25 april - Switzerland is the next country to raise the bar for foreign students. Foreign students can expect a doubling or even tripling of their fees. The European Student’s Union is furious.
25 april - European Parliament Member Katarína Neved’alová thinks that good vocational education should be one of Europe’s top priorities in order to reduce the massive youth unemployment. “Parents should not push their children so much to go to university. If you love cars, become a mechanic.”
24 april - The British Ministers of Business and Universities tour Mexico, Colombia and Brazil in order to attract more students from Latin America. This charm offensive will not only help Latin American students to pursue their dreams, but it will also help to repair the gap in the budget of British universities.
19 april - This week on the agenda, US Minister Duncan thinks that military veterans are a "tremendous source of teaching talent" and Medvedev feels ashamed when he enters some universities, but his minister won't get sacked.
18 april - The EU’s new regulation on data protection is so strongly lobbied by industry that academics from computer science, law and business administration take up the gauntlet: the rules must not be watered down.
17 april - Germany urgently needs extra space in its master-programs to accommodate every student. Up to 36.000 bachelor students may not find a spot in 2016. This does not solely have implications for German students it might also harm the reputation of German universities abroad.
17 april - The European Commission wants to cut the budget for Erasmus for all with 15% and leave untouched the student loan scheme. These priorities are wrong, says the European Student’s Union.
12 april - University rankings are ubiquitous, but still none of them are able do justice to research in arts, humanities and social sciences. The same holds true for teaching performance, according to EUA.
10 april - Having been a victim to a homophobic attack, Dutch art historian Wilfred de Bruijn, conservator at the Fondation Custodia in Paris, has become the centre of a big demonstration for GLBT-rights in Paris.
9 april - For most universities internationalisation equals ‘attracting students from abroad’. Moreover the role of MOOCs needs to be clarified, say institutions surveyed by te European University Association (EUA).
9 april - “Most famous people do very little for other people” thinks EU’s chief scientific adviser Anne Glover. “Any scientist is much more exciting than a football player or a soccer player. At least, in my opinion.”
8 april - Danish universities have to pay a fine of 13 million Euro for accepting more foreign exchange students than they have sent abroad. Minister of Education Østergaard is “considering if this is the right way to achieve our goals”.
8 april - The image of science as an exclusively male profession must be altered. Instead female role models and mentors help girls to choose sciences, say three CERN-researchers.
8 april - ESU raises strong concerns about the consequences of educational budget cuts around Europe. They believe that those cuts divert the EU from its strategy for inclusive growth. “Access to quality education needs to be in the frontline of the policy for economic recovery”
4 april - The Ukrainian Ministry of Education resorts to Soviet-style threatening techniques in order to gain the support of the student union for its higher education reforms. But the students fight back.