University

Page 2 of 8
1 2 3 4 … 8

A-level results are out, but what about those not going to university?

Fiona Millar

By Fiona Millar

A significant number of young people are turned off by traditional higher education. They should have a decent alternative

This year’s A-level results day saw grades down slightly, universities awash with places, and signs that young people might be starting to vote with their feet, and not in the direction successive governments have predicted. What is going on? For the past 20 years, encouraging more young people into higher education has been a central aim of education policy. Until now there was no real reason to think this plan wasn’t working.

Around a third of all school-leavers go on to higher education at 18, and that figure rises to almost 50% by the age of 30. But a survey tracking aspirations for a university education among pre-GCSE pupils released on Thursday by a social mobility charity, the Sutton Trust, suggests that the wind might now be blowing in a different direction. The trust has been monitoring aspirations for the past 15 years and reports a falling proportion of young people who think university matters. The survey also shows there is still a marked difference in attitudes towards higher education between students from different social backgrounds.

A blip or a worrying straw in the wind? We should fear the latter as it would point to a growing and glaring omission at the heart of our education system – the failure to cater adequately for those for whom university may not be the right choice. One obvious reason for disenchantment (reflected in the survey) is the high cost of tuition fees and living expenses. A degree generally leads to higher wages, and employers increasingly seek this level of education when recruiting – even for non-graduate jobs. Up to a third of graduates may now be working in low-skilled jobs.

But the survey also reveals that of those not planning to attend university, 58% cite not enjoying “that type of learning”. We need to understand why this is, what we might do about it. The assumption that everyone can and should enjoy an academic education is almost certainly flawed. Like many other graduates from a Russell Group university – in my case at a time when only 10% of the population went to university and were fully funded to boot – I believe every young person should have the chance I had. Not just of an academic education and a route into professional work, but also the opportunity to learn and develop socially and emotionally, preferably away from home, without the pressure of having to earn a living.

However, as a parent and a school governor I also know this path isn’t right for everyone. The over-academisation of the school curriculum and the devaluation of any sort of assessment that doesn’t involve a high-stakes exam may now be demoralising many young people, in particular those who most need to see the point of education.

There have been signs throughout this academic year that the latest incarnation of the GCSE – increased content, no coursework and lengthy exam papers – might be a massive switch-off to key groups of pupils. And the failure over decades to develop alternatives to academic study, in the form of high-status technical education and apprenticeships, is starting to look like a criminal act, especially in the run-up to Brexit when skilled workers from elsewhere may not be readily available. Over the past 50 years, a series of vocational qualifications have come and gone and never garnered the kudos of O-levels, GCSEs or A-levels. So we should not be surprised that traditional qualifications still reign supreme, that university still sits at the pinnacle of the education system and that growing numbers of students see no realistic alternative routes into fulfilling work.

Most people probably haven’t even heard of the new T-levels – the current government’s answer to this endemic English problem. These apparently “world-class” qualifications won’t even come on stream until 2020; and they will have to be delivered in woefully underfunded further education colleges. Even worse – there are barely 100 degree apprenticeships on offer, a drop in the ocean compared with thousands of more conventional courses. So for the growing number of young people who feel university is not for them there really isn’t anything concrete to aspire to.

The Sutton Trust is right: more maintenance grants and apprenticeships would probably help. But what is really needed is a huge culture shift, away from the assumption that academic is best and towards a broader vision of what makes a real education. A vision that should include what might be seen as “that other type of education”: practical, creative, technical, engaging – and, above all, of equal status to a university degree.

Source of the article: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/16/a-levels-results-higher-education-alternatives

Comparte este contenido:
Leer más »

A better way foward for transnational higher education

Peter De Costa

By Peter Da Costa

As I pen this commentary from my office at the National University of Singapore or NUS – my alma mater and summer academic home – I have been notified that NUS has emerged 11th in the Quacquarelli Symonds or QS World University Rankings and reclaimed its position as Asia’s number one university.

Tellingly, however, the top 10 universities are based in the West: five are in the United States, and the other five are European institutions. And while NUS has much to celebrate, having climbed steadily in the rankings over the past decade, it is also engaged in joint ventures with Duke University and Yale University to enhance its medical and liberal arts education programme, respectively.

Such a joint arrangement, which is representative of transnational education (TNE), is the focus of Professor Phan Le-Ha’s recent book, Transnational Education Crossing ‘Asia’ and ‘the West’.

Top-ranked universities like NUS and other middling Asian institutions, according to Phan, appear to have a fascination with Western universities, resulting in the latter exporting versions of their educational model abroad by establishing overseas campuses in China, Japan, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Vietnam.

TNE has, however, also drawn its fair share of criticisms as sceptics have been quick to point out that the practice of exporting Western models of higher education to Asian countries constitutes a form of neocolonialism; more often than not, host countries are coerced into granting concessions and providing resources such as land to create these satellite campuses.

Another unfavourable outcome is the ostensible exploitation of its students who, as Phan notes, may receive a mediocre education. Equally disturbing is how some TNE students are individuals who are merely biding their time as they await degree completion and future employment at the home countries of these degree-granting universities.

In other words, both the host institution and host country become stepping stones as these students aspire to eventually move on to the West.

Neoliberalism and TNE

As a critical applied linguist who studies issues of power, and inequality associated language-related issues to better understand their roles in the lives of individuals and conditions in society, I am particularly disturbed by the neoliberal turn that characterises TNE.

For one, students are generally viewed as customers in this financially lucrative enterprise where English is often the medium of instruction. As a consequence, English becomes a commodity, a means toward realising an end that can potentially have negative social implications.

One major implication is the reification of the (white) Western native English instructor whose variety of English and race are valued over the local variety of English used by local instructors. Put simply, a negative outcome of TNE is that it can promote institutional racism through the adoption of ‘rent-a-foreigner’ hiring practices. More often than not, these foreign instructors are also paid more than their local counterparts to do the same job.

Best of both worlds

As real as these ill effects of TNE may be, Phan reminds us that we should not to be too quick to subscribe to an Asian-as-victim trope. After all, some Asian universities are themselves complicit in perpetuating an asymmetrical relationship by electing, for example, to hire token white foreign instructors who might not be formally trained to deliver instruction.

Other Asian-based institutions might not hesitate to use the West-Asia paradox to their advantage by advertising that TNE allows students to enjoy a Western education while being ensconced in Asian values. TNE is thus promoted as a way of preserving one’s Asian values against the insidious cultural influence of the demonised West, an opportunity to enjoy the best of both worlds.

Understandably, Asian universities have much to be proud of. In the latest QS rankings mentioned earlier, four other institutions made the top 25 list: Nanyang Technological University (12), Tsinghua University (17), the University of Tokyo (23) and the University of Hong Kong (25).

The strong performances of Asian universities will probably improve in the future, buoyed by the brain circulation that Asia is experiencing. Many Western-trained academics are returning home, drawn by the attractive remuneration offered by improved local universities. In the long term, the internal ‘Westernisation’ of local universities fuelled by faculty returnees may erode the allure of TNE.

Cooperation rather than competition

Rather than being bound by the West-Asia binary, Phan recommends that TNE institutions adopt a less antagonistic stance and instead “engag[e] with a multidimensional, pro-West and practical-minded Asia”.

This is a valid point because competition can co-exist with cooperation, and cooperation will be essential if TNE is to survive and thrive. However, Western universities need to see the value of such cooperation because some are wary of ceding their rights to overseas campuses and diluting their brand name.

I think that any reservations these institutions might have need to be actively assuaged, with deliberate attempts made to preserve intellectual property rights and maintain academic standards. Intellectual espionage is without a doubt a contemporary reality, and institutions are right to be cautious about leaked content.

However, the solution is not to curtail TNE or, relatedly, restrict graduate student admission of Asian students to Western institutions on the grounds of national security. Instead, stricter measures need to be put in place to safeguard an equitable two-way exchange of knowledge and ideas.

Steps also need to be taken to tackle institutional racism and to value the expertise local talent can bring to TNE institutions. Rather than populating these institutions with ‘foreign’ talent, joint venture campuses should hire capable multilingual local faculty who are well versed with English as an international lingua franca, and thus do their part in facilitating global brain circulation.

At a time when multilateralism appears to be in jeopardy, TNE can take a leadership role in connecting institutions and people.

Unfortunately, university rankings do matter, and it is increasingly difficult to escape the audit culture that pervades higher education. What TNE needs to do is to design measures that will foster genuine cross-institutional collaboration and cooperation. If designed well, this could become a valuable template for other educational crossings, not just between the West and Asia.

 

Source of the article: http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20180626103409378

Comparte este contenido:
Leer más »

Education as a weapon in Iran and South Africa

Amy Fehilly

By Amy Fehilly

Education is usually seen as the key to better societies and better futures. But it can also be used as a weapon of discrimination, as the legacy of South Africa’s apartheid era has shown. And in Iran today, the government withholds education for the same effect: to marginalize, penalize and repress the country’s Baha’i people.

“Education is a double edged sword that can liberate or be used to enslave,” said Professor Somadoda Fikeni, a policy and political analyst at the University of South Africa, speaking at an event marking the launch of Not A Crime’s new project in Johannesburg on June 1.

The project raises awareness of the educational apartheid against the Baha’is of Iran, the country’s largest religious minority. Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the Iranian government has blocked Baha’i’s from pursuing higher education. As part of the initiative, Not A Crime studies the cost of discrimination in other countries where groups of people have faced discrimination. South Africa, which was ruled by the apartheid regime from 1948 to 1994, was the natural first choice for the study.

The panel discussion, which included experts in economics, law and sociology and IranWire founder Maziar Bahari via Skype, drew parallels between systematic and government-sanctioned education discrimination during apartheid and Iran today. “Iran cut links with South Africa during apartheid, but they continued to implement their own human rights abuses,” said Khwezi Cenenda, who chaired the debate.

The panel also featured Tahirih Matthee, Director of the Baha’i Office of Public Affairs in Johannesburg, Dr Iraj Abedian, founder and CEO of Pan-African Capital Holdings, and Professor Salim Nakhjavani from the University of Wits in the city, and took place at the School of Law at the university.

21_lKV4VCr_I0Imgmy.jpg.815x390_q85_crop_upscale

Anti-Baha’i graffiti in Iran

So what happened to education in South Africa under apartheid, and what is its legacy today? The South African government, led by a number of leaders including Hendrik Verwoerd, denied South Africa’s blacks and “coloreds” access to equal education for close to 50 years. The fallout from that cruel education segregation is one of the main causes of South Africa’s wealth disparity and high unemployment today. “Just over 50 percent of our population is unemployed,” said Iraj Abedian, a South African-based Iranian working in economics and business. “Our economy is not doing well, we have a shortage of skills. This is not a society at ease with itself. If a society is not at ease with itself it cannot unlock its full potential.”

The Baha’is in Iran are subjected to discrimination on religious grounds rather than race. The discriminatory policies are rooted in a 1991 memorandum signed by Iran’s then and current supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, which said that the progress of the Baha’is should be “blocked” by denying them work opportunities and higher education.

“What are the Bahai’s really doing that makes the government so angry?” asked Tahirih Matthee.  It’s a question, she said, that you would never dare ask of South African blacks today, so the same can be assumed for Iran’s Baha’is. “Iran has the potential to thrive if they give equal opportunities to all their citizens,” she said.

In response to the ban on higher education, Baha’is created the Baha’i Institute for Higher Education (BIHE), an underground university, in 1987. Thousands of Baha’is currently study through the BIHE system, and academic institutions around the world recognize its qualifications. “The more I studied BIHE the more I admired the resilience of young Baha’is who were fighting to study,” said Maziar Bahari, speaking about the inspiration behind the project. “So I decided to make a film about the Baha’is in Iran. The Baha’is have flourished because of education and peaceful resistance. As a result, everyone should know about the BIHE and this successful peaceful resistance movement.” Bahari’s film, To Light a Candle, was released in 2014.

Not A Crime also focuses on the history of the civil rights movement in the United States, and a series of murals have gone up in streets in Harlem, New York, Atlanta, Georgia and Nashville, Tennessee — where divisive, discriminatory laws wreaked damage on communities for decades. Speaking about the murals, Bahari said Not A Crime looked to the experience of black Americans in order to “explore the real cost of discrimination, as a warning to the Iranian government.”

The event in Johannesburg also featured three short films produced by Not A Crime, interviews with South Africans who studied under the Bantu education system, which was implemented by the architect of apartheid, Hendrik Verwoerd, as a secondary form of education tasked with creating second class jobs for black citizens. “There is no place for the Bantu in a European community above certain forms of labor,” said Somadoda Fikeni.

African-Americans are still dealing with the aftermath of brutal discrimination, and South Africans still deal with the legacies of apartheid today. In South Africa, overcoming that past and working for equal education is now a national mandate. The stories of people who lived through this time serve as an inspiration for the Baha’is in Iran – and, as Bahari describes, specifically as a warning to the Iranian government of the consequences of denying basic rights to 300,000 Baha’i Iranian citizens.

Speaking at the Johannesburg event, Abedian also issued a warning against “institutionalized, state-driven and politically motivated” denial of education. “The discrimination is based not on racial grounds but religious grounds; the essence is identical,” he said.

Perhaps most importantly, the discussion in South Africa ended on a message of hope. “The denial of access to knowledge is in itself one of the most grievous acts of oppression,” said Salim Nakhjavani. He asked the audience what they thought Iran could learn from the South African experience, and speakers discussed how peaceful resistance — a key tenet of the Baha’i faith — could bring about change in Iran.

 

Source of the article: http://iranpresswatch.org/post/14813/education-as-a-weapon-in-iran-and-south-africa/

Comparte este contenido:
Leer más »

THE Asia-Pacific University Rankings 2018: methodology

Times Higher Education

By The Times Higher Education

The Asia-Pacific University Rankings are built on the results of Times Higher Education’s extensive data collection, analysed with the same methods used for the World University Rankings and adjusted to reflect regional priorities

Browse the full Times Higher Education Asia-Pacific University Rankings 2018 results

The Times Higher Education World University Rankings are the only global performance tables that judge research-intensive universities across all their core missions: teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook. The Asia-Pacific University Rankings use the same 13 carefully calibrated performance indicators to provide the most comprehensive and balanced comparisons, trusted by students, academics, university leaders, industry and governments. However, the weightings are specially recalibrated to reflect the priorities of Asia-Pacific institutions.

The performance indicators are grouped into five areas: Teaching (the learning environment); Research (volume, income and reputation); citations (research influence); International outlook (staff, students and research); and industry income (knowledge transfer).

Exclusions

Universities are excluded from the World University Rankings if they do not teach undergraduates or if their research output amounted to fewer than 1,000 articles between 2012 and 2016 (and a minimum of 150 a year). Universities can also be excluded if 80 per cent or more of their activity is exclusively in one of our 11 subject areas.

Data collection

Institutions provide and sign off their institutional data for use in the rankings. On the rare occasions when a particular data point is not provided, we enter a conservative estimate for the affected metric. By doing this, we avoid penalising an institution too harshly with a “zero” value for data that it overlooks or does not provide, but we do not reward it for withholding them.

Getting to the final result

Moving from a series of specific data points to indicators, and finally to a total score for an institution, requires us to match values that represent fundamentally different data. To do this we use a standardisation approach for each indicator, and then combine the indicators in the proportions indicated to the right.

The standardisation approach we use is based on the distribution of data within a particular indicator, where we calculate a cumulative probability function, and evaluate where a particular institution’s indicator sits within that function. A cumulative probability score of X in essence tells us that a university with random values for that indicator would fall below that score X per cent of the time.

For all indicators except for the Academic Reputation Survey we calculate the cumulative distribution function of a normal distribution using Z-scoring. For the data in the Academic Reputation Survey we use the cumulative distribution function of an exponential distribution in our calculations.

Teaching (the learning environment): 25%

The most recent Academic Reputation Survey (run annually) that underpins this category was carried out in January to March 2017, attracting 10,568 responses. It examined the perceived prestige of institutions in teaching. The responses were statistically representative of the global academy’s geographical and subject mix. The 2017 data are combined with the results of the 2016 survey, giving more than 20,000 responses.

As well as giving a sense of how committed an institution is to nurturing the next generation of academics, a high proportion of postgraduate research students also suggests the provision of teaching at the highest level that is thus attractive to graduates and effective at developing them. This indicator is normalised to take account of a university’s unique subject mix, reflecting that the volume of doctoral awards varies by discipline.

Institutional income is scaled against academic staff numbers and normalised for purchasing-power parity. It indicates an institution’s general status and gives a broad sense of the infrastructure and facilities available to students and staff.

Research (volume, income and reputation): 30%

The most prominent indicator in this category looks at a university’s reputation for research excellence among its peers, based on the responses to our annual Academic Reputation Survey (see left).

Research income is scaled against academic staff numbers and adjusted for purchasing-power parity (PPP). This is a controversial indicator because it can be influenced by national policy and economic circumstances. But income is crucial to the development of world-class research, and because much of it is subject to competition and judged by peer review, our experts suggested that it was a valid measure. This indicator is fully normalised to take account of each university’s distinct subject profile, reflecting the fact that research grants in science subjects are often bigger than those awarded for the highest-quality social science, arts and humanities research.

To measure productivity we count the number of papers published in the academic journals indexed by Elsevier’s Scopus database per scholar, scaled for institutional size and normalised for subject. This gives a sense of the university’s ability to get papers published in quality peer-reviewed journals. This year, we devised a method to give credit for papers that are published in subjects where a university declares no staff.

 

Citations (research influence): 30%

Our research influence indicator looks at universities’ role in spreading new knowledge and ideas.

We examine research influence by capturing the average number of times a university’s published work is cited by scholars globally. This year, our bibliometric data supplier Elsevier examined almost 62 million citations to more than 12.4 million journal articles, article reviews, conference proceedings and books and book chapters published over five years. The data include the 23,000 academic journals indexed by Elsevier’s Scopus database and all indexed publications between 2012 and 2016. Citations to these publications made in the six years from 2012 to 2017 are also collected.

The citations help to show us how much each university is contributing to the sum of human knowledge: they tell us whose research has stood out, has been picked up and built on by other scholars and, most importantly, has been shared around the global scholarly community to expand the boundaries of our understanding, irrespective of discipline.

The data are normalised by the overall number of papers produced to reflect variations in citation volume between different subject areas. This means that large institutions or those with high levels of research activity in subjects with traditionally high citation counts do not gain an unfair advantage.

We have blended equal measures of a country-adjusted and non-country-adjusted raw measure of citations scores.

In 2015-16, we excluded papers with more than 1,000 authors because they were having a disproportionate impact on the citation scores of a small number of universities. Since last year, we have designed a method for reincorporating these papers. Working with Elsevier, we have developed a new fractional counting approach that ensures that all universities where academics are authors of these papers will receive at least 5 per cent of the value of the paper, and where those that provide the most contributors to the paper receive a proportionately larger contribution.

International outlook (staff, students, research): 7.5%

The ability of a university to attract undergraduates, postgraduates and faculty from all over the planet is key to its success on the world stage.

In the third international indicator, we calculate the proportion of a university’s total research journal publications that have at least one international co-author and reward higher volumes. This indicator is normalised to account for a university’s subject mix and uses the same five-year window as the “Citations: research influence” category.

Industry income (knowledge transfer): 7.5%

A university’s ability to help industry with innovations, inventions and consultancy has become a core mission of the contemporary global academy. This category seeks to capture such knowledge-transfer activity by looking at how much research income an institution earns from industry (adjusted for PPP), scaled against the number of academic staff it employs.

The category suggests the extent to which businesses are willing to pay for research and a university’s ability to attract funding in the commercial marketplace – useful indicators of institutional quality.

Source of the article: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/asia-pacific-university-rankings-2018-methodology#survey-answer
Comparte este contenido:
Leer más »

EEUU: Trump ‘to scrap’ college racial bias policy

Noticias

By: bbc.com/04-07-2018

The Trump administration is set to roll back the Obama-era policies promoting diversity in universities, known as affirmative action, US media report.

US Attorney General Jeff Sessions revoked 24 guidance documents on Tuesday, many involving race in schools and affirmative action recommendations.

It comes as Harvard University faces a discrimination lawsuit alleging it limits admissions for Asian-Americans.

In 2016, the US Supreme Court had ruled in favour of affirmative action.

Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the 2016 opinion, announced his retirement from the top US court last month.

His departure gives President Donald Trump a chance to appoint a justice who more closely matches the administration’s views on taking race into account in college admissions.

The Trump administration is expected to tell schools not to consider race in the admissions process, discontinuing the policy former President Barack Obama adopted to promote more diversity at colleges and high schools.

What does rescinding the policy mean?

Academic affirmative action – known as positive action in the UK- which involves favouring minorities during the admissions process in order to promote campus diversity, has long proved controversial in the US.

The lawsuit against Harvard currently filed by the Students for Fair Admissions alleges that the college holds Asian-American applicants to an unfairly high admissions standard.

The Justice Department is also currently investigating Harvard over racial discrimination allegations.

In April, it called for the public disclosure of the Ivy League college’s admissions practices.

Harvard argues it «does not discriminate against applicants from any group, including Asian-Americans».

Asian-Americans currently make up 22.2% of students admitted to Harvard,according to the university website.

Jeff Sessions
Image copyrightREUTERS
Image captionThe US attorney general revoked several affirmative action guidances

Under President Barack Obama, the Departments of Justice and Education issued guidelines for universities to promote diversity on campuses.

«Learning environments comprised of students from diverse backgrounds provide an enhanced educational experience for individual students,» the guidance reads.

«By choosing to create this kind of rich academic environment, educational institutions help students sharpen their critical thinking and analytical skills.»

The guidance features ways to encourage diversity, including granting admission preferences to students from certain schools based on demographics and considering a student’s race «among other factors in its admissions procedures».

The Obama-era policy replaced the Bush-era view that discouraged affirmative action.

The Bush-era guidance had been removed from the government website during the Obama administration, but it has since reappeared.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos told the Associated Press she would not debate or discuss the matter of race and college admissions.

«I think this has been a question before the courts and the courts have opined,» Ms DeVos said.

But according to a Pew Research Center study, 71% of Americans surveyed in October 2017 have a positive view of affirmative action.

Gate at Harvard UniversityImage copyrightREUTERS
Image captionHarvard University has one of the lowest admissions rates, accepting less than 6% of applicants

What is affirmative action in US colleges?

Affirmative action, or the idea that disadvantaged groups should receive preferential treatment, first appeared in President John F Kennedy’s 1961 executive order on federal contractor hiring.

It took shape during the height of the civil rights movement, when President Lyndon Johnson signed a similar executive order in 1965 requiring government contractors to take steps to hire more minorities.

Colleges and universities began using those same guidelines in their admissions process, but affirmative action soon prompted intense debate in the decades following, with several cases appearing before the US Supreme Court.

The high court has outlawed using racial quotas, but has allowed colleges and universities to continue considering race in admitting students.

Critics rail against it as «reverse discrimination», but proponents contend it is necessary to ensure diversity in education and employment.

*Fuente: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-44703874

Comparte este contenido:
Leer más »

Africa: Mahama wants re-engineering of university education curriculum

Noticias

Africa/ June 27, 2018/Source: https://www.myjoyonline.com

Former President John Mahama has called for re-engineering of the curriculum of University education in Africa to stimulate accelerated development if the continent is to remain competitive and relevant in the global space of skills acquisition and training.

He identified the mismatch nature curriculum bequeathed the continent from colonial mastership, which currently under-rights the content of syllabi at the Universities.

Speaking on the “Future of Work and Industrialisation” on the sidelines of the 53rd Annual Meetings of the African Development Bank in Busan, South Korea, Mr Mahama said churning out graduates of humanities for example in large droves would not unlock the quest for accelerated industrialisation in Africa.

It was on the theme, “Accelerating Africa’s Industrialisation,” which is underpinned by the Bank’s High 5 strategy including light up and power Africa, feed Africa and improve the quality of life of Africans.

He said stringent measures should be instituted to achieve a 70 by 30 parity in the sciences against the humanities to place the continent in pole-position to advance economically, socially and in the fields of science and technology, which is the catalyst to reaching accelerated development of the continent.

Mr Mahama said Africa was ready to break into the legion of industrialised continent, when the right pillars of development was activated and matched-up to the global competition even in the face of deployment of hitech artificial intelligence and robotics saying “we can start at our own pace and leverage to succeed.

“Rethinking Africa’s development paradigm will lead us to the desired destination.”

Mr Ken Ofori-Attah, Minister of Finance, also a panellists said stakeholders in Africa should pursue radically reforms in education pedagogy especially teaching programmes in entrepreneurship to jump-start changing the psyche of students to leapfrog Africa’s industrial.

He said political stability, investment in infrastructure as well as in technology, energy, macro-economic stability were essential.

Mrs Kanny Diallo, Minister of Planning and International Cooperation said frequent changes of governments and non-adherence to time-bound blueprints or development plans even makes Africa’s quest to notch accelerated development looking remote.

She insists huge investments in the agricultural sector and harnessing of the gains in the mining industry could be ploughed into the social services sector would enhance development in the agri-business value-chain to generate the necessary jobs for the youth.

She said long-term planning and solutions would assist the private sector to partner state institutions to absorb the defenceless and teeming youths with skills of engagements.

Source:

https://www.myjoyonline.com/news/2018/May-26th/mahama-wants-re-engineering-of-university-curriculum.php

Comparte este contenido:
Leer más »

Colleges and State Laws Are Clamping Down on Fraternities

Kyle Spencer

By Kyle Spencer

Fraternity members at Louisiana State University adhere to age-old rituals, shrouded in secrecy, that dictate how they gather, greet each other and initiate their young pledges.

But when they return to campus in the fall, one ritual will be drastically different: They will face much more severe consequences for dangerous hazing incidents.

In May, eight months after the death of Maxwell Gruver, a freshman pledge at the university’s now banished Phi Delta Theta fraternity chapter, Gov. John Bel Edwards of Louisiana signed into law an anti-hazing bill that would make it a felony for those involved in hazing that resulted in death, serious bodily harm, or life-threatening levels of alcohol. And students found guilty could land in a Louisiana jail for up to five years.

The new law represents an important departure for Louisiana, which once had some of the most lenient anti-hazing laws in the nation. But it also reflects renewed efforts around the country — in state legislatures, inside courthouses and on campuses — to prevent the hazing injuries and deaths that have plagued college campuses for decades.

“Realistically, the answer is regulation and reform,” John Hechinger, the author of “True Gentlemen: The Broken Pledge of America’s Fraternities,” said during a panel on Greek life last week at The New York Times Higher Ed Leaders Forum. “That is really the only possibility.”

There has been at least one school-related hazing death each year in the United States since 1961, according to Hank Nuwer, a Franklin College journalism professor and the author of multiple books on hazing. Most, but not all, have occurred during fraternity initiation events.

But in 2017, four students, including Mr. Gruver at L.S.U., Tim Piazza, a 19-year-old at Pennsylvania State University and Andrew Coffey, a 20-year-old at Florida State University, lost their lives in hazing-relating incidents. Mr. Coffey died on a fraternity house couch after drinking an entire bottle of bourbon during Big Brother Night. In each case, multiple students were charged.

This fall, Penn State President Eric J. Barron, who appeared on the panel with Mr. Hechinger, said that the incident on his campus had been a “horrible tragedy,” but one that had spurred new interest in reform.

This past year, Dr. Barron banned 13 organizations from his campus and instituted 15 reforms, including switching disciplinary oversight of the institutions from a Greek governing council to university administrators, requiring newcomers to take a pledge about their actions inside their organizations and deferring the initiation process for freshmen until later on in the school year, so they can develop new friends and interests before being faced with hazing.

This winter, officials at Florida State University started a hazing education initiative and increased staff members charged with monitoring Greek life. And at Louisiana State, President F. King Alexander proposed 28 reforms, including a requirement that chapters hire house managers.

College administrators are also beginning to look at the problem collectively. At a meeting in Chicago this spring, representatives from 31 colleges and universities explored ways to garner more cooperation from national Greek organizations, which can resist university oversight.

Dr. Barron is pushing an online safety database that will record incidents at chapters around the country, indicate which institutions are doing exemplary work in their communities and which are experiencing alarming trends.

Penn State and many other universities already have, or are instituting, their own report cards.

The high profile nature of the cases is also impacting state capitals. Pennsylvania, like Louisiana, is expected to soon pass an anti-hazing law that would make death by hazing a felony.

New Mexico has also been exploring the idea.

In Tennessee, state representative John DeBerry Jr. floated a bill that would ban fraternities altogether in the state.

Mr. Hechinger says fighting to make fraternities safer is probably a better use of critics’ energy, as it is unlikely that fraternities will be banned on public campuses where they are powerful.

“If we were going to create a higher education system from scratch, would we have organizations that year after year kill a student? Probably not,” he said at the conference. “But they are very ensconced in higher education, and if you try to do some kind of ban, which is often what people are asking, you run the risk of underground behavior.”

Source of the article: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/05/education/learning/colleges-fraternities-laws.html

Comparte este contenido:
Leer más »
Page 2 of 8
1 2 3 4 … 8