SCIENCE & EDUCATION

An increasing number of students who left the country at a young age are returning home to continue their university studies here because they find it difficult to get jobs there. At the same time, the number of secondary schoolchildren going abroad is also declining. Kim Young Academy, a private crammer that prepares students for transfer between universities, saw enrolment by foreign-educated students jump from 134 in 2007 to 215 last year, and until April this year 70 had signed up.

New Zealand is almost doubling the amount of money it spends promoting its education system to foreign students.The new international education agency would have a budget of 84 million NZ dollars (68.01 million U.S. dollars) over four years, almost double the amount allocated to its predecessors, the government announced last week.

President Dilma Rousseff Monday reaffirmed her commitment to provide scholarships enough for 75,000 Brazilian students to study abroad, up from 5,000 at present.It will be difficult but possible, the president said during her weekly radio address "Breakfast with the President". "Today, 5,000 Brazilians study abroad with government-funded scholarships, most of them are in France, Germany and United States. We want to grant 75,000 scholarships until 2014," she said.

THE HAGUE - The Delft University of Technology will establish a research branch in Beijing, the university said Tuesday.Delft will be the first Dutch university to open a branch in China.The new Delft University of Technology - Beijing Research Center will be based at the Institute of Semiconductors at the Chinese Academy of Science (CAS).

The only higher education institution in the UK that is devoted to the study of pharmacy is to become part of University College London after merger proposals that have opened deep rifts between academics were approved by governors.After several months of often angry debate over the plans, the council of the School of Pharmacy, University of London voted by 12 to eight to merge with its huge neighbour in what was described as a "wonderful opportunity" by the institution's dean, Anthony Smith.

HA NOI — Two thirds of universities and colleges, except those located in Districts 7, 9 and Thu Duc, will be relocated from the centre of HCM City to its suburbs following a decision made on Wednesday by the HCM City People's Committee and the Ministry of Education and Training (MoET). MoET asked city authorities to give priority to developing public transport to cater for students and workers that would be affected by the decision.MoET said that the universities and colleges in question would be announced soon.

The MBA degree has never been particularly popular in Italy, but two institutions are now hoping to change that with the launch of a full-time degree in the Umbrian capital of Perugia in September this year.Bradford University School of Management, the long-established UK business school, has teamed up with the University of Perugia’s faculty of engineering to launch a joint MBA programme that will give students the chance to study both management and specialist engineering modules. Initially there will be 50 participants on the one-year degree, which will be taught in English.

Stanford University’s Faculty Senate has approved the creation of what officials believe is the first stem cell science PhD program in the nation and, perhaps, the world. The new doctoral program in stem cell biology and regenerative medicine is also the first interdisciplinary doctoral program created by the School of Medicine in recent years.School officials say the fact that the university is taking the rare step of creating a new doctoral program acknowledges the growing importance of stem cell research in the realm of biomedical science. The senate unanimously approved the PhD program at its April 28 meeting; the initial approval extends for five years.

While academics of Indian origin such as Harvard Business School Dean Nitin Nohria, and Chicago Booth dean Sunil Kumar are scaling the professional ladder in the West, business schools within India are struggling to find the same calibre of talent to fill faculty positions, reports Cool Avenues.com.India's top institutions, such as the centrally-funded Indian Institutes of Technology and Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) have reported a 25% shortage in faculty. The urgency of the situation has led the central government to form three review committees to address issues relating to the growth of the IIMs such as governance, faculty and funding.

Recently created State universities “make sense and are sustainable” because of the need “of many students that are their families’ first member to go to university and if they hadn’t had this chance, they wouldn’t have been able to keep on studying," said Education Minister Alberto Sileoni.Many of the 3000 students that enrolled in the Florencio Varela university, one of the newest ones, wouldn’t have done so in any other university. These aren’t students that are taken away from UBA Buenos Aires University or the University of La Plata”, Education Minister Alberto Sileoni said.

he Higher Education Ministry on Thursday suggested that doctorate degree (PhD) be made the basic requirement for lecturer post at all public institutions of higher learning in the country.Its deputy minister, Datuk Saifuddin Abdullah, said this was necessary to achieve the 75 per cent lecturers with Phd in research universities and 40 per cent at other universities.

Stand alone business school Insead is continuing to build partnerships outside the business school world through an agreement with Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. The two will launch a dual-degree masters programme from which participants will graduate with both an Insead MBA and a Master of Arts from SAIS.The Insead-SAIS programme is designed for those who want to follow a career that combines international relations and business. Students admitted to both programmes will be able to complete the two degrees in two and a half years, instead of the three years required to complete the degrees separately.

Polish universities are finally responding to market demand by offering courses that reflect the needs of the economy, according to a Dziennik Gazeta Prawna survey of universities, the Warsaw Business Journal reports.This academic year, many universities will start offering majors in ecophysics, nuclear energy, interactive marketing and LNG terminal servicing.

Yale University and the National University of Singapore have made official their plans to jointly establish a liberal-arts college in the city-state, one they would like to be a model for all of Asia."We hope to create a really exciting model of liberal arts, one many Asian countries will find attractive because of its broader perspective on the complex problems of the world," said Richard C. Levin, Yale's president, in an interview on Wednesday.The two institutions had originally made public a possible partnership last September but said at the time they still had to hammer out several budgetary and legal issues.

Warwick University is bidding to become the first UK university to set up a campus in the United States. It has entered a global competition to open a science campus in New York - competing against leading universities from the US, Europe and Asia. New York's mayor, Michael Bloomberg, said that creating the science campus would be a "game-changer" for the city's economy.New York wants a research base to strengthen its technology industries.Warwick is up against 17 other bids to open a science and engineering research campus - which would help New York compete with US research powerhouses in California and Boston.

London Metropolitan University is to cut hundreds of courses, in a bid for financial sustainability in a "much more competitive environment" when fees are increased in England next year. The university is to "consolidate its portfolio" by dropping from 557 courses to about 160, it said in a statement. A lecturers' union condemned the cuts as unprecedented and unjustifiable. 

With the highest private-sector enrolment in Europe, the Polish university system could be a tempting model for Britain's coalition government. Around 300 private universities – some small enough to share premises with local schools – educate about 630,000 students a year, the highest private-sector enrolment in Europe. Unlike their fellow students at public universities, they have to pay fees, though both kinds of students are eligible for state-backed loans. And unlike public universities, their institutions do not receive any direct government funding.

Vocational education, research universities and faculty development are to get priority in the 12th Five-Year Plan starting April next year. The three areas have been marked as the key elements in a concept paper prepared by the HRD ministry outlining its vision for the plan. The paper says vocational students should account for 50 per cent of all enrolment in higher education by 2020. At present, that figure is less than 5 per cent.

Poland's higher education system will undergo significant changes if a bill signed into law today by President Bronisław Komorowski remains on the statute books. The bill is due to enter into force from October 1 but its constitutionality has been called into question.The Polish Press Agency (PAP) reports that, after Easter, the opposition Law and Justice (PiS) party plans to raise questions abouth the constitutionality of the new law with the Constitutional Tribunal.

The number of students at private colleges and universities in the Czech Republic has increased almost 30-times in the past ten years, the Czech Statistical Office (CSU) and the Institute of Education Information (UIV) said at a press conference yesterday.In 2000, 2000 students attended these institutions, which was a mere 1 percent of the total number of university/college students, while last year their number amounted to over 57,000, that is some 14 percent of all university/college students in the 10.5-million Czech Republic, the CSU and UIV said.On the contrary, interest in private kindergartens and primary schools is very low.