- MBA: Decline in MBA applicants
- Kazakhstan: Only 100 universities in 2 years
- EU: Easier Access to Non-EU Students
- Australia: University Experience Survey
While not all innovators of groundbreaking technologies and businesses are MBA graduates, many MBAs do become entrepreneurs, creating jobs and wealth for society. Others return to corporate jobs and play crucial innovation roles in companies. Either way, these individuals are vital to the economy. The decline in MBA applications (GMAC survey) should worry both business schools, from a revenue perspective, and the global brands that recruit graduates from leading schools as future leaders. People understandably feel less confident about leaving a job and making a big investment in an MBA when the economy is suffering. However, MBAs provide a fast-track, structured route to gaining business knowledge; you may learn in 15 months what might take 15 years to learn in a job. If the number of people taking MBAs continues to fall significantly, more will instead follow the corporate route of learning at work, which is haphazard, unstructured and much slower.
Kazakhstan will have around 100 universities remaining in the nearest two years, Tengrinews.kz reports citing Kazakhstan Minister of Education and Science Bakytzhan Zhumagulov.”The experience shows that the majority of the commercial universities are unable to do provide education of the required quality. That’s why we plan to slash their number from 66 to 30 in the nearest three years. We do not preclude optimization of the public universities either, especially in the view of the President’s instruction to focus on meeting the needs of the country’s regions. In the end, the total number of the universities (commercial and public) will make 100 in two years,” Zhumagulov said at the government meeting.
The European Commission proposes to make it easier for non-European Union students and researchers to enter and stay in the EU, in the face of growing competition from host destinations such as the US, Australia and Japan.
Subject to member state agreement, new legislation would from 2016 would improve the student visa process, access to the labour market and academic mobility between states. Speaking at a press conference this week, Cecilia Malmström, member of the EC in charge of Home Affairs, said the reforms were vital to the EU’s economic future.Among the proposals – which apply to 24 member states and exclude Denmark, Ireland and the United Kingdom – the Commission will seek to standardise student visa criteria which can vary wildly between states.
The University Experience Survey (UES) has been developed by the Australian Government to provide a new national platform for measuring the quality of teaching and learning in Australian higher education. The UES focuses on aspects of the student experience that are measurable, linked with learning and development outcomes, and for which universities can reasonably be assumed to have responsibility. The survey yields results that are related to outcomes across differing institutional contexts, disciplinary contexts and modes of study.The UES provides new cross-institutional benchmarks that can aid quality assurance and improvement.
