The Guardian (November 19)
“The Home Office has announced another set of measures designed to signal ever more ferocious intent to control the nation’s borders.” This is a mistake, apparently to appease “the irate chorus that fulminates against perceived inundation by foreigners.” It overlooks the reality of declining migration and logical outcomes. “With migration patterns simply following the current [downward] trajectory,” undesirable consequences need to be addressed. Who will provide social care when the already “struggling sector” is facing “a mounting recruitment crisis”? Without students from overseas, “many universities… will be pushed over the brink.” On top of it all, the contracting ratio of working-age adults will make growth ”harder to achieve” and decrease “Treasury revenues… with painful fiscal consequences.”
Tags: Borders, Consequences, Control, Ferocious, Foreigners, Home Office, Migration, Overseas, Recruitment crisis, Revenues, Social care, Students, Treasury, Universities, Working-age
Washington Post (November 4)
America may still be “the world’s leading scientific research power, but competition is growing more fierce.” Even though “it’s a dangerous time to dull the country’s competitive edge,” Trump’s moves against universities have done just that. “Scientists in the United States increasingly see European bureaucracy as a safer setting for conducting their cutting-edge research than their home country’s own institutions.” The European Research Council “has seen a surge in applications,” with “nearly triple the number of proposals from Americans compared with the year before.”
Tags: Applications, Bureaucracy, Competition, Competitive edge, Cutting-edge research, ERC, Europe, Fierce, Leading, Power, Proposals, Safer setting, Scientific research, Trump, U.S., Universities
Wall Street Journal (May 21)
“Computer science is hotter than ever at U.S. universities. But students graduating this month are discovering their degrees are no longer a surefire ticket to tech-industry riches.” As tech giants slow expansion and embrace artificial intelligence, they “now have less need for entry-level hires—or are shedding jobs” so graduates “are finding it harder than they ever thought it would be to land a job.”
Tags: AI, Computer science, Entry-level hires, Expansion, Graduates, Students, Surefire, Tech industry, U.S., Universities
New York Times (April 7)
“Businesses and universities want fast, easy ways to see if students and customers are vaccinated, but conservative politicians have turned ‘vaccine passports’ into a cultural flash point.”
Tags: Businesses, Conservative, Cultural, Customers, Easy, FAST, Flash point, Politicians, Students, Universities, Vaccinated, Vaccine passports
Boston Globe (September 8)
The shift to online learning has been filled with challenges and pitfalls. For professors, “reinvention has meant reworking syllabuses, prerecording lectures, and reconsidering how to test students’ knowledge of material – and even how to bond with them virtually.” The universities want “to avoid a repeat of last spring, when disgruntled parents and students filed lawsuits claiming the online learning experience was not worth the thousands of dollars in tuition costs.” Meanwhile, one survey showed that roughly half of the students “feel that higher education is no longer worth the cost, and 40 percent believe it’s a bad deal now that It has moved online.”
Tags: Challenges, Disgruntled, Lawsuits, Online learning, Parents, Pitfalls, Professors, Reinvention, Students, Tuition, Universities
The Economist (August 8)
“Covid-19 will be painful for universities, but also bring change. They need to rethink how and what they teach.”
Tags: COVID-19, Painful, Rethink, Teach, Universities
Bloomberg (September 20)
There has been “a huge and very worrying change in Japanese education policy….Essentially, Japan’s government just ordered all of the country’s public universities to end education in the social sciences, the humanities and law” with a non-binding order from Hakubun Shimomura, Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. This is “a terrible direction for Japan to be going.” To succeed as a rich country in a service economy, Japan will need more conceptual thinkers who can communicate, rather than more engineers. “Japan needs to keep educating students in the social sciences and humanities. It needs to avoid a doomed attempt to return to a developing-country model of growth.”
Tags: Communicate, Conceptual thinkers, Education policy, Engineers Developing country, Government, Humanities, Japan, Law, MEXT, Rich, Service economy, Shimomura, Social sciences, Universities
New York Times (November 7)
“The competition to get into higher-ranked universities is destroying the lives of young people and their families in countries like South Korea and Japan…. The paradox is these ridiculous tests don’t necessarily lead to demanding college classes.”
Tags: Classes, College, Competition, Demanding, Families, Japan, Paradox, Ridiculous, South Korea, Tests, Universities, Young people
