SCIENCE & EDUCATION

The French business school SKEMA is to be one of the first European business schools to open a campus in the US, in Raleigh, North Carolina. This will be Skema’s third overseas campus - the other two are in China and Morocco.

In a bid to generate entrepreneurial businesses in Russia, Rusnano, the Russian Corporation of Nanotechnologies, which combines an economic development body with a venture capital firm, has turned to MIT Sloan to develop an executive education programme to help it in its quest.

Student unions in Switzerland are calling for the nationwide introduction of minimum grants for undergraduates at the country's 12 universities and 50 higher education colleges, reports SwissInfo. The Association of Swiss Students said it would begin to collect the necessary signatures to force the federal authorities to take a leading role in defining grants and streamlining the regulations in the country's 26 cantons. Cantons are largely autonomous on education matters.

Universities are looking to bring forward plans to restrict enrolments in response to tighter government funding and increased demand for tertiary education, reports the New Zealand Herald. Government funding criteria changed in 2008 to cover only an agreed number of students at each tertiary institution, prompting universities to cap student numbers.

Stockholm universities are among the top choices for students this autumn, with medicine, law and economics the most popular fields of study, according to a new report from the Swedish Agency for Higher Education Services (Verket för högskoleservice - VHS). According to the VHS statistics, the medical programme at Karolinska Institutet in Solna, in Stockholm County, has attracted the highest number of first choices among prospective students applying for courses in the autumn 2010.

As graduating MBA students across the US continue the job hunt this year, two US business schools have announced new curriculum for the next incoming class, intended to make their graduates more exployable.

The Federation of All Pakistan Universities Academic Staff Associations has called on the Higher Education Commission to appoint only serving academics fulfilling the requirements of a professor as vice-chancellors or rectors in public sector universities, writes Rasheed Khalid for The News. Academics do not want universities headed by military of civil officials.

During a two-day Caribbean conference on higher education policy-makers, educators and experts discussed the situation of higher education in the region. The meeting was a joint initiative between the Surinam government, the Organization of American States and Unesco, reports the Office of the Prime Minister of St Kitts and Nevis.

Priority should be given to the establishment of private universities that have intensive investment or operate on a non-profit basis, while poor-quality ones should be shut down, an education supervisory team has said, reports the Communist Party paper the Saigon Giai Phong Daily. The National Assembly standing committee's supervisory team made the statement at a meeting on 9 April in Hanoi to hear feedback on its report on quality in Vietnam's higher education sector. The team's investigation showed that many private universities failed to meet requirements in terms of instructors and teaching facilities.

Recent news of fee hikes in Singapore's three public universities is unlikely to deter foreign students because the new fees remain internationally competitive, write Karen Zainal and Luke Vijay for the Straits Times.

Bilateral ties between Malaysia and the EU are set to improve with the launch of the RM2.5 million (US$0.8 million) Malaysia-European Union Link (MYEULINK) initiative, writes Richard Lim for The Star. Funded by the EU with support from the Higher Education Ministry, the three-year project encourages cooperation and dialogue in higher education, while keeping decision-makers in Malaysia informed on a range of EU policy initiatives. Khaled Nordin said the effort showed the EU's willingness to foster closer ties with Malaysia. "MYEULINK may only last for three years but its benefit will go well beyond this time frame," he said in a press conference.

Taiwan's National Tsing Hua University and China's Tsinghua University are planning to establish joint laboratories on both campuses to enhance cooperation between them, an NTHU official said last week, reports Focus Taiwan. The laboratories will be funded by both sides, with NTHU contributing NT$20 million (US$628,000) and Tsinghua four million yuan (US$586,000) annually.

Nano Research, an English-language journal jointly published by Springer and Tsinghua University Press, is now listed in the Thomson Reuters' Science Citation Index-Expanded (SCI-E), reports PhysOrg. The journal, founded in July 2008, is part of Springer's Chinese Library of Science, a collection comprising more than 90 journals. Its open access publishing model allows readers to download full articles for free via the online platform SpringerLink.

China will revamp its higher education system to ease the grip of red tape, granting colleges more autonomy, education authorities said last week. But, Xin Dingding reports for The China Daily, university leaders are worried that once they are stripped of their administrative titles they could face new problems. The new draft guidelines for education reform, which are out for public comment, plan to "modernise" the higher education system.

New admissions regulations for Swedish universities set to be introduced in the autumn are likely to mean fewer places available for foreign students and could be in breach of EU law, according to the National Agency for Higher Education. "There is a high probability that fewer places will be on offer to foreign students," Alexandra Sjöstrand, an investigator at the agency, told The Local on Friday. In practice the changes mean that there will be four new sub-groups within the group of applicants admitted on their high-school grades: Swedish grades, Swedish grades supplemented with further study, foreign grades, and (Swedish) Folk High School grades. Previously, all the various non-Swedish standard grade systems were translated into an equivalent Swedish grade for consideration. Students, both Swedish and non-Swedish, will still be able to apply through the Swedish Scholastic Aptitude Test (Högskoleprovet) or through the alternative application category, which has been increased to 30 percent of places under the new regulations.

The British government will invest £30 million (US$45 million) in a research centre to further develop Tim Berners-Lee's Semantic Web, writes Joab Jackson for IDG News Service. The Institute for Web Science will be run by Berners-Lee, who formulated the basic protocols for the web, along with University of Southampton artificial intelligence professor Nigel Shadbolt. "This institute will help place the UK at the cutting edge of research on the Semantic Web and other emerging web and internet technologies and ensure the government is taking the right funding decisions to position the UK as a world leader," said British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, in a statement.

India's government has appointed a task force to create a national database of academic qualifications to ensure confidentiality, authenticity, online verification and easy retrieval of degrees, write Ravi Krishnan, Pallavi Singh and Sapna Agarwal for LiveMint.com and The Wall Street Journal. The team, which will submit its report on the e-certificate project by the end of this month, will appoint one of two depositories - the National Securities Depository Ltd or Central Depository Services (India) Ltd - to create and manage the database, the first time such a storehouse is being planned on a nationwide scale. 

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.