International education, which is Victoria’s largest services export industry, contributed A$4.7 billion to the Australian State's economy last year. To harness the potential of this industry better, a discussion paper by the Victoria government has come up with an idea — catch students young.
The paper says that the enrolment of international students in Victoria’s universities for higher education can be increased if the schools in the State increase their capacity to deliver the Victorian Certificate of Education to international students. This would benefit the students as they would get a global exposure and be motivated to apply for studies in Victoria.
Learning gainIn an attempt to find out how much students are actually learning while pursuing higher education, The Higher Education Funding Council for England has planned to launch a dozen pilot projects that will try to look at ways to measure this. The projects will include testing students’ ability to analyse, synthesise and think critically, testing how ready they are for employment and other methods. The interest in measuring this ‘learning gain’ is due to the steady increase of tuition fee of academic institutions.
NUS reportThe National Union of Students (NUS), U.K., has found that there is a “startling lack” of provision across institutions and student unions to deal with “lad culture” that can result in sexual violence and harassment on campuses. An audit of 35 institutions and student unions by NUS found that though policies existed to deal with these problems, they were ill-defined and not always relevant.
The report has revealed that almost half of U.K.’s universities lack policies to tackle these issues and only 51 per cent have a formal policy on sexual harassment.
Compiled by Sarthak Saraswat
