latter is calculated by the weighted scores of the other five indicators divided by the number of full-time equivalent academic staff. The centre says that if staff numbers are not available, only the weighted scores of the five indicators are used.

The centre is certainly correct, however, when it refers to its “transparent methodology and reliable data” – unlike some other rankings – and its listings are still regarded as the most reliable, if not most prestigious, of all the global university ranking systems.

Performance by field

It also publishes other results of the vast amount of data the ranking collects, such as the classification of the top 200 universities in five broad fields as well as in five selected subject fields. The following lists the fields and the top five universities in each, which again shows America’s domination:

Natural Sciences and Mathematics: Berkeley, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford and Caltech. Engineering-Technology and Computer Sciences: MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and University of Texas at Austin. Life and Agriculture Sciences: Harvard, Cambridge, Stanford, MIT and University of California, San Francisco. Clinical Medicine and Pharmacy: Harvard, UC San Francisco, Washington (Seattle), Johns Hopkins and Stanford. Social Sciences: Harvard, Chicago, MIT, Berkeley and Columbia.

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And in the subject fields:

Mathematics: Princeton, Harvard, Berkeley, Pierre and Marie Curie and Stanford. Physics: Berkeley, Princeton, MIT, Harvard and Caltech. Chemistry: Berkeley, Harvard, Stanford, Northwestern (Evanston) and Cambridge. Computer Science: Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, Harvard and Princeton. Economics-Business: Harvard, Chicago, MIT, Berkeley and Princeton.

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International Back to top

[Finland] Why tuition fees for international students won’t work – University World News By Jarmo Kallunki – University World News – 15th August http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20140813105702695

In addition to the trial, during the regime of the current government (2011-15) these fees have been debated every spring in government negotiations on its spending limits.

The two main positions centre on education export and taxpayer arguments, but are based on several fallacies.

Education export and the ‘necessity’ of fees

The widest used argument in the current debate is based on the concept of ‘education export’.

The concept in Finland roughly corresponds to the British concept of transnational education, but is wider in the sense that education export includes all commercial elements of education, for example teaching facilities, capacity building, infrastructure and school and curriculum management.

In 2010 the ministerial working group preparing the Finnish education export strategy used the UK and New Zealand as models of well-functioning education markets and referred to the World Trade Organization’s GATS – General Agreement on Trade in Services – as a point of departure.

The argument for tuition fees goes as follows: Finland has a renowned education system and capitalising on it financially would increase the Finnish export revenue and in part help the economy to recover from the downturn.

This strategy, according to its advocates, is hindered by the fact that in Finland education is tuition-free by law, and thus it is necessary to remove the ‘obstacle of tuition-free education’ and allow higher education institutions and secondary schools to collect fees from non- European Union and European Economic Area students.

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What is missing in the argument above is a knowledge and understanding of international education markets.

First: international students and buyers are not clueless travellers grabbing anything that comes their way. Instead, there are particular fields of study that attract international students from different countries.

For example, in the United Kingdom and the United States the majority of international students are studying in programmes linked to business and engineering while in The Netherlands students are going for economics and social sciences.

So we should ask: what are the niche markets for Finnish education? According to universities and Finnish embassies, it is public administration, education and social services (including health and medicine) that attract international students to Finland.

This leads to a second point: the interest in buying Finnish education is shown by overseas national authorities and institutions and international organisations, not individual students.

This is natural in the sense that the above-mentioned subjects are such that they are either too expensive for an individual student to purchase, or they are subjects that lose out in competition with economics, law etc when it comes to the earnings premiums that the degree promises.

So, if a prospective student is considering whether to invest, say, €60,000 (US$80,130) in a (Finnish) teacher education that does not generate large earning benefits, or £25,000 (US$42,000) in a business degree that will generate large benefits, then it’s not difficult to predict what the investment-minded student will choose.

This leaves us with the conclusion that Finnish advocates of education export should be looking for institutional buyers (states and sub-government public authorities, international organisations, companies etc) instead of individual students.

Finnish higher education institutions are already able to offer a so-called ‘made-to-order education’ under the Finnish Universities Act, Section 9. This means that they can sell degrees to institutional buyers and the buyers may decide what kind of degree they wish to have and – within a general quality standard – who they wish to have educated.

This holds true as long as the buyer does not charge the students they are sending fees. This act was introduced in 2008, and gives permission to Finnish higher education institutions to respond to market demands. What is difficult in this concept is that institutions have been little interested in getting down to business – even in cases where there were concrete offers and proposals.

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It is noteworthy here, that everything else except trading degrees for tuition fees is already possible in Finland: individual courses, modules and continuing education are tradable, and further education operates purely on a market basis. In fact, the best performing Finnish education industries operating abroad are trading further education and selling made-to-order education.

Therefore, rather than blaming tuition-free education for being a barrier to business, one should be asking why it is that there is no interest in grasping the business opportunities that are already available? Especially when made-to-order education is in financial terms both much larger business and a far more stable source of funding than individual students.

The answer is lack of know-how and a lack of cooperation between higher education institutions. The Finnish government and ministry have not been much help as they are too stuck in the stagnated argument about whether there should be fees or not.

The national student union has not stood still, but went forward last fall with proposals for developing education export while still preserving tuition-free education. This strategy was welcomed by many export practitioners and stakeholders, but its political value was lost after the old tuition fee debate started again this spring.

Austerity politics and the taxpayer argument

The second widely used argument is based on the common-sense assumption that international students come to Finland, enjoy Finnish social security, obtain their degree and leave the country: they enjoy free taxpayer-paid education, but give nothing back.

Therefore Finnish higher education institutions should be forced to collect tuition fees from them – no taxpayers’ money should be wasted.

This argument is more flawed than the export argument.

The first clear mistake is that international students are not entitled to Finnish social security; they have to sustain themselves. Secondly, the argument ignores the fact that over 70% of international students stay in Finland after graduation and within a year 70% of them – that is, 50% overall – find a job in Finland.

Taking into account the taxes they pay (with Finnish tax rates) and the ‘investment cost’ of free education, this makes a profitable investment for the state in a few years – even if 30% leave the country. This, I believe, is the logic behind the OECD-originated idea of recruiting international talent.

The third flaw in the argument is related to the first argument about international students having to finance their living in Finland. According to some preliminary calculations this amounts to a €200 million (US$267 million) capital flow into Finland annually, which is around twice as much as could be gained via tuition fees even in the wildly unrealistic optimum case.

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Setting fees would cause international student numbers to plunge like in Sweden, which would cause a crash in the flow of capital via living expenses expenditure. So, actually, it could be the case that the foreign capital flow into Finland would dive if tuition fees were introduced. This suggests that tuition-free education actually attracts more foreign spending into Finland than the tuition fees would.

There is also a fourth flaw in the ‘saving taxpayers’ money’ argument. There are indeed few lessons to be learned from the Finnish tuition fee trial, but one is clear and undeniable: as in Sweden and to some degree in Denmark, it would be the case in Finland that if fees were introduced, the number of international students who would actually come in and pay the full fee would be low.

This has nothing to do with quality of education nor other education-related issues, but with the fact that the total cost for students to study in Finland would be too high. Living in Finland is very expensive, and throwing full cost tuition fees – as required by the proponents of this argument – on top of that would make studying in Finland a no-go option for many.

Generous scholarships, as in Sweden, would be needed to help these students. This, of course, would be more or less the same as free education anyway. But not quite: it would be more costly. The administration of the scholarship systems, with all the work needed to decipher the students’ social conditions etc, would require extra funding.

As eloquently put by a vice-rector of one Finnish university: “The university would have to become a detective too.”

In the case of the few students who actually paid the fee, this would lead to a situation where collecting fees became more costly to the higher education institution – and the state – than tuition-free education. In the tuition fee trial this has actually been the case for one university and will very likely be the case for many others when one counts the working hours of staff in international offices.

This is a very counter-intuitive result, but actually not unbelievable: tuition fees may become a costly option.

Don’t charge international students fees

So, what does it come down to?

It all comes down to the fact that international students cannot afford to study in Finland if tuition fees are collected: the recruitment pool of Finnish higher education institutions is not the sons and daughters of millionaires, but the children of the middle-classes in developing countries.

For them, tuition-free education is a sign of social justice and a guarantee of equal opportunity. And for them, tuition free education is a clear pull-factor onto which Finland should hold in the competition for international talent.

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The same is true when it comes to education export: Finnish education is a reflection and a creation of the Nordic welfare society and the excellence of its quality is based on a long tradition of building a socially sustainable society.

It is stated in the Universities Act itself: besides promoting free research and education, the mission of Finnish universities is to educate students to serve their country and humanity.

If education export is developed according to this principle – and it should be – then tuition fees are not needed. And putting a fee barrier in the path of international students coming to Finland is not exactly serving humanity either. Tuition-free education, on the contrary, fits this purpose well and is therefore worth promoting.

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Pilot global quality platform for ‘non-traditional’ HE – University By Karen MacGregor – University World News – 16th August http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20140815132413563

In a nutshell, the quality platform – which will be piloted within the next two months – is envisaged as a voluntary, non-governmental external review of non-institutional providers undertaken by an expert team and based on self-evaluation, using standards that include student outcomes.

The Council for Higher Education Accreditation, or CHEA, will facilitate its development but the platform will need to be operated by an existing or new organisation, said CHEA President Judith Eaton.

The quality platform was discussed at a webinar last week titled “Exploring External Quality Review for Non-Institutional Providers” and attended by US higher education professionals and officials but also people from countries such as Barbados, Belgium, Ghana and Israel.

Eaton said that non-institutional education providers – defined as “providers of education experiences operating apart from traditional colleges and universities” – had generated significant attention in recent years.

These providers had attracted millions of students because their courses were readily available, low cost and convenient, and offered a way to obtain some post-secondary experience. “They may have hundreds of offerings and the sector continues to grow.”

Governments and employers were very concerned about access, affordability and workforce development, were looking for additional solutions to these challenges and saw non- institutional education as part of those solutions.

“The issue of an emerging sector raises immediately for all of us in higher education questions about quality. Although we have many fine non-institutional providers and they have robust internal quality review practices, we’ve not seen evidence of external practices.

“This is why we start talking about the quality platform,” Eaton told the webinar.

The providers

There are different kinds of non-institutional education providers.

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For instance massive open online course – MOOC – platforms such as Coursera, UdaCity, edX, FutureLearn, France Université Numérique, Open2Study, Veduca and Udemy offer online courses for career, general education or general interest.

The Khan Academy provides online education with free content and assistance, and private companies such as Straighterline and Pearson offer private, low-cost online courses that may be used for college credit. In a slightly different vein there are electronic tools to array evidence of the skills and achievements of individuals, such as Mozilla open badges.

Non-institutional providers generally offer education that is mostly coursework or modules, with a range of courses that could be career-focused or general education or general interest.

“Typically we’re not talking about offering credits for degrees, although we may be talking about certificates or badges,” said Eaton. “These providers are primarily online and typically they are free or low cost although we are starting to see some charges for certification.”

They may have course assistants rather than faculty, students attend episodically and providers have relied on the market for quality judgments – until now.

The quality platform

Eaton described the proposed quality platform as “a review, a process and a tool. An external review of the performance of non-institutional providers of education for their quality.”

She stressed that it would be providers, and not courses, that would be reviewed.

For instance in the case of MOOCs, while traditional institutions such as Harvard produce MOOC content, the quality platform would only review the the providers of that content – platforms such as Coursera that bring together offerings from various sources – on the basis that quality providers will in turn ensure the quality of their courses.

“A quality platform could help students and the public by both assuring and improving quality in this sector. It could provide reliable information to the public about a provider’s quality and assist students as they attempt to make decisions about undertaking offerings in the non- institutional sector.”

It could also have a consumer protection function, said Eaton. “We can protect students and society from sub-standard performers and performance among the providers.”

Universities and colleges too could benefit from quality judgments when considering whether to accept non-institutional offerings for credit, while quality assurance and accrediting bodies could benefit when reviewing institutions and programmes that were working with non- institutional providers. Governments and employers were other potential audiences.

Operation

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The quality platform would develop standards, Eaton explained, with providers self-evaluating based on those standards. There would also be external review by peer experts and the public – in the form of an expert team – based on the standards.

Examples of standards were whether: learning outcomes were articulated and achieved; learning outcomes met postsecondary expectations; curricula provided opportunities for successful transfer of credit; and transparency was maintained and comparability established.

The external expert team – comprising experienced academics, professionals from the quality assurance and accreditation community, members of the public, students and representatives from business and government – would review providers based on the standards.

If the expert team decided that a provider met the standards, ‘quality platform provider’ status could be awarded. There would be periodic re-examination of the provider, and there would be transparency and comparability of reviews and their results, which would be made public.

“In other words, the quality platform would provide an external review that is typical of a voluntary quality assurance process,” said Eaton.

Non-institutional providers would need to volunteer for quality platform review, complete an application, provide and certify background information and submit evidence that quality platform standards were met (self-review) and engage with the expert team (external review).

“We will seek interest from various providers in testing the quality platform. We have several folks interested in working with us for the first pilot. Over time, as it continues to grow, we might see government taking interest. Certainly the field would demand it,” said Eaton.

It is envisaged that reviews would take “months rather than years. As we continue to have these discussions and we launch the first pilot, we’ll learn a lot more about the numerous issues raised.”

The pilot project would begin within two months, Eaton told University World News. Afterwards, the pilot would be evaluated and further pilot projects might be undertaken.

“We’re putting a process out there and there are a number of options available about who would take on the process and do the work, including quality assurance and accreditation bodies.

“But first we want to know, do the standards work? Does the expert review approach work? Do we have the right issues? How do we improve the review? Will the quality platform yield reliable information about the quality of non-institutional providers? Is this doable at all?”

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International and postgrad fee survey, 2014 By David Matthews – Times Higher Education – 21st August http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/features/international-and-postgrad-fee-survey- 2014/1/2015207.article

Figures published last month by the Office for Fair Access confirm that English universities charging less than £9,000 a year for an undergraduate degree course have become an exception to the norm, as more and more universities bump up against the ceiling.

There is no limit, however, on the amount that universities are allowed to charge international students, and a survey of tuition fees for the coming academic year, compiled by The Complete University Guide and published this week by Times Higher Education, shows that fees for overseas students have risen by inflation-busting amounts.

If, after the general election in May next year, the cap on undergraduate fees is removed and the floodgates open, what might be the result? Is it likely that fees for UK undergraduates would surge upwards, as they have for international students?

Since the £9,000 cap on undergraduate fees was set for 2012-13, it has remained unchanged while inflation has nibbled away at its value. Last year, Andrew Hamilton, vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford, broke cover and argued that fees should better reflect the cost of educating an undergraduate at the university, which he claimed to be £16,000 a year.

In June this year, Sir Howard Newby, vice-chancellor of the University of Liverpool, was even more explicit, calling for completely uncapped fees. And in the same month, Michael Thorne, who leads Anglia Ruskin University, said that some universities would be “completely stuffed” financially in just three years if fees remain frozen at £9,000.

Meanwhile, universities have been raising fees in those other areas where they have freedom to do so. According to the 2014 survey results, on average, universities have increased their “typical” fee for overseas undergraduate classroom-based subjects by 4.8 per cent on the previous year (among universities providing comparable data in the 2013 and 2014 surveys), with an average fee of £11,987. In the lab, fees are up by an average of 4.6 per cent to £13,774.

At postgraduate level, international students are also being charged more: on average 5.5 per cent extra for classroom subjects and for those studied in the laboratory. Across the sector, the average typical fee for these course types was £12,390 and £14,274, respectively.

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The priciest course in our survey is Oxford’s MBA at £42,640. Oxford declined to comment, but in previous years the university’s Saïd Business School has argued that the sum is not excessive compared with other MBA programmes at elite universities in the US and Europe. Excluding medical school fees, the most expensive courses were generally those geared towards a career in business or finance. The average annual price of an MBA for an international student was £17,413, substantially higher than the average for other classroom- based postgraduate courses.

All this might seem to suggest that in a “true”, uncapped market, fees for home undergraduates would balloon. But data from home postgraduate fees, which are not subject to a cap, present a different picture.

For these courses, in 2014-15, average annual tuition was £5,680 – much lower than the typical undergraduate fee. The average fee increase for home postgraduate students was 1.2 per cent, a rise that is below the rate of inflation (which in June this year was 2.6 per cent). At more than one in five universities, the typical fee for this type of course has actually been cut for 2014-15.

Yet some postgraduate courses for home students do not come cheap. Among the most expensive were MScs in finance, finance and accounting, investment and wealth management, and risk management and financial engineering at Imperial College London, which cost £29,000 a year. The University of Warwick charges £31,000 for finance-related master’s programmes, while Oxford’s MSc in financial economics comes in at £32,760.

Some commentators on higher education policy have argued that the cap on undergraduate fees drives up the average: universities feel that they must charge top dollar for fear that students will think that low fees mean low quality, which explains why almost all of them have now gone for the maximum sum.

This type of pressure on pricing was predicted by the Browne Review, the 2010 report into university financing that paved the way for the controversial decision to triple tuition fees. It warned against placing a cap on fees, arguing that it would “distort” them. “In the current system, all institutions charge the maximum amount [£3,290, as it was in 2010] for all courses – so the cap has become a standard price for higher education rather than a means of control to prevent unfair charges,” the report said.

Might the absence of a maximum fee give some institutions the freedom and confidence to charge less than £9,000?

Anna Vignoles, professor of education at the University of Cambridge, thinks that this is very unlikely.

“There will be a reluctance to reduce fees since this might signal lower quality to students, and students will not push for lower fees if the government is continuing to underwrite the loans,” she says.

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Moreover, “some middle-ranking institutions may put up fees to match the fees of higher- ranking institutions to try to signal higher quality”, Vignoles adds.

In other words, the temptation to charge a high price for fear of appearing to be a low-cost, low-quality option – or, to put it another way, an institution’s desire to signal its membership of the “elite” – might be undiminished in an uncapped market.

When universities decide their fee levels, the issue of students’ access to loans is another crucial factor. For Nick Barr, professor of public economics at the London School of Economics, it is “not surprising” that postgraduate tuition fees for home students are relatively low, because UK postgraduates, unlike undergraduates, have no access to a public loan system that helps them to cover the cost of their tuition fees – an omission that he describes as “barking mad”.

Were undergraduate fees to be fully uncapped, Vignoles points out, it is highly unlikely that the government would simply extend the current system to cover any fee – this would be akin to the Treasury, which backs the loans, “writing a blank cheque”.

What could happen instead, thinks David Palfreyman, director of the Oxford Centre for Higher Education Policy Studies, is that the government might offer each student a “voucher” of up to £7,500, for example, in publicly backed loans. Universities wishing to charge more than this would have to finance any extra privately, from banks, perhaps, so that students could take out bigger loans to cover the costs.

The “premier league” of universities will “easily” raise this from the commercial money market and so will be able to charge £15,000 to £17,500 a year, he thinks. But at the other end of the scale, some universities might charge as little as £6,000, and the government could even limit its publicly backed “voucher” to £5,000 a year to save money, Palfreyman forecasts.

If students have to take out privately financed loans, where repayments are not contingent on income, “students would be much more cost-focused”, says Vignoles, and this would push fees downward.

But, of course, loans with tougher repayment conditions might be a great deterrent for students from poor backgrounds. “I would be concerned if you had very high fees without income-contingent loans,” Vignoles says.

Reshaping the University: The Rise of the Regulated Market in Higher Education, a recently published book written by Palfreyman and Ted Tapper, emeritus professor of politics at the University of Sussex, predicts that the cap will have been removed by the end of the next parliament and suggests that a greater range of fees will emerge: “In the context of uncapped fees, and the consequential likelihood of wider fee differentiation between universities and among courses, then fee levels can be predicted to have a greater impact on student demand.”

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But all this assumes that a dam, ready to burst, is an apt metaphor for the £9,000 cap. The decision to raise the cap on fees to £9,000 was highly controversial, prompting thousands to take to the streets in a series of protests that were held near the time of the parliamentary vote on fees in December 2010.

Whoever forms the next government may decide to take a very different route, perhaps, Palfreyman suggests, re-embracing the idea that higher education is a public good, lowering undergraduate fees to £6,000 and reintroducing more state-funded teaching grants. This is thought to be the Labour Party’s current preferred option, although it has not announced its official policy. So the fees dam may not burst at all after May 2015 – but may instead be reinforced.

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Are International Students Satisfied? By Elizabeth Redden – Inside Higher Ed – 20th August https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/08/20/new-survey-offers-insights-international- student-satisfaction-three-countries

An analysis of satisfaction surveys from 60,000 international students at 48 universities in Australia, the US and Britain reveals that most are, by and large, satisfied but it varies according to country of origin. And clustering of undergraduates from a single country can inhibit integration.

The analysis is based on data from the International Student Barometer, a survey instrument developed by the International Graduate Insight Group (i-graduate).

“It is notable that China ranks #1 in terms of number of international students, but #26 among the 30 largest nationalities on overall satisfaction, and #21 on recommendation” (that is, willingness to recommend the institution), the report states.

Students from Saudi Arabia — another large and rapidly expanding population on American campuses — are also likely to post lower levels of satisfaction.

The report suggests some possible explanations such as familiarity with English and particular cultural traits to help explain the differences.

The analysis also found variations in satisfaction according to level of parental education: the higher the ratio of first-generation college students within the international student population, the lower the overall satisfaction rate.

The report states that first-generation international students — who at some institutions in the sample make up nearly 50 per cent of the international student body — “are more likely to be culturally, academically and financially disadvantaged, which may lead to a less rounded and more problem-beset experience, and lower satisfaction. Such students, and their parents, may be more prone to less-informed choice of institution or more susceptible to suspect recruitment practices.”

The analysis also suggests that the higher the proportion of international students from any one country, the lower the levels of integration, with the effect being most pronounced when it comes to high concentrations of Chinese students. The analysis also revealed very little correlation between an institution’s spot on the Academic Ranking of World Universities and satisfaction levels. At the graduate level the positive correlation between ranking and satisfaction was somewhat stronger.

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The report identifies areas that international undergraduate students see as important and for which they tend to rate their universities highly — areas such as subject matter expertise of faculty and academic content of the program — as well as areas that students think are important but for which satisfaction levels are somewhat lower, such as “making good contacts” as far as career prospects are concerned, friendship with domestic students, organised social activities, and visa or immigration-related advice.

“In many cases these are aspects of the experience where international undergraduates desire greater structure and institutional action,” the report states.

While satisfaction with cost of living is correlated with willingness to recommend the institution, satisfaction with factors such as cost of accommodation, ability to earn money and availability of institutional financial aid are only weakly correlated with willingness to recommend.

“This may position tuition fees, accommodation costs, financial aid and ability to work as upfront ‘facts’ to be negotiated but cost of living as more complex, less visible pre-enrolment and a daily phenomenon,” the report states.

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