breaking news
India-Australia
Shriya Niazi
Australia’s Deakin University, the first foreign university to open an international branch in India, held its first graduation ceremony at its Gujarat campus. This milestone is the first indicator of how foreign university campuses have the potential to change the higher education landscape in this country.
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middle east
Wagdy Sawahel and Brendan O’Malley
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Zimbabwe
Clemens Manyukwe
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Norway
Jan Petter Myklebust
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top stories
global
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Number of high school students increased from 103 million to 269 million
Nathan M. Greenfield
The number of students in higher education worldwide has increased by 161% since 2000, but completion rates need to improve. Overall, says UNESCO, equitable expansion depends less on any single policy than on a coherent combination of demand- and supply-side measures, supported by quality assurance, flexible pathways and an assessment of who benefits.
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Australia
Shadi Khan Saif
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India
Shriya Niazi
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middle east
Annalisa Pavan
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news
iran-israel
Wagdi Sawahel
As conflict intensifies in the Middle East, the Israel Defense Forces has confirmed that it has targeted two Iranian universities, namely Malek Ashtar University and Imam Hossein University, and a Space Research Center for suspected military use by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
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India-Middle East
Shriya Niazi
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Africa
Wagdi Sawahel
While some countries in Southern and West Africa maintain excellent levels of academic freedom, the region has stagnated, with academic freedom operating at levels that are stressful for researchers and research institutions. Academic Freedom Index 2026 Report just released.
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Finland
Jan Petter Myklebust
Finnish student organizations have criticized a proposal put out for public comment in January by the Ministry of Economy and Employment that would allow authorities to revoke residence permits for international students receiving government welfare.
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Germany
michael gardner
A new analysis conducted by the Moses Mendelssohn Institute suggests that the cost of housing for students in Germany continues to rise. The German Student Welfare Association called on the government to urgently address the issue.
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Denmark
Jan Petter Myklebust
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Edtech, AI, higher education
global
james unil au
Educational technology has reached a tectonic tipping point, moving from frontier innovation to embedded infrastructure. Instead, AI is reframing learning as real-time, co-constructed cognition. This is a breakdown in discipline that has profound implications for higher education, institutional design, and the future of knowledge.
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global
Anila Dehart
As AI transforms entry-level jobs, human-centered capabilities that cannot be replicated with AI will become more important to graduates, employers, and universities’ relevance in workforce development. Higher education’s ability to make these capabilities available to all students will shape equitable outcomes and economic competitiveness in the AI era.
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global
Hannelly Adendorff, François Cirier, Chenwen Huang, Soraya Lester, Sonya Strydom, Skyna Wolge
Universities around the world are considering how to meet the challenges of generative artificial intelligence. Nowhere has this disruption been felt most acutely in the field of evaluation, where questions of integrity, authorship, and evidence of learning are at the core of organizational credibility.
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world blog
England
rob phillips
Residential courses offer huge benefits to students, from Open University weekends, PhD summer schools, MBA expeditions to field trips in many other subjects, and can also give international students additional skills and the opportunity to experience life away from university.
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SDGs
India
Nidhi Piplani Kapur and Harshita Tripathi
India aims to become a global hub by strengthening domestic research, innovation and student employability. To this end, simply increasing the number of international students is not enough. Universities must develop global citizens through the national educational policy of “domestic internationalization.”
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Last week’s top stories
US-World
Nathan M. Greenfield
Academic freedom is declining faster in the United States than in any other country, according to the latest indicators. Once a global exemplar of institutional autonomy and academic freedom, the country is now at risk of becoming an exporter of bad examples, experts say.
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global
Bruce McFarlane and Jason Yong Tare
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South Africa
Desmond Thompson
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global
james unil au
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Africa
Desmond Thompson
The innovative approach of the African Emergencies Higher Education Network, a consortium of African universities, training providers and refugee-led organizations, focuses on expanding access for displaced people to accredited, employment-oriented tertiary qualifications. Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for over 30% of the world’s refugee population.
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Norway/Nordic countries
Jan Petter Myklebust
A new campaign to enshrine academic freedom in Norway’s constitution has been launched by the Norwegian Association of Researchers and the Norwegian National Union of Students, with strong support from the country’s top scientists, including two Nobel laureates.
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US
Nathan M. Greenfield
A group of U.S. academic organizations, with support from ChatGPT, is challenging last year’s termination of a $100 million National Endowment for the Humanities grant that a two-person Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team found to have “adverse” and “dangerous views.”
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Finland
Jan Petter Myklebust
A new report that says Finnish researchers face “increasing institutional pressures, an instrumentalist view of research, and personal harassment of research” raises questions about how resilient Finland and other Nordic countries are when it comes to upholding the concept of academic freedom.
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