A ranking of Chinese tycoons' donations to their alma maters has been released, following the controversy over Chinese entrepreneur Zhang Lei who gave a record US$8,888,888 (S$12.5 million) to Yale University in the United States. The ranking, published by an independent Chinese website, included more than 50 tycoons who donated a total of over one billion yuan (S$205 million) to the Chinese universities they attended.

An increasing number of North American college preparatory boarding schools are offering study abroad programs at the high school level, most often with a service component. This growing trend -- begun in some schools as recently as this year and in others as far back as two decades -- aids in providing a global education and preparing students not only for college but also for life.

Vietnam and France have formed a partnership to establish a new university specialising in science and technology near the Vietnamese capital Hanoi. Known as USTH, the university will focus on six strategic multidisciplinary research areas - biotechnology-pharmacology, aeronautics-space, energy, ICTs, materials-nanotechnologies and environment-water-oceanography.

While many countries around the world are fighting to reverse the effects of last year's global economic meltdown, some of the top international business schools are transferring valuable lessons learned from the global recession into new course curricula.

American universities again dominate the latest Shanghai Jiao Tong rankings as they have for the past six years. Released last Friday, almost a week earlier than expected, the rankings place US universities in all but three of the top 20 spots with Harvard, Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley in first, second and third spot, and the universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Tokyo the only outsiders at fourth, 10th and 20th respectively. The top 10 universities are unchanged this year from the rankings drawn up in 2008.

North America and Western Europe are neck-and-neck in the latest Eduniversal global top 100 business schools ranking, published online last week. They have 34 and 33 schools respectively in the top 100, followed by Far Eastern Asia with 16 institutions. Eurasia and the Middle East is the only one of nine geographical regions with no schools represented.

Women outnumber men in worldwide university enrolments and graduation rates, according to Unesco's 2009 Global Education Digest. The number of female students in tertiary education rose six-fold between 1970 and 2007.compared with a quadrupling of male enrolments during the same period.

MBAs have long been seen as both a stepping stone and milestone in professional career progress. Craig Donaldson looks at some of the latest MBA trends and examines the all-important process of how to choose the ideal MBA school and program

So, you have decided to study for a post-graduate management or business degree, but once you begin your research you will find this is not as simple as it first appears. From weekend programmes to campus-based courses, from degrees in management to degrees in marketing or finance, the choice often seems bewildering. Which degree to choose?

If we look at the online degree colleges on the internet, the college that stands with different prominence is Diplomatree.com. There is a course for every one. One can work and simultaneously pursue the degree courses from the comfort of the home. Diploma Distance Learning Tree have brought even closer.

Harvard University has maintained its number one placing in the annual Times Higher Education-QS World University Rankings but British institutions dominated the peak group in this year's league table. Cambridge University leapfrogged Yale University to take second place and British institutions were placed fourth (University College London) and fifth equal (Imperial College London and Oxford University), meaning the UK accounts for four of the top six institutions in the world. Last year only Cambridge and Oxford were in the top five with Imperial College sixth.

Many academic programmes at European universities are not adapted to the needs of the labour market, Ján Figel, the European Commissioner for Education, Training, Culture and Youth, told the Gothenburg "Knowledge Triangle" conference.

A record number of students have been accepted into university or college this year, following the fastest period of processing ever seen by UCAS; 419,627 applicants have now had a place confirmed, an increase of 44,523 on the same point last year. In England, 349,892 applicants have been accepted, compared to 313,271 at the same point last year.

Despite efforts to reduce the geographical bias of search engines, American universities still take the lead in the latest edition of the Ranking Web of World Universities. But some institutions in developing countries are reaching higher ranks, especially in Latin America where the University of Sao Paulo, in 38th place, and the National Autonomous University of Mexico, UNAM, at 44, benefit from the increasingly inter-connected Brazilian and Mexican academic web spaces.

More students than ever before are leaving their homeland to pursue higher studies abroad. The number of these mobile students increased two-and-a-half times between 1975 and 2007, to reach 2.8 million. Two-thirds of these foreign students make a beeline for six countries — the US, UK, France, Australia, Germany and Japan in that order.

More than a year into the greatest economic upheaval since the Great Depression, the world is a changed place. Millions of jobs have disappeared, many of them never to return. Trillions of dollars in shareholder wealth have gone up in smoke. And the business world is struggling to come to grips with a radically new economic climate where risk is, well, a four-letter word.

The battle between two of the largest graduate school testing giants has been heating up recently as more business schools warm to the idea of providing students with an alternative to the Graduate Management Admissions Test (GMAT). Now another top-ranked business school is weighing in. The University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School(Wharton Full-Time MBA Profile) plans to allow MBA applicants to submit the Graduate Record Exam (GRE), for admission in the fall of 2010, says Admissions Director J.J. Cutler. It's part of a move by the school to attract a broader applicant pool, including dual-degree students, younger applicants, and international applicants from far-flung countries without GMAT access.

Student groups from around the world met on the margins of the World Conference on Higher Education with the aim of establishing a global student organisation that could become a powerful lobbying force to advance the student perspective at international education meetings.

'World class' status for universities could take years to achieve, cost a large amount of money - and still fall short of the social and economic rewards commonly associated with top brand name institutions, according to a report launched at UNESCO's World Conference on Higher Education.

A global university ranking exercise, rivalling those of China's Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Britain's QS-Times Higher Education, is set to be launched in 2011. This follows a European Commission decision last week to award a four-country consortium of institutions a contract to design and test "a new multi-dimensional" rankings system.

A range of changes await academics who move countries - different languages, different cultures, new environs. But no matter where they go in the world, there is one thing they are unlikely to escape and that's the neoliberal audit culture that underpins university management.

In 2009, the Vietnam International Education Development (VIED - replaced the Management Committee of Project 322) will on behalf of Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) select and award many scholarships for studies overseas. The scholarships for doctoral and master study overseas will be provided for Vietnamese universities, colleges research institutes and state officers. The scholarship for Undergraduate study will be awarded to excellent students (International Olympic Award winner, students with highest result at the entrance examination into Vietnamese universities) and good students from rural and remote areas, students of minority nations.

For the first time, HESA has collected comprehensive data on the number of students studying outside the UK for qualifications awarded by UK HE institutions (HEIs). The new data shows that 196,640 ‘offshore students’ were studying entirely overseas for HE level awards from 112 UK HEIs during the 2007/08 academic year.

In theory everyone agrees that attrition in Ph.D. programs is a real problem. Graduate students don't want to spend years in programs from which they will never graduate, and universities don't want to support those who won't complete their programs. Also in theory these days, most academics agree that it's crucial to expand the diversity of the Ph.D. pipeline so that the candidates for faculty positions represent a broader demographic than the current professoriate.

The economic downturn is making it difficult for colleges to place their students, but they are ready with a damage-control plan, writes Sameer Kumar Sharma for Express India.

According to GetEducated.com’s most recent web poll, more than 90 percent of respondents say cost is “extremely” or “very” important in selecting the best online college. Less than 3 percent reported that money “doesn’t matter.”

How to avoid being the victim of a degree scam.Read about the Top 10 Signs: Are you dealing with an online college degree mill?

Dr. Bernhard Fechner, Informatiker der Fern-Universität Hagen, präsentiert sein neuestes Forschungsprojekt und stellt die Software als Trial- Version allen interessierten iSC Usern zur Verfügung.

The Carnegie Foundation has released the 2008 results of their annual survey of student engagement at undergraduate colleges: "Promoting Engagement for All Students: The Imperative to Look Within." According to this report, online learners are more engaged in learning than their campus peers: they spend more time participating in learning; moreover, they find e-learning more stimulating than the classroom.

A handful of schools have taken steps to boost female enrollment by creating personal networks to recruit women, changing classroom-time requirements and adding more outreach staff. But while interest in part-time, fast-track degrees geared toward professionals with 10 or more years' experience has risen in recent years, many schools say they still have work to do to attract more women. As it stands, women make up less than 20% of most E.M.B.A. class rolls, though at a number of top programs the percentage is even smaller -- as low as 5%. Meanwhile, women typically make up nearly 30% of the class at top full-time M.B.A. programs and more than 40% of enrollment in part-time programs.

A number of leading business schools and graduate programs were dealt a serious blow this fall when big private lenders including CitiAssist and Sallie Mae (SLM) suddenly terminated their popular "no co-signer" student loan programs. The canceled loan programs, which typically allowed applicants to obtain up to $150,000 without a co-signer to assume stewardship of the loan should the borrower default, were a financial lifeline for many international students, many of whom have no other way to finance their MBA educations. They were yet another victim of the credit crunch, which has decimated many private lenders and made those still in business more cautious than ever.

You know that continuing your education will improve your earning power, not to mention open new career doors, but is a master's degree really worth the investment? Research suggests it is. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, a master's degree holder earns more than $10,000 more on average each year than one with a bachelor's degree alone, and nearly $500,000 over the course of his or her working life.

Universities in Europe are looking to embrace a new form of learning, called open content, which could blow away the division between university students and the rest of the population.In the UK, the Joint Information Systems Committee (Jisc) and the Higher Education Academy are launching a £5.7m pilot scheme to investigate the impact of open content and to look at issues of how to contextualise existing online material so anyone can make sense of it. Several European academics are already experimenting and the European Commission has expressed interest.

As part of BusinessWeek's 2008 MBA ranking, corporate recruiters at more than 500 of the companies that hire the most graduate business students were asked to provide their opinions on which schools produce the strongest graduates in functional areas such as marketing, global business, accounting, and communication skills. Also, they were asked program-specific questions, such as which schools are most improved and which offer students the most global focus. Using this data, Business Week has created a ranking of specific areas, or specialties, within the MBA programs themselves.

The MBA industry is in turmoil. Many business schools are revisiting their offerings to see if they still have relevance in the 21st century. And HBS is using its centennial year to convene worldwide experts on business education and plot its directions for the next 100 years. Critics claim MBA programs put too much emphasis on theory and not enough on leadership in a global environment. A number of top MBA programs have retooled their offerings. HBS is looking at several change proposals, including the development in students of "soft skills."

Few higher education institutions around the world appear to have escaped the collapse of financial markets. In Asia, Africa, North America, Europe, Britain and down under in Australia and New Zealand, universities have been hit hard as the value of their investments in property and shares and, in many cases, their income from diverse sources crumples. How to counter, or at the very least cope with, this alarming situation - unique in the experience of university managers - will be the great challenge in the year ahead. As the following stories show, for higher education the boom days are well and truly over.

After the frenzied blur of GMAT prep, essays, school research and getting your applications in on time, potential business school students are faced with something even more unsettling: waiting for the school's decision. Once you've submitted all your materials, the situation is out of your control, and you and thousands of other hopefuls are at the mercy of a faceless admissions office. Luckily for the proactive applicant, there are still steps to be taken in the pursuit of your dream school.

Academics and students around the world at this very second are being subjected to infringements of their professional and human rights, and most of these violations are going unnoticed. From surveillance to corruption, from torture to murder, educators and the educated stand little chance against the full force of corrupt regimes and repressive agents intent on stifling democracy.Violations of this kind are not limited to countries with poor human rights records. On the contrary, in the post 9/11 world even the most transparent democracies are showing signs that are a cause for concern. Many institutions and academics in the West are subject to an increasingly sophisticated infrastructure of surveillance, intervention and control.As a result, universities are operating within a climate of increased pressure and paranoia, to the detriment of academic freedom. Yet academic freedom is at the very core of the university's mission and is essential to teaching and research.

Resistance to the Bologna process is growing among academics and students in different countries across Europe. In Spain, angry students have stepped up their protests by occupying university buildings, blocking train lines and interrupting senate meetings. The Spanish government has tried to defuse the situation but last week more than 600 students were occupying various buildings at the University of Barcelona while universities in Madrid, Seville and Valencia were also affected.

Across America, fuelled by growth in short-term programmes and increasing diversity in participating students' majors and destinations, a two-to-one female-to-male ratio of students studying abroad has stayed remarkably stagnant. In 2006-07, the most recent year for which data are available, 65.1% of Americans studying abroad were women, and 34.9% were men. A decade earlier, when the total number of study abroad students was less than half its current total, the breakdown was 64.9% female, 35.1% male, according to Institute of International Education Open Doors statistics.

Eduniversal nominated the leading 27 schools – three drawn from each of nine geographic regions - following research that identified the top 1,000 business schools. Further analysis reduced this number to 100 and from this group the final 27 were selected with the assistance of the deans of the 1,000 schools. Many of the world’s best-known schools, including the London Business School, the Hong Kong UST Business School and INSEAD, the international graduate business school with campuses in France and in Singapore, scored a place in the final Eduniversal list.

For years, business schools have been working at increasing the number of women in MBA programs, with average female enrollment at most schools languishing in the mid-20% to low-30% range. However, for some schools, women-geared admissions events like "Opening Doors for Women" at New York's Stern School of Business appear to be paying off. The entering class for Stern's full-time MBA this fall, for instance, is 41% female, the highest of any of the top business schools. Indeed, since 2005, women's MBA enrollment has increased by 13%, according to a 2008 study by the Forte Foundation, a consortium of schools working to increase the number of women pursuing MBAs.

The Sloan Foundation has released its annual report on the state of online education at higher education institutions. The 2008 Sloan Survey of Online Learning reveals that enrollment rose by more than twelve percent from last year.

On the nation's B-school campuses, hope used to spring eternal. No more. Students are downsizing their expectations, rejiggering career plans, and settling for less as the cascading effects of the global financial crisis start to be felt at MBA programs around the country. With companies pulling back on second-year recruiting and competition for the few remaining finance jobs becoming fierce, students are entering what surely is the toughest MBA job market since the dot-com bust.

In an increasingly global market, business leaders must live, work, and think beyond their home country. That global mentality is becoming infused with the MBA culture from early on—and many applicants to business school are now considering programs all over the world. Here are the top non-U.S. full-time MBA programs in this year's BusinessWeek rankings.

There are several excellent MBA programs outside North America. European Business schools such as London Business School in the UK, IMD in Switzerland, INSEAD in France, ESADE in Spain, and RSM Erasmus in the Netherlands immediately come to mind as some of the top ranked MBA programs in the world. Although the US remains by far the primary center for MBA study (about 83% of all the GMAT score reports worldwide are sent to US-based business schools based on the GMAC’s 07 data), Europeans are increasingly choosing to study in Europe outside of their home country while Americans also start to take a serious look at schools across the Atlantic. This tendency, however, has been balanced by Asians who overwhelmingly choose to study in the US.

Universities that accept a broad range of students and offer lifelong-learning opportunities - specifically, those of Australia, the UK and Denmark - have the best higher education systems in terms of responding to economic and social challenges, according to Brussels-based think tank the Lisbon Council.

Free online courses are available now in both video and audio format from Yale University's Open University project. Yale University tapes these courses on campus and then posts the lectures, syllabi, assignments, and work sets online. Some courses you can cruise for free: Financial Markets, Milton, The American Novel Since 1945, France Since 1871, Civil War - Reconstruction, and an Introduction to Ancient Greek History.

Daily newspapers in cities around the world were celebrating, or deploring, the status of their universities on Friday with publication of the latest rankings by the Times Higher Education and British publisher QS World Rankings. Reactions from vice-chancellors outside the US, whose universities again dominated the charts, were much the same: how can the UK compete against America's hugely wealthy Ivy League institutions when British universities are under-funded?

More than 2.5 million university students are now estimated to be studying outside their own countries - a 70% increase in the past decade and the number looks set to continue rising. A new report confirms that students from China dominate those studying abroad, far exceeding young people from India, South Korea, Germany and Japan - the top five nations with the most students in other countries.With nearly 400,000 of its students now enrolled in foreign universities, China outranks India by more than 250,000. Because of the huge rise in Chinese student mobility, Asian students comprise 45% of the total studying offshore followed by those from Europe with 28%, Africa with 12% and the Americas with 10%.