SCIENCE & EDUCATION

With the college entrance examination still a month away, some universities have already begun to fight for the best high school graduates by offering generous scholarships, writes Wang Wei for China Daily.

For the first time in decades, Singapore (1) and Hong Kong (2) have topped the USA (3) in IMD’s World Competitiveness Yearbook rankings. They are so close, however, that it would be better to define them as the leading “trio”.

Older executives are shunning corporate training. This is a problem both for them and the firms they work for. It is tempting to conclude that older executives are falling victim to age discrimination, as firms focus resources on younger talent. But according to Jorgen Thorsell, Mannaz’s vice-president, this is not the case. Reticence, he says, comes not from the organisations but from the employees themselves.

In a bid to make Malaysia an education hub for Southeast Asia, the Higher Education Ministry has targeted 120,000 foreign students in local universities by 2015, reports the national news agency Bernama. Deputy Minister Dr Hou Kok Chung said the prospects were good as Malaysia achieved its target of 80,000 international students last year - 58,294 enrolled in private universities and 22,456 in public universities.

Babson College, the US business school most noted for entrepreneurship, is to advise the Abu Dhabi Chamber of Commerce on its plans to set up its own business school, the Abu Dhabi School of Management (ADSM).

Around two million university students in China, accounting for more than 30% of total students there, are willing to seek advanced studies in Taiwan, far exceeding the quota of 2,000 planned by Taiwan's Ministry of Education, according to findings of a survey released yesterday by the Chinese University of Hong Kong, reports The China Post.

UK universities have wrongfully claimed tens of millions of pounds from the taxpayer for students who have dropped out of courses, according to documents the government tried to keep secret, write Jack Grimston and Melanie Newman for The Times. In the papers, officials accuse universities of "artfully misconstruing" data in a "coordinated approach" to ensure they could claim as much as possible from the taxpayer. They found half the universities they checked were taking the extra money.

In farm fields south of Paris, billions of euros are being ploughed into a new modern university campus designed to rival Harvard, MIT and Cambridge as one of the world's best, reports AFP. The Paris-Saclay super-campus is France's answer to years of decline in higher education, with the result that the nation's best university only ranks 40th in the world.

There is a stark difference between the hype around higher education and the real picture, reports The Times of India. The top universities in India have 34% vacancies in teaching jobs. Twenty-two central universities with 11,085 sanctioned posts have 3,777 vacant posts, parliament was told on Wednesday.

Mr Nohria, a professor who specialises in organisational change and leadership, will be HBS’s 10th dean. The appointment caused few raised eyebrows; Harvard has a tradition of elevating its deans from within its own faculty (Mr Nohria has been a professor at the school since 1988) and MBA students on campus had lobbied hard on his behalf. He will assume his new position in July, succeeding Jay Light who announced his retirement last December.

India has initiated action to ensure social justice among its citizen through higher education, by increasing student intakes in universities and colleges to 30% by 2020, reports the Assam Tribune. The current gross enrolment ratio in higher education is 12.4%, said Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee at the Indian Institute of Management, Shillong, last week.

China’s most well-established international business school, Ceibs, has opened its second Chinese campus, in Beijing. Although Ceibs was initially set up in Beijing as the the China-EC Management Institute, it relocated to Pudong, on the outskirts of Shanghai, in 1994. Teaching resumed in Beijing in 1996.

One of the growing trends in recent years has been for business schools to retrain academics from non-business disciplines to teaching in business school. Now corporate and financial practitioners are also being trained to take their place in the classroom.

India plans to shut its doors to international public and private universities that operate for profit, believing that the move will keep the education sector free of commercialisation, writes Hemali Chhapia for The Times of India. So the University of Phoenix of the US, or the expanding Monash University of Australia, or Britain's first private company-university BPP College of Professional Studies, would not be permitted to set foot in the country.

Takuya Otani would love an MBA from a top US business school, but he won't apply. When he graduates from college in Tokyo next year, he'll pass on an American degree and attend graduate school in Japan, writes Blaine Harden for The Washington Post. "I am a grass-eater," Otani said wistfully, using an in-vogue expression for a person who avoids stress, controls risk and grazes contentedly in home pastures. Once a voracious consumer of American higher education, Japan is becoming a nation of grass-eaters.

The Malaysian government is calling for more constructive collaboration between the private sector and institutions of higher learning in the country, especially in commercialising the latter's research and development findings, the Bernama news agency reports.

The Swedish Parliamentary Ombudsman (Justitieombudsman - JO) has launched an inquiry into demands by several Swedish universities for employment applications to be submitted in English.

VietNamNet Bridge - Unless academic libraries become proactive, visionary and innovative in the way they deliver services, hardly any students will be interested in exploring the valuable resources that libraries have to offer in light of the information explosion, according to Nguyen Thi Thanh Mai, head of the Ministry of Culture, Sport and Tourism's Library Department.