Davos is one of the world's prime networking venues for economists, bankers and diplomats, writes Oliver Staley for Bloomberg. Yale University sees it as an opportunity to do business, too, entertaining potential donors and recruiting world leaders to teach on campus. Yale isn't the only US university to send a delegation to the Swiss ski resort last week to discuss the environment, technology, communications and the economy. Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago are also sent groups and sponsored events. US universities are increasing their presence at the World Economic Forum as they compete for faculty and students with foreign institutions and as they try to attract international donors, said Donald Heller, director of the Center for the Study of Higher Education at Pennsylvania State University. It's important for them to be visible at forums where universities from other countries will be present, he said.

A ranking of Chinese tycoons' donations to their alma maters has been released, following the controversy over entrepreneur Zhang Lei who gave a record US$8,888,888 to Yale University, China Daily-Asia News reports. The ranking, published by an independent Chinese website, included more than 50 tycoons who donated a total of over one billion yuan (US$146.5 million) to the Chinese universities they attended.

Technical and polytechnic education in Malaysia will be overhauled this year in order to restore public confidence, writes Richard Lim for The Star. Higher Education Minister Datuk Seri Mohamed Khaled Nordin said the move was necessary as polytechnics were currently regarded as a second chance route for weaker students and this perception had to change. Focusing on human capital development, the change would see polytechnics focusing solely on diploma and higher-level courses. More places and opportunities for further study would also be offered to increase the public's accessibility to higher education.

By any financial measure, this fiscal year is a terrible one for public higher education. And while that's no surprise to anyone working at a state college or university, new national data document the extent of the loss of state support, writes Scott Jaschik for Inside Higher Ed. Total state support for higher education for 2009-10 - including federal stimulus dollars - is US$79.4 billion, which is a decline of 1.1% from the prior year and 1.7% from the year before that. This represents a dramatic shift from the three-year period of 2005 to 2008 when state support grew 24% to $80.7 billion - without federal stimulus dollars in the equation.

The Stockholm School of Economics in Riga is planning to start a Swedish-owned hospital in the Latvian capital in order to raise the standards of the country's hospitals and to remove some of the burden from the Swedish healthcare system. Gunnar Ljungdahl, Senior Vice President of the Stockholm school's majority-owned Riga offshoot, believes more education is needed when it comes to the administration of Latvian hospitals and said the Swedish system could function as a benchmark.

New Delhi: Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies (NMIMS), India’s premier management school’s Narsee Monjee Aptitude Test (NMAT), the management admissions aptitude test, will soon be computer-based, thus making a transition to a new age digital method, by this month. For the first-ever computer based NMAT, NMIMS has partnered with Pearson VUE to conduct the exam in 19 cities in India and 11 countries outside India between January 30 and February 8, 2010.

Japan appears to be suffering from brain drain. Examples include chemist Osamu Shimomura and physicist Yoichiro Nambu, both of whom won Nobel Prizes in 2008 for research conducted in U.S. universities. Japan is not the ideal place to seek employment for some postdoctoral researchers. According to a study conducted by Masako Asano of Osaka Prefecture University, 41 percent of postdocs in particle physics leave Japan to get jobs because there aren't enough here to go around. But Japan's public universities rate quite well internationally, according to the evaluation committee on national universities, part of the education ministry.