An increasing number of universities are allowing senior students with no job offers to stay another year under cheaper tuition as the preference for fresh graduates remains strong in the job market. As major Japanese companies tend to employ new graduates, many senior students with no job offers believe that it is better to repeat their final year and continue to look for job opportunities as college students.

Universities should be given the freedom to charge students whatever tuition fee they like, the body representing the country's 750 largest employers of graduates will say today. The Association of Graduate Recruiters (AGR) says that lifting the cap - currently £3,240 a year - is needed if standards are to be maintained in the wake of £518m of cuts being made by the Government.

Two years ago, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) embarked on an ambitious overhaul of its storied research labs, responsible for some of the most momentous computing innovation of the last 40 years, writes Aaron Ricadela for Business Week. Now, HP Labs Director Prith Banerjee is turning his attention to the company's half-dozen international labs, aiming to generate cutting-edge development from scientific outposts in Asia, Europe and the Middle East. Signalling its emphasis on international research and development, HP opened its seventh lab in Singapore on 24 February, establishing a research hub in a key country in HP's fastest-growing region. The Singapore lab will collaborate with HP labs in Bristol, England and Palo Alto in California on research into cloud computing, as well as with HP's services and software groups.

The Israeli state has come up with a plan to diminish the 'brain drain', writes Meirav Arlosoroff for Haartez. It has proposed establishing a new fund to provide the jobs needed to keep the country's best and brightest academics from moving overseas, or to bring them back home. The fund, to be managed by the Council for Higher Education, will invest in centres of research excellence that provide positions for repatriated scientists and engineers. The Higher Education Council presented the plan to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week, in coordination with the Finance Ministry and the National Economic Council. He is expected to approve the plan. The Stars Plan calls for the establishment of 30 research centres at a cost of NIS 45 million (US$12 million) each, bringing the total cost to NIS 1.3 billion.

Universities must offer suitable courses for people aged 50 and above, a Universities UK report says, writes Katherine Sellgren for BBC News. The study says the ageing population in the UK "offers higher education institutions a serious challenge". It says universities should set up centres in areas where there is a high density of retired people. They should offer a range of courses such as moving from full-time to self-employment, ageing healthily, human rights and environmental citizenship.

A tough budget year could have meant big cuts for science research funding, but as mapped out in the Obama administration's plan for the 2011 fiscal year released on Monday, it doesn't, writes Jennifer Epstein for Inside Higher Ed. Though President Barack Obama vowed in his State of the Union address to freeze discretionary domestic spending, his $3.8 trillion budget shifts priorities to find increases for science and technology research and education that well outpace the 1.1% rate of inflation expected over the next year.

VietNamNet Bridge - Only three foreign invested universities have been established in Vietnam over the last 12 years, while growth in domestic universities has been huge. The Ministry of Planning and Investment (MPI) has submitted a report on university education to the National Assembly’s Standing Committee outlining the state of higher education. According to MPI, in 1998-2005, Vietnam established three new universities and eight junior colleges as well as upgrading 32 junior colleges into universities and 40 vocational schools into junior colleges. Meanwhile, during that time, only two foreign-invested universities were set up in Vietnam, including RMIT and Dresden Vietnam Polytechnic University. MPI said that during that time, foreign-invested projects in education and training mostly focused on setting up short term foreign language and vocational training centers.

Education Minister Batt O'Keeffe has accused some university professors of teaching as few as four hours a week, writes John Walshe for the Irish Independent. They are earning between EUR120,000 (US$166,000) and EUR143,000 a year for what the minister last week called a "light" teaching load, as well as for research and administration. The minister said he would like to see professors spend more time in the classroom, irrespective of the amount of research involved. Undergraduates deserved the best people in front of them in class so they could benefit from their professionalism and expertise.

London: Carbon emissions from air travel could be reduced, thanks to collaboration between engineers from universities and aerospace industry. The research, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and aircraft manufacturers Airbus and GKN, will be using carbon fibers that are curved within flat plates to produce damage-tolerant, buckle-free structures. This will lead to substantial cost and weight savings of between 10 and 30 percent on structural components, saving fuel and reducing Carbon-di-oxide emissions from the aviation industry, in turn helping reduce the impact on the environment. Richard Butler is leading the University of Bath team, which includes H. Alicia Kim and Giles Hunt.

Davos is one of the world's prime networking venues for economists, bankers and diplomats, writes Oliver Staley for Bloomberg. Yale University sees it as an opportunity to do business, too, entertaining potential donors and recruiting world leaders to teach on campus. Yale isn't the only US university to send a delegation to the Swiss ski resort last week to discuss the environment, technology, communications and the economy. Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago are also sent groups and sponsored events. US universities are increasing their presence at the World Economic Forum as they compete for faculty and students with foreign institutions and as they try to attract international donors, said Donald Heller, director of the Center for the Study of Higher Education at Pennsylvania State University. It's important for them to be visible at forums where universities from other countries will be present, he said.

A ranking of Chinese tycoons' donations to their alma maters has been released, following the controversy over entrepreneur Zhang Lei who gave a record US$8,888,888 to Yale University, China Daily-Asia News reports. The ranking, published by an independent Chinese website, included more than 50 tycoons who donated a total of over one billion yuan (US$146.5 million) to the Chinese universities they attended.

Technical and polytechnic education in Malaysia will be overhauled this year in order to restore public confidence, writes Richard Lim for The Star. Higher Education Minister Datuk Seri Mohamed Khaled Nordin said the move was necessary as polytechnics were currently regarded as a second chance route for weaker students and this perception had to change. Focusing on human capital development, the change would see polytechnics focusing solely on diploma and higher-level courses. More places and opportunities for further study would also be offered to increase the public's accessibility to higher education.

By any financial measure, this fiscal year is a terrible one for public higher education. And while that's no surprise to anyone working at a state college or university, new national data document the extent of the loss of state support, writes Scott Jaschik for Inside Higher Ed. Total state support for higher education for 2009-10 - including federal stimulus dollars - is US$79.4 billion, which is a decline of 1.1% from the prior year and 1.7% from the year before that. This represents a dramatic shift from the three-year period of 2005 to 2008 when state support grew 24% to $80.7 billion - without federal stimulus dollars in the equation.

The Stockholm School of Economics in Riga is planning to start a Swedish-owned hospital in the Latvian capital in order to raise the standards of the country's hospitals and to remove some of the burden from the Swedish healthcare system. Gunnar Ljungdahl, Senior Vice President of the Stockholm school's majority-owned Riga offshoot, believes more education is needed when it comes to the administration of Latvian hospitals and said the Swedish system could function as a benchmark.

New Delhi: Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies (NMIMS), India’s premier management school’s Narsee Monjee Aptitude Test (NMAT), the management admissions aptitude test, will soon be computer-based, thus making a transition to a new age digital method, by this month. For the first-ever computer based NMAT, NMIMS has partnered with Pearson VUE to conduct the exam in 19 cities in India and 11 countries outside India between January 30 and February 8, 2010.

Japan appears to be suffering from brain drain. Examples include chemist Osamu Shimomura and physicist Yoichiro Nambu, both of whom won Nobel Prizes in 2008 for research conducted in U.S. universities. Japan is not the ideal place to seek employment for some postdoctoral researchers. According to a study conducted by Masako Asano of Osaka Prefecture University, 41 percent of postdocs in particle physics leave Japan to get jobs because there aren't enough here to go around. But Japan's public universities rate quite well internationally, according to the evaluation committee on national universities, part of the education ministry.

From spring, renowned private universities in Tokyo and the Kansai region are expected to open a number of new schools, including attached or affiliated middle schools, in a bid to attract bright students at an early stage. Waseda University and Chuo University will open their first-ever attached middle schools in Tokyo. Waseda University and Chuo University plan to set up unified middle and high schools in Saga Prefecture and Yokohama respectively. Kansai University and Kwansei Gakuin University also are proceeding with similar plans.

SINGAPORE: About 1,500 students in Singapore have signed up for courses or degree programmes in the relatively new field of Service Science, Management and Engineering (SSME) since 2008. These students hail from Nanyang Technological University, the National University of Singapore, Singapore Management University and the Institute of Systems Science. SSME is a new academic discipline designed to produce students with the combined business, technology and social sciences skills needed in today's workforce.

Chile's once-a-year university entrance examination determines future professional options for hundreds of thousands of students. More than 280,000 students signed up to take the Prueba de Selección Universitaria (PSU) test last week, which according to the Education Ministry is the largest number ever, writes Pamela Morales for The Santiago Times. Monday morning began the first of two days of tests that will determine whether students are admitted to university; to which university, the best, the second best, or an also-ran; and in what discipline. PSU scores are the primary admissions factor at Chile's 25 public universities - among them the country's most prestigious schools - where students compete for one of the 51,000 openings.

In a global age, Korean universities are naturally focusing on globalisation, writes Oh Se-jung, a professor of physics at Seoul National University, for the JoongAng Daily. Most universities say internationalisation is part of their central goal for development and that they are establishing international departments. Some select students who are fluent in foreign languages. They are also putting added effort into attracting foreign professors and students, and increasing the number of classes taught in English.