SCIENCE & EDUCATION

It's official: Higher education is shrinking, for the first time in at least 15 years.Total enrollment at American colleges and universities eligible for federal financial aid fell slightly in the fall of 2011 from the year before, according to preliminary data released Tuesday by the U.S. Education Department's National Center for Education Statistics.The data from the department's Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System show that 21,554,004 students were enrolled in fall 2011, down from 21,588,124 in fall 2010. While that drop is smaller than two-tenths of one percent, it is the first such dip since at least 1996, according to officials at NCES.

International students are spurning the UK's most prestigious universities as a re sult of Government immigration curbs, The Independent can reveal.Some courses at universities in the Russell Group – which represents 24 top institutions, including Oxford and Cambridge – have seen a drop of up to 30 per cent in applications from Indian students.The impact of strict new visa rules has been compounded by the negative publicity that followed the revoking of London Metropolitan University's (LMU) licence to teach overseas students last month.

Indonesia’s Health Ministry last Monday signed a new partnership agreement with 26 state universities to create a national database of plants from across the archipelago that have therapeutic effects, writes Dessy Sagita for The Jakarta Globe.“I’ve been for some time bothered with how others have been claiming [our traditional herbs], and how we still import 90% of raw materials for our medicines. It would be wonderful if we can benefit from our own resources,” Health Minister Nafsiah Mboi said on the sidelines of the signing event in Jakarta.

For Canada, observers say, the new reality in education has been much too late to sink in – the country might as well wave a white flag. The problem lies in a risk-averse way of thinking that has led us to having only 2 per cent of international branch campuses. In the 21st-century education climate, where universities compete for students and name recognition globally, it’s not only about bringing students to your home, but also about building standalone campuses in their homes.The emerging Asian and oil powerhouses in the Middle East, when not creating their own institutions, are courting Ivy League names for their corner of the world, by providing space and, in some cases, money. Meanwhile, a federal advisory panel released a report in August that recommended Canada double its number of international students by 2022, a worthy goal, but one that, critics say, misses the true international challenges.

International-development experts have expressed much concern about the brain drain of African scholars to universities in North America and Europe. Largely neglected in this discussion is the movement of academics taking place within Africa itself. This exodus occurs in two forms: scholars obtaining top-level jobs outside of academe in their home countries, and scholars migrating to better paying university jobs in more developed African countries.In almost every case, the universities losing talent are also losing the time and resources they spent to cultivate their faculties.

Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki at Kyoto University has released a document on the Internet that claims to provide proof for the abc conjecture in number theory, said to be the most important unresolved problem in modern mathematics, causing a stir among peers. The abc conjecture provides immediate proofs for other theorems including even Fermat's famous last theorem, a vexing issue in number theory that took roughly 350 years to be demonstrated, and Mochizuki's 500-page document, if it withstands scrutiny, will represent "one of the most astounding achievements of mathematics of the 21st Century," Dorian Goldfeld, a mathematician at Columbia University in New York, was quoted as saying by Nature magazine in its Sept. 10 online edition.

Two thirds of Japanese people admit they are losing the ability to pen the "kanji" characters used in the written language because of their reliance on emails and mobile phone messages. Of those to replied to a survey by the Cultural Affairs Agency, 66.5 per cent said they feared they were forgetting all the required strokes in some of the characters, up more than 25 percentage points from the last survey, which was conducted 10 years ago.

It is often said love is not logical. Yet, the "study of love," which attempts to objectively and scientifically analyze romance and teach it as an academic subject, has recently become a hot topic. The popular new field also aims to improve people's communication skills with the opposite sex.

Observers say that as more young people face tough economic conditions and struggle to find a decent job in South Korea, more will choose to wear a military uniform, writes Oh Kyu-wook for The Korea Herald.According to recent data from the army, 6,403 students applied at the Korea Military Academy to become army officers – a competition rate of 23.7 for each place, the highest in nearly three decades. The Naval Academy and the Air Force Academy had 27.2 and 25.7 applicants per place, respectively.

The number of university students has dropped for the first time in six years, while the number of elementary school children, which has been declining for the last 10 years, dipped below 3 million for the first time. Ten years since the elementary schoolchildren started dwindling due to the low birthrate, it is now beginning to affect the number of university students. According to the Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology, a total of 3.73 million students are enrolled in two-year colleges and four-year universities, 0.2 percent or 6,094 fewer than last year.

Foreign students with poor qualifications are being used by British universities as “cash cows” to fill holes in the higher education budget, a leading academic has admitted.Universities and successive governments have “turned a blind eye” to the recruitment of under-qualified students for years to drive up funding levels, according to Prof Susan Bassnett.The scholar suggested that the abuse of the student visa system witnessed at London Metropolitan University was rife at other institutions across Britain.

A newly extended alliance between the Group of Eight coalition of Australian universities and the ‘China 9’ universities is helping to build “globally mobile students”, says Go8 Executive Director Michael Gallagher. But competing with elite universities from the US will remain a challenge, says one China expert, as Chinese students choose universities based on reputation and rankings, writes Charis Palmer for The Conversation.“If we’re going to compete on elitism we will always lose to the US,” said James Laurenceson, who is president of the Chinese Economics Society Australia and a senior lecturer in economics at the University of Queensland.

Many middle-ranking universities have suffered a drop in new student numbers as a result of controversial "market-based" government reforms to admissions, an Independent survey reveals today.A cut in student numbers at the likes of Oxford Brookes and Brunel comes as several of the UK's elite universities exploit reforms allowing them to expand to take more of the best pupils – defined as those who score a miniumum of AAB at A-level.Hull University said its intake would be 500 fewer this year – and acknowledged that interest in snapping up places through the clearing system had not been as high as 2011.

The Danish government has announced a dramatic increase in spending on higher education in 2013 as student numbers hit an all-time high.On Monday 27 August Finance Minister Bjarne Corydon published a budget proposal for 2013, boosting the spend on higher education by DKK3 billion (US$506 million) to cover additional expenses from a record intake of 60,000 students.The plan also earmarks DKK6.5 billion for investment in new buildings and improvements to research laboratories and a strengthening of the taxameter – Denmark’s per capita allocation to universities for active students – in the humanities and social sciences by DKK250 million.

On 14 August the final report of a panel charged with advising the Canadian government on its first international education strategy was released. The report provides a roadmap for achieving the panel’s vision for international education, including doubling the number of full-time international students in Canada from 239,000 in 2011 to more than 450,000 over the next decade.The report was released by the minister for international trade, so the the fact that it focuses largely on the economic advantages of increasing Canada’s international education activities is not surprising, although the panel does not simply see international students as a source of revenue.

The Human Resource Development Ministry has decided not to push ahead in the monsoon session of parliament with legislation allowing foreign education institutions to set up base in India, reports The Economic Times. Instead, the ministry is focusing on the troika of bills – prevention of malpractices, setting up education tribunals and mandatory accreditation for institutions – that forms the core of its higher education reform agenda.

Schools in China and India partner for distinctive experiential education. A newly established Global MBA program will enable students at Case Western Reserve University’s Weatherhead School of Management to experience education in China and India, in addition to Cleveland. Weatherhead is joining with the School of Economics and Management at Tongji University (SEM-Tongji) in Shanghai, and with Xavier Labour Relations Institute (XLRI) in Jamshedpur, India, for the shared academic venture slated to begin the in the second half of 2013. Each institution expects to enroll 20 students. Recruitment begins this summer, allowing for sufficient lead time.

UK universities recruited more than 50,000 international students through commission payments to overseas agents last year, spending close to £60 million on the practice in 2010-11, a Times Higher Education investigation has found.Using data obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, THE found that 100 universities enrolled 51,027 students in 2011, or the nearest recorded period, via a process involving agents paid on a commission basis.This represents a significant proportion of all international students in the UK. In 2010-11, 174,225 non-European Union students enrolled on higher education courses in the country, according to the Higher Education Statistics Agency.

There is one group of university teachers in Italy who have reason to regard their counterparts teaching at U.S. study-abroad programs with envy. These are the “lettori” — literally “readers” — widely used here to designate language teachers hired in part for their proficiency in a mother tongue other than Italian. Americans, Britons, Canadians, Chinese, Germans, Latin Americans, Spaniards and Russians — these 1,500 academics have long been responsible for the bulk of foreign language teaching and examining in Italian universities.

Major universities collected 20 percent more tuition than was due last year, according to a study Monday. The finding was based on a study of 20 Seoul-based private universities by the Korea Higher Education Research Institute. The schools inflated expenditure when drawing up their annual budgets, while reporting less than what was actually collected in revenue, as a means to impose higher tuition fees.