Breaking News
UNITED KINGDOM
Brendan O’Malley
The government of the United Kingdom has announced new rules that allow expansion of its highly skilled talent route but restrict the time allowed for international students to find a graduate-level job and raise the English language requirements for migrants to A-level equivalent.
MIDDLE EAST-TURKIYE
Wagdy Sawahel
UNITED STATES
Nathan M Greenfield
Top Stories
UNITED STATES
This is lowest level since height of COVID pandemic
Nathan M Greenfield
The United States is experiencing its lowest level of international student interest in studying for a masters degree in over five years owing to regulatory and policy changes beyond the sector’s control, raising fears of a longer-term shift that will be difficult to reverse.
UNITED KINGDOM-INDIA
Brendan O’Malley
ARGENTINA
Mónica Marquina
AFRICA
Damtew Teferra
News
UNITED STATES
Nathan M Greenfield
The Trump administration’s compact offered to nine elite US universities has provoked alarm among higher education leaders. It demands surrender of academic freedom and curbs on international recruitment in return for federal funding, a Faustian pact borrowing from the authoritarian playbook of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán.
PAKISTAN
Ameen Amjad Khan
HONG KONG-EUROPE
Yojana Sharma
EUROPE
Jan Petter Myklebust
SOUTH AFRICA-SWEDEN
Desmond Thompson
A three-year extension of the South Africa-Sweden University Forum has been launched, marking the start of a new phase that aims to deepen academic partnerships, expand intra-African collaboration and strengthen student mobility – even as international funding pressures raise questions about the sustainability of such initiatives.
SEYCHELLES-AFRICA
Andreia Nogueira
The higher education system of Africa’s least populous country – the Indian Ocean archipelago of Seychelles – is increasingly reaching out to universities across Africa to explore possibilities for partnerships with a view to expanding its educational offerings, strengthening its competitiveness and attracting more students.
MOROCCO-MAURITANIA
Wagdy Sawahel
The Moroccan School of Engineering Sciences – the country’s first officially recognised private engineering school – is to open a branch in the capital of Mauritania, Nouakchott, marking a milestone in Mauritania-Morocco bilateral academic cooperation and offering a model for intra-Africa higher education cooperation.
Edtech, AI and Higher Education
GLOBAL
Peter Salden
Ideologically preset large language models, as perfect tools for subliminal manipulation, threaten intellectual sovereignty and should be of particular concern to academia, where free thought is essential. But there are steps that universities can take towards AI sovereignty to prevent the worst effects.
GLOBAL
Max Lu
The rise of large language models presents a compelling response to the logistical challenges of student assessment, offering efficiency and consistency at an unprecedented scale. But before adopting such systems in high-stakes educational contexts, we need to reduce variations between models and improve alignment with human judgements.
GLOBAL
Wagdy Sawahel
A study using machine learning has revealed that around 10% of cancer research papers published in the past 25 years – including those in the top 10% of journals by impact factor – share title and abstract features with retracted paper mill papers. In recent years the proportion has soared to 15%.
World Blog
GLOBAL
Mark Sterling and Lia Blaj-Ward
A new book reminds us that academic citizenship is not what academic colleagues do in addition to teaching and research, but something that is firmly at the core of academic work, and benefits communities within institutions as well as the wider society.
SDGs
GLOBAL
Min Bahadur Bista
Global patterns show that widening participation in higher education does not guarantee completion. As enrolment expands, policy-makers must recognise that large numbers of students leave without a credential, threatening both equity and economic productivity. The policy focus must shift from access alone to access plus success.
AFRICA-EUROPE
Francis Kokutse
KENYA
Wilson Odhiambo
NIGERIA
Hussain Wahab
Top Stories from Last Week
GLOBAL
Nathan M Greenfield
The latest Scholars at Risk academic freedom report details how pressure on institutional autonomy and academic freedom in authoritarian states has combined with ‘historic levels’ of pressure on academia in liberal democracies, principally the United States, aimed at long-term control by anti-democratic forces.
GLOBAL
Richard Watermeyer, Donna Lanclos and Lawrie Phipps
GLOBAL
James Yoonil Auh
GLOBAL
Victor Lim Fei, Yee Jia’en and Jerrold Quek
CHINA
Lingfei Zhao and Wei Liu
In contrast to United States government policies that seek to deter the flow of international talent, the Chinese government has rolled out a comprehensive set of measures to advance internationalisation of its universities, and is advancing these measures in a systematic way.
GAMBIA-MAURITANIA
Elizia Volkmann
Gambian student organisations and diplomats have been warning that students from their country are being expelled from Mauritania, as part of a general immigration crackdown. A Human Rights Watch report says 28,000 people, including students, have been expelled from Mauritania between January and June.
UNITED KINGDOM
Nic Mitchell
Higher education leaders appear to have lost their fight to prevent a new levy being charged on English universities recruiting international students – with the funds generated earmarked to pay for new targeted means-tested maintenance grants for domestic students from disadvantaged backgrounds.
GLOBAL
Nic Mitchell
Despite United States President Donald Trump grabbing headlines with attacks on science and universities, the upcoming IAU conference will be guided by the fact that the need to build public trust in universities is as relevant for African countries as it is for others.
World Round-up
SAUDI ARABIA-UNITED KINGDOM