Northwest Education Law Blog : Northwest Education Lawyer & Attorney : Williams Kastner Law Firm : Tacoma, Seattle, Portland

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India and the United States plan to establish a joint education council of academics and industry experts to pave the way for advanced bilateral relations in higher education, the Press Information Bureau of India said Thursday. The announcement followed a meeting between William Burns, under secretary for political affairs in the U.S. State Department, and Kapil Sibal, India's minister in charge of higher education. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]
 

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Mirroring a nationwide trend, the University of Washington is overhauling how its students and professors interface with foreign countries. The UW study abroad experience today involves much more oversight than it did two years ago when Amanda Knox left on an unsupervised European adventure that quickly degenerated into a nightmare. When Knox, who is on trial for murder in Italy, left her familiar U-district environs in late summer 2007, she embarked on her own independent study in Umbria with very few guidelines or institutional oversight.

As UW college students return to class last week, those intending to go abroad and the professors who advise them found a rapidly changing academic landscape. In the wake of several negative overseas episodes, officials are busy raising awareness about the positive impact the UW is having worldwide and taking steps to improve communications, regulation and emergency preparedness for its students abroad. Compared with two years ago, international education officials are more closely tracking who, where and what study-abroad programs involve. The university has new rules:. The department chair has to sign off on the program. Insurance is required. So is a cell phone. No program money can be used to buy alcohol, just for starters.

New guidelines are being put in place to streamline communications, ease financial transactions and institute mandatory training for faculty taking students abroad. The Global Support Project, a rapid-response team with one person from each branch of the central administration, takes on cross-disciplinary international challenges.

Such reforms aren't unique to UW. Universities across the country are examining how better to organize study abroad to meet blossoming demand from students (and prospective employers) for foreign experience. Many are turning to independent service providers whose business it is to contract housing, health care or niche risk management services dealing with legal, financial or public relations crises when things go haywire abroad. [Seattlepi.com]

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Shanghai — Amid concern over equity in its higher-education system and rising interethnic political tension, China has raised enrollment quotas for students from less-developed western provinces, the China Daily reported today.

The country closely regulates enrollment by region and ethnicity, with policies that have traditionally favored residents of developed cities like Beijing and Shanghai for admission to elite universities in those same cities. Under the new policy, the number of slots reserved for students from central and western China will each increase by around 7 percent.

All told, 60,000 spots will open up for students from poor provinces like Anhui, Henan, and Guizhou — as well as, presumably, western regions inhabited primarily by ethnic minority groups like Xinjiang and Tibet. As justification for the change, the newspaper explained that western China suffers from “historic underdevelopment” and “complicated geographic situations” that block local students’ access to education.

A majority of the new places will be at universities that are administered directly by the education ministry, receive more resources, and are mainly located in prosperous cities in eastern China. To open up those slots, the institutions will cut positions open to more-privileged local students. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

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New Delhi — In an unprecedented move at the behest of India’s new education minister, the country’s main investigative agency has launched a sweeping crackdown on its regulator of engineering and management colleges, filing charges of corruption against the regulator’s chairman and arresting a top official in the act of taking a bribe to grant recognition to an engineering school, The Hindustan Times reported.

The regulator, one of 16 in India, has often been accused of corruption, and its officers across India have been accused of approving colleges with poor facilities in exchange for money. Many engineering schools have also been started by politicians who, it is alleged, are complicit in the bribery process. Many colleges themselves have been accused of taking money, euphemistically referred to here as “capitation fees,” to admit students to engineering courses that are in high demand. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]