Breaking News
INDIA
Shuriah Niazi
Until recently, most discussions on the globalisation of higher education in India focused on international universities establishing degree-granting branch campuses. But attention is shifting towards a different model – the establishment of local research and collaboration hubs that connect universities, researchers, students and industry.
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NETHERLANDS
Jan Petter Myklebust
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GLOBAL
Nathan M Greenfield
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Top Stories
GLOBAL
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Higher education funding models must follow purpose
Angel Calderon, Hans de Wit, Ellen Hazelkorn and Hamish Coates
The current funding difficulties facing universities are the result of a focus on piecemeal funding mechanisms that have become increasingly unsustainable without a coherent vision for the future, which embraces the whole tertiary education landscape and emphasises both private and public benefits.
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MEXICO-UNITED STATES
Nathan M Greenfield
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UNITED KINGDOM
Fabrizio Trifiró
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News
UNITED KINGDOM-EUROPE
Nic Mitchell
Despite opposition from some British university leaders, pressure is growing to agree to a compromise in tuition fees charged to students from European Union member states in a bid to get a new post-Brexit trade deal over the line in next month’s UK-EU summit.
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NORWAY
Jan Petter Myklebust
Norway’s government proposes to end a scholarship scheme for students from selected developing countries. It marks a retreat from a tradition of supporting students who could otherwise struggle to afford a degree and raises concerns about access and cooperation with the Global South.
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INDIA-UNITED STATES
Shuriah Niazi
Amid growing uncertainty surrounding United States student visas and the rising costs of studying abroad, American universities have begun bringing their degree programmes to India. The University of Colorado Denver has become the first American public university to prepare to establish a campus in Hyderabad.
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MIDDLE EAST-NORTH AFRICA
Wagdy Sawahel
A freely accessible online academic encyclopaedia is being developed, for the first time, to create a comprehensive, authoritative and peer-reviewed source of knowledge in Arabic to provide communities of students, academics and researchers with reliable, in-depth knowledge across a broad range of fields.
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Analysis
GLOBAL
Nathan M Greenfield
The Global Invisible University, unveiled by the Central European University, turns the Invisible University for Ukraine, developed in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, into a stand-alone programme that will “support students and scholars affected by war and authoritarianism across multiple regions”.
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Edtech, AI and Higher Education
GLOBAL
Cameron Mirza
Universities have long managed admissions, student support and alumni relations as disconnected functions, with separate data, tools and priorities. AI can connect and transform these operations, empowering institutions to understand and better support the entire student journey while preserving human relationships.
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GLOBAL
Petra Recter
Oxford University Press has published an AI Literacy Module that lecturers can assign to students, providing skills to evaluate generative AI content and usage that will be useful for their education and their future careers. The module is accessible via (paid-for) Oxford Insight, Oxford Learning Link and Oxford Trove platforms.
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GLOBAL
Tarek Abd Elgalil
While many AI debates focus on academic integrity, a WISE-IIE study across seven countries revealed a broader challenge: universities are at vastly different stages of AI readiness. These differences threaten to create new inequalities in how effectively universities can adopt and govern AI technologies.
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World Blog
UNITED KINGDOM
Holly White
Universities are increasingly committed to fostering inclusive environments where all students have the opportunity to succeed. Students who are most affected by decisions should have a meaningful role in shaping them. This provides universities with richer insights, promotes inclusive policies and fosters stronger communities.
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SDGs
GLOBAL
Ahmed C Bawa
As universities around the world grapple with higher education transformation, the challenge facing open science is to recapture its public purpose. There is no better way to do that than through galvanising science to address the Sustainable Development Goals by connecting the local and the global.
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AFRICA
Felicia Nkrumah Kuagbedzi and Rosalie Lack
Open Access Week 2026 turns a spotlight on a question that is urgent for African higher education: who pays for the infrastructure that makes knowledge open? This is important, as institutions may commit to open science principles before they have secured the infrastructure to sustain them.
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FRANCE
Maria Melchior and Camille Davisse-Paturet
Young people’s mental health is directly linked to the environments in which they grow up, including the education system. The reasons why students in France are taking action now may well be, at least partly, for the same reasons their mental health has deteriorated in recent years.
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Features
ETHIOPIA
Wondwosen Tamrat
The debate over hair length and dress requirements at Ethiopia’s Addis Ababa University has become one of the most visible student policy controversies recently. The question is how these rules contribute to the institution’s reputation rather than it being determined by the quality of its teaching, research and graduates.
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Top Stories from the Last Edition
GLOBAL
Libing Wang
Universities entrust academics with much of the responsibility for students’ learning. Teaching develops through experience and engagement with changing knowledge, students and educational contexts, and AI makes this especially visible, putting greater importance on the expertise that shapes learning rather than simply delivering content.
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MEXICO
Nathan M Greenfield
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AFRICA
Gedion Onyango and Liisa Laakso
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NORWAY
Jan Petter Myklebust
Norway’s participation in the European Union’s next research programme stirred a growing political row after the research minister warned that the country would not remain involved “at any cost”. Scientists feared that withdrawal would damage Norwegian research and restrict access to European Research Council funding.
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UNITED STATES
Ryan Miller
In the midst of an ongoing political backlash against LGBTQ people on campuses in the United States, activism needs to return to the grassroots in order to build the momentum needed where conditions allow for diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives to flourish again.
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UNITED KINGDOM
Louise Nicol
January 2027 will be an important test of the new immigration regime in the United Kingdom, following new rules affecting student visa refusal rates. They may create a more compliant international higher education system, but at the same time they may reduce diversity.
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NORDIC COUNTRIES
Jan Petter Myklebust
Norway, Denmark, Finland and Sweden from 2014 to 2024 have graduated 82,300 PhD candidates, but they have difficulty recruiting their own national citizens. The gaps are increasingly being filled by international students, notably in STEM sciences, and finding ways to retain them is a priority.
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