Category: Europe

Turning a Soviet-era university into a leading Eurasian management school

“It’s entirely realistic to focus not only on encouraging the best Kazakh students to study inside Kazakhstan, but even on attracting international students to come here”

Nearly 32 years ago, Kazakhstan gained its independence from the Soviet Union and began building a market economy. It was a difficult transformation for our country and society — especially for our education system.

Dozens of new private, for-profit universities and colleges began operating in Kazakhstan. Existing universities had to change on the fly, adapting their educational programs to the new environment, competing with the new establishments, recruiting faculty with more up-to-date qualifications and competing internationally for both students and academics.

I have first-hand knowledge of the complexities involved in these processes. As a student, I secured a Bolashak International Scholarship — an initiative Kazakhstan launched shortly after independence to fund the sending of Kazakh scholars to universities abroad, to equip us with modern technical and managerial skills — and studied at the University of Wroclaw in Poland. Upon returning home, I worked as an administrator at one of the Kazakh universities in Astana, and then served as Kazakhstan’s vice minister of Education and Science for almost two years.

“The explosion of international applications has intensified the number of verification checks needed and made for a challenging landscape”

The UK has long been an attractive place to study for international students and, as the latest figures show, the trend looks set to continue. However, managing the implications of the UK meeting international student targets a decade before the deadline has undoubtedly piled pressure on university admission teams.

The explosion of international applications in the wake of the introduction of the new Graduate Route Visa, plus a general widening of the recruitment net, has intensified the number of verification checks needed and made for a challenging landscape.

September 4, 2023
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Europe, Higher education, International student recruitment, Internationalisation, Pathways, Study abroad, UK

The unforeseen consequences of restricting the migration of student dependents

“Whilst understanding the UK government’s objective to control migration, the potential repercussions of curtailing this route could be substantial”

The recent announcement by the Home Office regarding the restriction of family migration for international students arriving in the UK, from January 2024, has gained significant attention in the context of rising migration figures.

The latest statistics from the ONS confirmed that net migration has peaked to 606,000 in the 12 months to December 2022; far higher than the government’s target – although the largest increase in these figures is down to visas being issued under the Ukraine Schemes and British National (Overseas) route.

“A four-year course student will have to budget up to £3,100 for the IHS surcharge alone in the UK – a significant difference from the current £1,880”

The UK has always been a dream leading destination for many students in different parts of the world. Every year, thousands of international students apply to UK institutions, and besides securing admission, they also need to obtain a student visa.

Generally, anyone travelling to reside in the UK for an extended period must pay an immigration health surcharge, an upfront fee paid to access the National Health Service, the government-funded medical and healthcare services for residents in the UK. So, that’s an additional mandatory expense to cover. How much an international student will pay for visa application and IHS surcharge, depend on their study duration.

“Both short and long-term financial planning could bolster Brand Britain’s higher education offering”

Competition is fierce in the global industry built on attracting international students into higher education. And it’s little wonder.

Recent financial forecasts have predicted that the spending associated with international students is set to increase from an estimated US$196 billion in 2019 to $433 billion by 2030.

When universities across the world are still recovering financially from the additional investments they made during the pandemic, the fees income overseas students bring in can provide a much needed buffer against budgetary shortfalls.

With so much at stake, protecting this revenue is a key priority for the sector.

“Broadly, international students have a greater variety of attitudes and a greater variance of digital skills than their UK counterparts”

International students coming to the UK are an increasingly diverse group. They arrive with a breadth of personal perceptions, cultural backgrounds and prior experiences both inside and outside formal education. These experiences impact on how well they use digital technologies to learn.

This diversity means that the digital experience of international students coming to the UK is inconsistent with all their needs.

The problems these students face can be tackled by higher education providers taking a more inclusive approach, focusing on equity and outcomes. They can create a digital experience that benefits all students, not just international students.

The Jisc team has embarked on a four-phase research project aimed at understanding the digital experience of international students studying in the UK. Our findings and initial recommendations from the first phase will be published in the middle of April 2023.

March 7, 2023
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Edtech, Europe, Higher education, Innovation

How should universities respond to robot writing?

“At one end of the spectrum are ‘the accommodators’ who see the inevitable rise of AI and conclude that fighting it is pointless. But this is a false dichotomy”

The arrival of automated essay-writing software has sent shockwaves through the global higher education sector. Academics and administrators are urgently debating how to respond to a technology that could make cheating a run-of-the-mill, free, and potentially acceptable behaviour for millions of university students.

Just last year Australia’s higher education regulator, TEQSA, was busy blocking access to scores of essay mills – websites that offer to write essays for students – usually for a few hundred dollars, with turnaround times of 24 hours to two weeks. That response now feels like it came from a bygone era, in the face of the game-changing ChatGPT, the new AI algorithm that can respond to nearly any prompt by spitting out original text right before one’s eyes.

February 15, 2023
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Cyber crime, Edtech, Europe, Higher education

Interdisciplinary collaboration for 21st century learning

“Within the busy, everyday lives of teachers, is it practical to overhaul the system while protecting the sanctity of their subject?”

Regardless of which level of education they work in, every teacher will have some form of specialism; be it early years, secondary mathematics, art or music. However, in an increasingly globalised and interconnected world, educators are waking up to the need for a new style of learning that is more transdisciplinary and focused on the skills and competencies needed for the 21st century workplace.

The traditional approach of narrow subject specialisms is obsolete, according to Reimers (2009), and teams of teachers from across the disciplines need to work together to create a more integrated, globally-minded approach to learning.

“The proposed policy seems out of the blue, as it goes against everything the government has said in the past decade”

British home secretary Suella Braverman is drawing up new immigration rules to make it harder for foreign students to come to the UK with their dependents. This proposal has come in light of a five-fold growth in “dependant visas” issued in the last three years.

If approved, it will be added to other post-Brexit measures implemented since the UK left the European Union. But how will a changed immigration system impact student migration and how will education exports economy be impacted?

“While interest in UK higher education remains strong, the move away from international quality standards in English regulation poses significant risks”

Though it may not come to mind as an export in quite the same way as cars, oil or whisky, education contributes significantly to the UK’s international trade economy with higher education contributing 70% of the country’s total education revenue in 2019. The global reach of higher education yields numerous additional benefits including staff and student mobility, research collaboration and knowledge exchange. The UK Government’s latest international education strategy sets an ambitious target to increase the value of education exports to £35 billion per year by 2030. The UK’s ability to meet this target will rely heavily on the global confidence currently enjoyed by UK higher education.

Reputation is not built overnight and the significant trust placed in the quality of UK higher education has been the result of a concerted effort by the sector over many decades, supported by a shared vision of what high-quality teaching and learning looks like.

November 14, 2022
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Europe, Higher education, Transnational education