Emma Harden-Wolfson

Higher education in Central Asia blog

  • African Universities and the Global Rankings

    Originally posted on Registrarism: Should African universities be concerned with the global league tables? Inside Higher Ed has a really good piece on African universities and the impact of the international rankings. Essentially the challenge for Africa is that the global league tables use metrics which simply don’t favour the continent’s institutions: Any observer of… Read more

  • Tajik students not allowed to attend foreign-run events

    Having read about this last week, I was all set to think about the implications of the rather bizarre announcement from the Tajik Ministry of Education that they would be banning students from attending events run by foreign organisations. However, the kind people at the Institute for War and Peace Reporting have done this for… Read more

  • Kazakhstan-Japan Students Forum

    I’m always interested to learn more about countries with an interest in Central Asian higher education and it’s especially nice to hear about connections being made outside of the “usual” suspects (e.g. UK, USA, Canada, Germany, Switzerland). Here is a republication of a story from the University of Tsukuba in Japan about a Kazakhstan-Japan Students… Read more

  • Postgrad education – any glimmer of hope for the future?

    Since the publication of the Browne Report in 2010 (which recommended much greater freedom in setting tuition fees for undergraduates which was ‘in effect a carte blanche to charge more), UK universities have been spending a lot of time over the past couple of years soul searching and hand wringing about the future of higher education. This has… Read more

  • A monument for all seasons: honouring teachers in Kazakhstan

    There is something very Soviet/Central Asian about putting up monuments, and it’s definitely a fashionable thing to do at the moment (recent achievements include the world’s tallest flagpole in Tajikistan, Turkmenistan has the world record for the largest Ferris wheel). Today I can report that Kazakhstan is planning to build the country’s first monument ‘dedicated to… Read more

  • Youth and Public Policy in Kyrgyzstan

    A report has been published [en] [ru] today which for the first time attempts to undertake an audit of the relationship between young people and public policy in contemporary Kyrgyzstan. Whilst I haven’t been able to read it in full, it looks like a sincere and thorough attempt to map the landscape, highlight weaknesses (many,… Read more