Welcome to the final edition of Fifteen before our summer break. Today’s voyages take us from Harvard (where else?) to Tashkent, Paris to Moscow, Dubai to Fez with a very brief stop in North Mitrovica.  Too much is Trump-related, too much of it is about financial ills, but there are also some good news stories with respect to increased access to higher education as well.

1. You have probably seen more Trump v. Harvard stories than you care to.  But what’s fascinating about the story is how it has gripped the imagination not just of America’s media but of the entire world’s media.  The primary story angle?  How Trump’s expulsion of Harvard foreign students affects “our” students.  Here are stories from Ethiopia, Iceland, Vietnam, Malaysia, India and Kazakhstan. It’s been literally the biggest higher education story in the entire world. (Sources: MSN.com, Iceland Review, VN Express, New Straits Times, Financial Express, Kursiv).
2. New rankings were the other dominant global news story of the last two weeks.  The new edition of the CWUR rankings (A Shanghai rip-off run out of Saudi Arabia) got huge play in Hispanic and lusophone countries, as of course did the new CYD rankings in Spain.  The new AD Scientific rankings got some traction, too. (Source: CWUR, CYD, AD Scientific)
3. The biggest evidence so far that Trump is destroying the dominance of US Higher Education?  Malaysia has decided to stop sending its scholarship students to the US.  It won’t be the last country to do so. (Source: University World News)
4. The full extent of the cuts to future Science spending in the US became apparent earlier this week.  Cuts of about 33% to the National Institutes of Health and about 50% to the National Science Foundation.  As the Economist has written, US Science subsidized the whole world’s innovation budget, so move has extremely nasty global consequences as well as purely American ones.  Oh, and also the proposed Budget absolutely trashes funding for US Tribal Colleges – down 90% in the proposed Bill. (Sources: Inside Higher Education, The Economist, Propublica)
5. Few if any countries can match Uzbekistan’s rate of higher education growth, with a fivefold increase in student numbers in just the last decade.  Some of that has been done through international institutions setting up shop in Tashkent and elsewhere: the latest is a new Uzbek-France university set to start later this year.  And Uzbek universities have grown so much that they are starting to take in a lot of international students.  Altogether remarkable. (Sources: Intellinews, UZ Daily, Zamin)
6. Maybe not quite Uzbekistan-level, but it’s pretty good: Dubai student numbers are up 29% this year, mainly due to increased international students enrolment. (Source: Arabian Business)
7. France also is bucking Europe-wide trends for lower enrolments and it’s in large part this increase student numbers that is causing serious financial strains in the system.  But, on a different note, higher education is now considered an important enough part of regional economic planning that for the first time a French region (Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur) has set up its own “instance regionale de concertation” for higher education (this might sound trivial but in ultra-centralized France it’s a huge deal). (Sources: Le Parisien, Centre d’observation de la société, ministère chargé de l’enseignement supérieur et de la recherche)
8. Here are two really good reads on the current state of higher education in Russia, one by Dmitriy Dubrovsky on the slow-motion collapse of the country’s higher education system, and the state of the international boycott (or lack thereof) on Russian universities.  (Sources: OVD-Info and VoxUkraine)
9. As international student enrolments fall by 17% and universities across the country are cutting courses, Universities UK put a new paper on how universities can work together to save money.  It’s worth a try.  (Sources: National Centre for Universities and Business, TheTab.com, UniversitiesUK)
10. From North (i.e. Serbian) Kosovo comes the story about the University of Pristina.  Originally, this was the main Kosovan University, but it split in two in 1999, with Kosovo proper getting the main campus and a rump Serbian-only university migrating to the ethnically Serbian enclave of North Mitrovica, where it was funded by the Serbian state whilst technically being extra-territorial.  Now, professors of the Serbian bit of the university claim their institution is being slowly strangled or “systematically dismantled by the government in Belgrade.  (Sources: Wikipedia, Kossev.info)
11. How bad is credential inflation in China? One university in Nanjing posted an ad for a canteen manager, specifying that candidates must have a doctorate. (Source: news18.com)
12. Here’s an absolutely bizarro tale from Hungary.  Remember a few years ago when the Hungarian state spun off its universities into Foundations?  Well, one of those university Foundations – that of the Budapest University of Technology and Economics – seems to have sold a significant stake in itself to the country’s leading oil and gas company. (Source: Wikipedia, MSN)
13. Morocco universities are in the news for all the wrong reasons.  The proximate cause is a Professor at the University of Agadir being arrested for selling master’s degrees. But on top of a string of other scandals, calls for reform are in the air, though no one thinks it will be easy. (Sources: Le360, Hespress)
14. The same old story out of Colombia: government claiming more money is coming but in fact a number of institutions are very financially shaky.  One of those institutions is ICETEX, the world’s oldest student aid agency.  The situation is so bad that whole alternative new student aid systems are springing up to take its place.  The prestigious Javierana University has set up its own loan program, as has the municipal government of Bogota. (Sources: El Diario, El Pais, El Espectador, Semana)
15. I’ll end this one on a pleasant note: here’s a story from Denmark about “Youth Island”, a naval fortress island 30 minutes from Copenhagen, which is run by the Ungdomsøen Foundation as a retreat for students who just want a quiet place to study. (Source: Euronews)