Global and growing

The provision and funding of higher education is shifting, writes Alison Goddard.

More and more money is being spent on higher education. Too little is known about whether it is worth it, writes Emma Duncan in the Economist. Her special report makes the cover—"the world is going to university"—of this week’s issue, which includes a leader and a package of content. It says that global demand for higher education is growing faster than demand for cars and that the American model of higher education, in which students rather than the state pay for their studies, is spreading. Some musing on rankings, American universities and how they struggle to contain costs, the ways in which some universities are resisting any switch to online learning and are opening campuses abroad are included in the package. The newspaper concludes that both the provision and funding of higher education is shifting towards the private sector. Elsewhere in the Economist, there is an article which purports to explain why Britain’s universities produce so many radical Islamists.

The British are broadly in favour of students paying tuition fees, a position that has not much changed over the past decade, according to a piece in the Conversation.