- Turkey: Becoming a Regional HE Hub ?
- Funding: Hidden Cost of Private Funding
- US: Scepticism on College Rating Plan
- China: New breed of Branch Campus
Of the 140,000 international students who applied to study through scholarship programs provided by the Turkish government in 2013, only 4,000 were able to attain one of these scholarships.The overseas demand for scholarship programs in Turkish higher education has increased, as students from the US, Israel and even Armenia, with which Turkey currently has no diplomatic ties due to the events of 1915, are increasingly applying to study in Turkey through various scholarship awards.
The broader notion that universities need to secure private funding because governments can no longer bear the load throws up some other interesting questions, too. In the US, there is debate about the influence that philanthropists such as Bill Gates are having on higher education.The USD 36 billion Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, along with others such as the Lumina Foundation, are spending vast amounts of money on encouraging more disadvantaged students to complete post-secondary study.The question is not so much whether the move is altruistic as whether such influence should rest with so few. Critics contend that, in the absence of a desire on the part of politicians to invest either more money or hard policy thinking on higher education, it’s easy for governments to fall in line with the foundations’ view of the world. What if getting more people to complete traditional college degrees turns out to be an unsustainable model for preparing people for the workforce?
Dozens of people spoke to a panel headed by U.S. Undersecretary of Education Martha Kanter about unintended consequences of a government college ratings system.The meeting Wednesday at California State University, Dominguez Hills was one of four public sessions around the country for the Obama administration to gather feedback on its college plan. Kanter told the crowd that the goal of the plan was to use taxpayers’ education money wisely and increase affordability of higher education.
Universities from a number of countries have set up branch campuses in China, hoping to tap into the country’s desire for a Western education and a large pool of middle-class students. But China wants new types of university partnerships that tie in closely with its aspiration to drive up research and innovation.Last month Australia’s Monash University and China’s Southeast University, or SEU, which is based in Nanjing, formally launched a new joint campus in Suzhou Industrial Park near Shanghai.It joined other branch campuses in Suzhou in Jiangsu province on the East coast, such as Xi’an Jiaotong Liverpool University offering undergraduate and masters degrees awarded by Liverpool University in England. The National University of Singapore’s (NUS) large research facility in Suzhou was inaugurated in May. But according to official Chinese media the SEU-Monash Joint Graduate School is the “first Sino-foreign graduate facility approved by the Chinese Ministry of Education”.
