The 2014 Grant letter: another epistolary triumph

And the wait was finally over The Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills has written to HEFCE with the Department's annual message on funding and helpful bag of instructions. As excitement in the sector reached near fever pitch, the contents were being live-tweeted by @TimesHigherEd while everyone else waited to get hold of …

Developing higher education in Kurdistan

Vital developments in an emerging nation. Back in 2009 one of the University of Nottingham's senior academics took on an unusual new role. Professor Dlawer Ala'Aldeen was appointed as Higher Education Minister and began to draw up plans to improve the quality of and to internationalise higher education in Kurdistan. The post-Saddam university system he …

Save universities from more misguided regulation

Well-meaning but fundamentally wrong proposals for yet more regulation Just when you thought things couldn't get much worse in terms of higher education regulation, another group comes along and proposes a whole load more. Brilliant. (I've posted before here on this issue.) I've not seen the report yet (it is due to be published today) …

Higher Ed data – way too much information

Tackling the surfeit of data I've written before here about Higher Education regulation (see for example this general commentary and this post on information provision) and the excess of information provision available to prospective students. It's pleasing therefore to see that HEFCE is undertaking a review of providing information about higher education. The aims of the review …

Launch of the nice university league table

New league table: nearly there. A previous post noted the imminent arrival of the all new European non-ranking ranking. Well now it seems to be nearly complete with only a year to wait until the first ranking is produced. The public launch of the 'multi-dimensional' ranking, which is intended to cover a wider range of …

Higher education funding letters: another bundle of joy

On government HE funding letters The Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills has written to HEFCE with the Department's annual message on funding and helpful bag of instructions. The letter sets out Government funding and priorities for HEFCE and for higher education for the second year of the new financial arrangements for higher …

University Education – Free for Everyone?

Will everyone have free HE in 10 years' time? Or is this just more MOOC hype? An interesting piece in Time on "Why College May Be Totally Free Within 10 Years". It's a report of an interesting (but perhaps rather sinister sounding) TedEx style think tank event called the Nantucket Project.   The report commented …

MOOCS: 12 Reasons for universities not to panic

Don't believe the hype? There has been an extraordinary level of hype in higher education (and beyond) about Massive Open Online Courses or MOOCs. Vice-Chancellors and their senior management teams up and down the country have been fretting about the developments and whether they need to get on board with one of the big players …

From National to Global Universities

A nice piece from David Wheeler in the Chronicle of Higher Education on some of the challenges for universities in going global: Universities, like companies, may need to make the transformation from being a national brand to being a global one. Siemens, once thought of as a German company, now says that it is “a …

Killing the myths in higher education

Misunderstandings and myths An interesting new pamphlet has just been published by HEPI. Misunderstanding Modern Higher Education: Eight "category mistakes" is a brief and snappy read and is available from the HEPI website: In this HEPI occasional report, Professor Sir David Watson discusses eight myths - category mistakes - concerning higher education that are widely …

The Imperfect University: Reviewing Higher Education in Scotland

Report of the Review of Higher Education Governance in Scotland  As we have seen in the previous post in this series on regulation, governments, although they will often talk the language of freedom and autonomy, cannot help but get themselves involved in the regulation of higher education. However, Scotland is different and higher education in …

Evaluating University Internationalisation

On the benefits of evaluating international activity A nice short article by Eva Egron-Polak, Secretary General of the International Association of Universities (IAU) published by the Academic Coordination Association. Egron-Polak argues that there is a beneficial emphasis on evaluating internationalisation at present and that this trend means that international activity is being taken seriously and …

The Imperfect University: who should lead universities?

Academics make the best university leaders Or do they? For the first piece in this series I thought it would be appropriate to revisit and develop a post from early in 2011 on leadership in universities. The focus here is very much on the who rather than the how of university leadership - that's a …

Quality of Swedish universities ‘too low’

Sweden's Education Minister has some harsh words for the country's universities Echoing the views of the Ugandan President on his country's higher education system, Sweden's Education Minister, Jan Björklund, has been speaking out: “The quality of the knowledge that Swedish students have when they leave university is not enough to prepare them for adult life,” Björklund …

Firsts and fees, plagiarism and pay hikes (and the rest)

No dumbing down here - is this the most comprehensive HE piece ever? Daily Mail online has a terrific piece which manages to conflate a host of different higher education issues within a single kick ass column. On the back of recent HESA data which shows an increase in the number of students achieving first …