UNITED KINGDOM Private college to award its own degrees

BBC News29 July 2012 Issue No:232

 

A private college in London has been given the power to award its own degrees in a move the government says will increase competition in England's higher education system, writes Angela Harrison for BBC News.

Regent's College, which is in London's Regent's Park, says it hopes to get university status in the near future. It is one of two private colleges being given degree-awarding powers this week and which are the first to get the right since the coalition government came to power. The identity of the second college has not yet been made public.

Until now, people studying at Regent's College have received degrees through its partnerships with various universities and institutions, including the Open University. Students study for British and American degrees at undergraduate and postgraduate level. Most pay fees of about £14,000 a year. 

Yale stops sending students to Peking University

Yale Daily News29 July 2012 Issue No:232

 

Despite reaffirming its partnership with Peking University seven months ago, Yale has decided this summer that it will not continue its programme sending undergraduates to live and study at the Chinese institution, citing low student enrolment, write Gavan Gideon, Daniel Sisgoreo and Tapley Stephenson for Yale Daily News.

Yale College Dean Mary Miller, whose office recommended the programme’s cancellation, said the Peking University-Yale University Joint Undergraduate Programme in Beijing became financially unsustainable due to weak participation, with only four students signed up this autumn.

Though Yale President Richard Levin called the programme a “great success” when Yale renewed its commitment to the partnership in December, enrolment has consistently been below the level administrators had hoped for since the programme was launched in 2006. Miller said it was not sustainable to have staff outnumbering students.

INDIA Online education market ‘to grow to $40 billion by 2017’

Press Trust of India29 July 2012 Issue No:232

 

India's online education market size is set to grow to US$40 billion by 2017 from the present US$20 billion, reports the Press Trust of India.

“We expect drastic changes in online education in the next two- to three-year period,” LoudCloud Systems Chief Technology Officer Anil Sonkar said.

India has one of the largest education systems in the world, with a network of more than a million schools and 18,000 higher education institutions. More than half of the country's 1.2 billion population falls in the target market for education and related services.

LoudCloud is engaged in providing e-learning technologies in India. It has roped in Odisha-based Centurion University of Technology and Management for their distance education branch, which is set to start in June 2013, he said.

SOUTH KOREA Universities caught lying about graduate employment

The Korea Herald29 July 2012 Issue No:232

 

A number of South Korean universities have been falsifying graduate employment data to raise funds and attract students, according to a government investigation, writes Oh Kyu-wook for The Korea Herald.

The Ministry of Education, Science and Technology announced last Thursday after a two-month investigation that it found 28 universities across the country had falsely reported the employment rate for their graduates. The ministry report came as an increasing number of universities in the country face declining student enrolment and tightened budgets.

“The graduate employment rate is an important indicator when we value universities. So some of them tried to fake the numbers in order to receive funds from the government,” an official said. The ministry currently funds universities based on an annual evaluation, and the graduate employment rate is one of the most important points of the report, he added.

Full report on The Korea Herald site

Rankings – ‘Multi-dimensional’, ‘user-driven’ are the magic words

Frank Ziegele and Gero Federkeil29 July 2012 Issue No:232

 

In a recent article in University World News Phil Baty, editor of the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, warned that rankings needed to be handled with care. If we consider the impact international rankings have today, we can only agree with Baty’s notion that “authority brings responsibility”.

In more and more countries – Baty cited examples – a good league table position in the major global rankings plays a decisive role in policies of cooperation of universities with foreign institutions, as well as with regard to the recognition of foreign degrees and the portability of loans and scholarships.

These are clear signs of a dangerous overuse of rankings. No ranking has been introduced for these purposes and – hopefully – most producers of rankings would reject this role.

But we want to argue that ranking providers should not only object to misuses: it is more important to design rankings in a way that makes misuse difficult and guides users to apply rankings in an appropriate and meaningful way.

The ‘composite indicator’ problem

One of the major mistakes of rankings is the use of a ‘composite indicator’. A more or less broad variety of indicators is weighted and aggregated into an overall score for the whole university. One number is thus intended to measure the complex performance of a university!

If rankings provide information in this way, they seduce users into making decisions based on that one number. This is surely an oversimplification of quality in higher education.

Rankings can provide some quantitative information on particular aspects of the performance of universities – teaching and learning, research, international orientation and others. To do this, they have to focus on a limited number of selected dimensions and indicators, which means no ranking is able to reflect the full complexity of universities.

Some global rankings, which focus on reputation, measure nothing more than the strength of the universities’ global brand, which might not correlate to their performance. Yet their results are actually influencing that very reputation.

Other specialised rankings, for example Webometrics rankings, only measure the success of university policies in attaining web presence, but not their teaching or research performance. Despite this, the user is lured into believing s/he will be able to identify the best universities in the world with these kinds of rankings.

U-Multirank

How can we change this? The magic words are ‘multi-dimensional’ and ‘user-driven’ ranking.

The U-Multirank project, initiated by the European Commission, developed and tested the feasibility of such a system.

Different stakeholders and users have different ideas about what constitutes a high quality university and hence have different preferences and priorities with regard to the relevance of indicators. There are neither theoretical nor empirical arguments to assign a particular pre-defined weight to an indicator.

U-Multirank takes these points seriously by leaving the decision about the relevance of indicators to the users of the ranking. It presents a separate ranking list for every single indicator and suggests using an interactive internet tool, which allows people to choose the indicators that are most relevant to them.

Moreover, the set of indicators is not restricted to bibliometric research performance, but also includes dimensions such as teaching and learning, knowledge transfer, regional engagement and international orientation. This multi-dimensional approach is able to make the different institutional profiles and the particular strengths and weaknesses of universities transparent.

In combination with its grouping approach (building three to five performance groups instead of calculating a pseudo-exact league table), U-Multirank avoids the lure of oversimplification inherent in the attempts to crown the ‘best’ university in the world.

The provision of more differentiated and, admittedly, more complicated information decreases the pressure to change the methodology just to come up with a different list than in the year before. Since a major quality criterion for rankings is the stability of their methodology, this point further increases the value of the multi-dimensional approach.

The development of the U-Multirank model and the response to it from within higher education and among stakeholders has already stimulated a number of changes in the traditional global rankings. Some now also work on field-based rankings and some have started to include interactive elements to allow for user-driven elements.

However, they still stick to league tables and composite indicators instead of providing a really multi-dimensional and user-driven ranking. Let’s start the democratisation of rankings by leaving the choice completely to the user.

U-Multirank also looks for a broader and stakeholder-oriented approach in generating ranking data: the idea, which was tested in the feasibility study, is to combine international (bibliometric and patent) databases with the outcomes of institutional, student and alumni surveys.

This allows the comparison of, for instance, facts about study programmes (as U-Multirank provides a field-based ranking) with student satisfaction surveys, leading to a differentiated picture of performance.

If you only know the student-staff ratio, you can’t say if a high ratio means high quality in small groups or just a lack in demand due to bad quality. As soon as you can correlate the ratios to the students’ judgment of their contact with teachers, you will have a better impression of performance.

We have heard the objections against U-Multirank – “is this still a ranking?” or “will users understand this?” or “people still want to know who is number one!”

We would answer: as U-Multirank still shows vertical diversity by measuring performance, it is a ranking system. To make it understandable despite the complexity, the user-friendliness of the web portal will be of major importance. And, last but not least, we believe in intelligent users.

The next phase of the European Commission’s project has to demonstrate that all this can be implemented as a stable system.

* Professor Frank Ziegele is managing director and Gero Federkeil is manager in charge of rankings at the Centre for Higher Education Development in Germany.
 

Higher education institutions need to rein in (especially internal) costs

William Patrick Leonard29 July 2012 Issue No:232

 

In an article in The Seattle Times last month, featured in University World News, two members of the University of Washington’s board are quoted as saying: “This is the fourth year in a row our students have seen a double-digit tuition increase…It can’t go on.”

The University of Washington is not alone in facing declining external support. The American higher education community’s prospects for its own sustainability are questionable. It is unlikely to endure as we know it, with reliance on tuition fee and enrolment increases compensating for the failure to more rigorously control costs and balance budgets. Public and non-profit private institutions alike have focused for too long on short-term solutions.

Without a large endowment income cushion, the bulk of US public and non-profit private institutions have been focused on the short-term imperative of bringing revenues in line with an array of immediate, unavoidable and inflexible operating costs that these institutions bear.

Short-term remedies to balance institutional budgets present only a limited solution. Decades of relatively predictable government support appear to have engendered a sense of unquestioned entitlement, as institutions have added programmes and services on top of existing expenses.

There are three short-term internal tools for balancing institutional budgets. To date, only
two – increasing tuition fees and-or enrolment – have been regularly used.

Tuition fee increases have become an annual expectation. Conversely, increased admissions, while not often recognised as a revenue enhancement tool, have been used with equal frequency.

The former has been until recently grudgingly accepted by students and their benefactors. The latter has been widely accepted inside and applauded outside the academy as a means of expanding access to the American dream. Unfortunately, economies of scale aside, increasing the size of the student body tends to lead to future cost increases, as more faculty, staff and other resources are needed to support a larger student body.

An unsustainable cycle

Near-exclusive reliance on these two short-term remedies has trapped many of the nation’s public and non-profit private institutions in an unsustainable cycle.

After decades of tuition fee increases exceeding the Consumer Price Index, coupled with declining measures of value added, students and their benefactors are increasingly less tolerant of these annual increases. This disquiet has been exacerbated by mounting student debt and questions about the subsequent income students need to earn to settle the obligation.

Popular expressions of growing dissatisfaction have in turn prompted the steady decline of the once unquestioned support of elected officials. In recent years, state subsidies to public institutions have declined to the point that some flagship public institutions are publicly considering morphing into some form of non-profit status without any governmental support.

Enrolment and tuition fee increases appeal to institutional leaders. They have been perceived as far less internally contentious alternatives. Pushing for a higher enrolment gives the institution and the public a sense of positive momentum.

Increasing tuition fees has been received by students, parents, elected officials and the public at large as inevitable. The objections from external constituents have been met with the reminder that quality must be maintained, if not enhanced. Recently, the traditional grudging acceptance of the quality defence appears to have reached its limit.

Cutting costs avoided

The third internal budget balancing tool, cutting costs, has been the least favoured. It can negatively influence programmes and hence careers. I suggest that many institutions, large and small, have found it politically easier to increase revenue rather than control costs.

They have tended to resist seriously questioning the viability of ineffective or inefficient programmes and services. Simultaneously, many have increased their continuing cost burden by enhancing existing programmes and services as well as adding new ones.

Simplistically, institutional costs may be crudely subdivided into two categories – external and internal.

The external costs are composed of purchased goods and services. Unless the institution has the power to negotiate price, its utility, insurance, contracted services and consumable costs are largely beyond its control. External costs are strongly influenced by the internal costs that institutions should have more control over.

The place to start is internal costs. In American higher education internal costs are governed as much by unquestioned culture as by contractual obligations. Institutions have tended to regard the traditional mix of faculty, curriculum, calendar and infrastructure as immutable. This has been accompanied by an exaggerated sense of entitlement to external support.

The majority of US higher education institutions can no longer rely on the historic levels of government support or philanthropic largesse. Nor can they depend on the continued utility of tuition fees and enrolment increases to align revenue with their immutable culture-driven costs.

In order to endure, these institutions will have to restrict, rather than abandon, their dependence on external support. In the near term they should carefully assess the relevance, efficiency and effectiveness of each existing programme and service in their current cost portfolio.

To further dampen cost escalation in the longer term, they would be wise to recall that it is far less painful to stop a recommended programme or service addition before implementation than to subsequently terminate it.

Institutions must become much more responsible for the internal balancing of their budgets. Otherwise, their sustainability is questionable. Consistently demonstrating internal cost control could go a long way towards rebuilding external trust and funding.

* William Patrick Leonard is vice dean of SolBridge International School of Business in Daejeon, Republic of Korea.

UK visa changes driving Indian students away

Alya Mishra and Yojana Sharma29 July 2012 Issue No:232

 

For Indian students, higher education in Britain is no longer an attractive option owning to tougher visa rules and withdrawal of a post-work visa option. According to consultants and students, the UK is being replaced by Canada and Australia as the preferred destinations for graduate study.

“The number of students going to study in the UK has declined sharply following the changes to the post-student work visa regulations,” said Naresh Gulati, CEO of Oceanic Consultants, a leading overseas education agency. “The number is likely to go down further if corrective action is not taken in the immediate future.

“Other countries such as Australia have gained after making some significant changes to visa regulations that seem to appeal to the Indian student,” Gulati said.

Study Overseas, a foreign education consultancy in New Delhi, confirmed the decline in the numbers of students heading for the UK in recent years. The number of students going to Britain through the agency has halved: for the September 2011 intake, it sent 40 students to UK universities as opposed to 80 in 2010.

Potential size of Indian market is huge

According to a Student Insight report on India, about to be released by the British Council’s Education Intelligence unit, 74% of those considering undergraduate study and 77% of those "seriously considering" foreign study at the time that they were asked, are “beyond making casual enquiries and instead are looking to plan and implement overseas study arrangements”.

The majority had never studied abroad, but were “flexible when it came to choosing countries and institutions in which to study”. The British Council's data were collected between 2007 and July 2012 with some 1,200 responses collected in May-July 2012.

It is an indication of the potential size of the Indian market as a source of foreign students, according to the British Council.

With the British government saying it is tightening its rules because too many students use the study-abroad route as a bridge to migration, the British Council report showed that only 3% of Indian students surveyed said they wanted to move overseas permanently.

Rather, respondents said that career prospects, the quality of courses and wanting the cultural experience of living overseas were by far the main drivers for both prospective undergraduate and postgraduate students.

“The overwhelming majority of students from India plan to return home after studying, with only a very small percentage saying they were thinking of using higher education as a springboard for migration,” the report said, adding to a highly polarised debate in the UK on whether students should be regarded by the government as potential migrants in deciding policy on international students.

Another report from the MigrationWatch think-tank, published on 23 July, found that the rate of potential refusals by the UK Border Agency for student visas was high for India – around 59%, compared to a reported 0% for the US and Canada and an overall average for main source countries of around 33%.

MigrationWatch suggested that a ‘credibility test’, which would ascertain English-language proficiency and intention to return to the home country, would help reduce the number of “bogus” applications.

Not being able to work is a major deterrent

After changes to UK visa rules, students can no longer remain in the country to work. This, according to Indian students, is a major deterrent.

“The fee for UK universities for a one-year postgraduate course is around £11,000 (US$17,000). An equal amount is needed for stay and food,” said Shrin Raghavan, a final-year student at Delhi University.

“It makes no sense to go to a UK university as it would be financially impractical to repay the student loan if I am not able to work there for two years post-studies.”

Raghavan, who would have liked to enrol at the London School of Economics, chose to go to Monash University in Australia. “I can work in Australia for two years after completing my studies," she said.

In Canada, a post-study work permit can be issued up to a maximum of three years, depending on the length of the study programme that the student completes.

Students also said that the visa changes by the UK made them feel unwelcome.

“For the UK, international students have become a means of income. They do not want anything to do with you once you have paid the fee,” said Anirudh Chail, who is scouting for countries in which to pursue an MBA.

Other countries filling the gap

According to Sikandar Singh, an independent career counsellor, the UK “cannot compete in a market where countries like Canada, Australia and others offered post-work visas.

“The UK needs to understand that a majority of Indian students belong to the rising middle class and for them higher education is a means to procure better jobs and career opportunities,” Singh said.

Australian universities have witnessed a surge in applications from Indian students, whose number has shot up by 16% and is expected to rise further. More than 32,500 student visa applications by Indians were filed from July 2011-March 2012, as compared to 28,067 during the corresponding period last year, according to latest official data.

Australia has been trying to streamline its international higher education sector, which was hit in recent years by a strong dollar value, tough visa norms and racial attacks on Indian students.

A new student visa processing system has been introduced, which a number of Australian universities recently signed up for with Australian Immigration.

The new system will allow students with certificates of enrolment from participating Australian universities to be treated as low-risk applicants when applying for student visas. The change was made to decrease visa waiting time and to help minimise tedious requirements regarding financial matters.

According to Naresh Gulati, the initiatives taken by the Australian government have ensured that false applicants are weeded out, while creating a positive environment for genuine students.

“This is an internal matter that the UK government needs to tackle. We don’t see any role for the Indian government,” Gulati said.

QS defends paid-for gold star addition to rankings

David Jobbins25 July 2012 Issue No:232

 

Quacquarelli Symonds Limited, publisher of the QS World University Rankings, has defended the use of quality marks granted to universities that have paid to go through an audit process.

Universities apply to be audited and pay for a process that judges them across 51 criteria that can lead to the awarding of up to five QS 'stars' that are visible against the institution’s entry in the ranking.

In contrast with the rankings, which draw on a small amount of globally available, largely public data, the QS stars system examines criteria such as facilities, access, engagement and innovation.

The stars appear seamlessly alongside the listing for each university on the World University Rankings, despite protestations from QS that the two are totally separate operations.

The UK magazine Private Eye reported in its current issue that two Irish universities – the University of Limerick and University College Cork, UCC – had paid “tens of thousands” of euro for their stars.

The magazine recorded that UCC had told the Irish Examiner that the €22,000 (US$26,600) cost of obtaining the stars was worthwhile, as it could be recouped through additional international student recruitment.

The total cost for the audit and a three-year licence is US$30,400, according to the scheme prospectus.

QS says the system is much more resource-intensive than the rankings and involves a great deal of guidance and support to draw out the correct data, compute the results and guide their interpretation.

QS concedes that some elite universities – Cambridge and Harvard among them – have not had to pay for the accreditation process for their five-star rating as their award is based on publicly available information.

Ben Sowter, director of research at QS, confirmed that “a few leading universities we used to test the measures” had not had to go through the accreditation process.

Private Eye reported that the University of Central Lancashire, which secured four stars after paying to go through the process, was ranked 601 in its World University Rankings.

Three other UK universities have been given stars, compared with 16 in the US (including the Ivy League institutions that escaped the accreditation process), 12 in Australia, and one – the Al-Farabi National Kazakh University – in Kazakhstan.

Sowter told University World News that the rankings gave a “broad brush insight into relative quality” but QS Stars “provides a more in-depth evaluation”.

He added: “Our concept for users is that, if they want more detail on universities in the rankings, then the stars, where available can provide that."

He conceded that rankings – not just those compiled by QS – had limitations.

“There are aspects of institutional quality that no organisation will ever be able to collect on a sufficiently comprehensive basis globally and in many cases the world’s top universities would all be sufficiently strong so as to offer little discernment.

“Because of the nature of QS Stars, the fact that it is a process we go through with the full support of the institution...means that we can respond to a great deal of criticism of rankings in a different context.”

Sowter accepted that not all the information on which the allocation of stars was based was published.

“QS stars are a rating and not a ranking...This is not intended to be a dismissal of the need for transparency, but at the same time the detailed view on accreditation results are rarely, if at all, made public.

“However, we do publish the performance of institutions in each individual category and we are talking with institutions about potentially publishing a richer data profile."

The 51 indicators can be seen both in the brochure and here.

“Many are self-reported and undergo a verification process, which is a major part of the workload that each audit demands,” said Sowter.

The QS World University Rankings lists just over 700 universities – about 3.5% of the world’s universities.

Sowter said: “In global terms, viewing the quality of world universities through a frame of reference defined by the likes of Cambridge and Harvard has limitations.

“With universities all over the world charging substantial fees to international students, an objective means of differentiating between the quality of the services they provide is indispensable. QS Stars allow students to make more informed choices, while also helping universities to recruit more effectively by providing independent verification of the areas in which they excel.”

To date, more than 100 institutions in 25 countries have adopted the stars and one-star and even zero-star results have been recorded.

“This is not a standard that is geared to enable everyone in the world to achieve top scores that are not justified by their genuine capabilities," Sowter said.

"It is designed to recognise that, for most, there is more to the decision of selecting a university than finding out who published the most journal articles, employed the most Nobel prize winners or attracted the most headlines."