Festival National Folcloric Studentesc la USAMV Iasi
Universitatea de Stiinte Agricole si Medicina Veterinara „Ion Ionescu de la Brad” din Iasi (USAMV) organizeaza vineri, pe 24 mai 2019, ora 16:00, in Aula Magna „Haralamb Vasiliu”, cea de a treia editie a Festivalului National Folcloric Studentesc „Asa-i viata omului”.
Festivalul reuneste ansambluri care promoveaza tinerele valori din diferite zone ale tarii precum Moldova, Bucovina, Muntenia si Ardeal. Spectacolul va fi sustinut de: Ansamblul Studentesc MUGURELUL (USAMV Iasi), Ansamblul Studentesc BUCUR (USAMV Bucuresti), Ansamblul Studentesc TRADITII (USAMV Cluj-Napoca), Ansamblul Studentesc ARCANUL (Universitatea „Stefan cel Mare” Suceava), Ansamblul Folcloric ”Doina Carpatilor” al Casei de Cultura a Studentilor din Iasi.
”Moldova se mandreste cu o bogatie de traditii populare, pe care Universitatea Agronomica Iasi se straduieste sa le reinvie, cu ajutorul studentilor iubitori de folclor. Traim intr-o perioada in care multe dintre obiceiurile si traditiile poporului nostru, odata cu trecerea timpului, sunt pe cale de disparitie sau au suferit modificari. Oamenii si-au adaptat preferintele in functie de evolutia fireasca a societatii si si-au orientat interesul catre aspecte mult mai actuale ale mediului in care traiesc. Traditiile si obiceiurile nu trebuie lasate sa moara sub cenusa timpului. Ne vom aminti ca suntem romani prin ceea ce avem mai de pret, prin traditiile care, preluate de tineri cu talent si interes, trebuie redate vietii pentru a dura in timp”, a precizat prof. univ. dr. Vasile Stoleru, prorector cu activitati sociale, studentesti si relatii cu alumni.
Evenimentul este organizat de USAMV Iasi, sustinut de Primaria Municipiului Iasi, in parteneriat cu Universitatile de care apartin Ansamblurile participante, fiind inclus in seria evenimentelor din cadrul Festivalului International al Educatiei, editia 2019 si Iasi – Capitala Tineretului din Romania 2019 – 2020.
Intrarea este libera si sunt asteptati iubitorii de frumos!
Publicație : Bună Ziua Iași
Oxford aims to attract deprived students with new foundation year
University launches schemes to bring in more undergraduates from disadvantaged groups
The University of Oxford is to launch programmes to address its historically low numbers of students from disadvantaged and under-represented backgrounds, including a foundation year for talented school-leavers who lack the required grades.
Louise Richardson, the university’s vice-chancellor, said the programmes were “a hugely exciting initiative” to improve access to the university, and combined with existing schemes would mean one in four British undergraduates at Oxford coming from deprived or disadvantaged backgrounds.
“The whole university and just about everyone in it has come in behind this and that doesn’t often happen here. That speaks to how strongly we all feel about this,” Richardson said.
The two new programmes are targeted at students who would otherwise be academically qualified to enter Oxford but have either been overlooked in favour of more accomplished candidates or have been unable to reach the entry requirements due to their family circumstances or background.
Richardson said the impetus behind the schemes was a recognition that Oxford was not making sufficient progress in widening access.
“If you look at our data it’s very clear that the numbers are low and the pace is slow. I think we felt a certain impatience,” Richardson said.
“There’s a huge commitment across the university to do more on this and there’s a sense that the pace at which we were realising this ambition was too slow.”
David Lammy, the MP who has been a prominent critic of Oxbridge admissions for disadvantaged and minority ethnic students, said the new foundation year was “a major step forward” for Oxford as well as a recognition that it and Cambridge needed to make radical changes.
“These changes continue to allow Oxford’s 38 autonomous colleges enormous discretion over how seriously to take access. For true systemic change to be achieved, admissions should be centralised and contextual data should be used at every stage in the admissions process,” he said.
“There needs to be recognition that all of the academic evidence confirms that a student with three A grades from a state school and a council estate has achieved more on merit than their counterpart with the same grades from a posh public school.”
One of the schemes, Foundation Oxford, will offer students with “high academic potential” a place on a one-year, pre-degree course, based on a programme already in use at one Oxford college, Lady Margaret Hall (LMH). The students will receive tuition and coaching, with the intention that they go on to begin an undergraduate degree the following year.
Alan Rusbridger, the former Guardian editor and principal of LMH who introduced its foundation year scheme, said: “Foundation years are a very powerful tool in allowing extraordinarily talented and committed young people to have an Oxford education. A commitment to social mobility doesn’t have to be in tension with excellence: quite the opposite.”
The foundation scheme will make contextual offers – based on their circumstances – to 50 students a year from 2021, at a cost to the university of about £20,000 a student. The university said eligible candidates could include refugees and children in care or those with care responsibilities.
Cambridge University has said it plans to launch a similar scheme in 2021.
The other new programme, Opportunity Oxford, is designed to aid successful applications from students from under-represented backgrounds who meet the academic standards but have been “near-misses” in winning places, according to Richardson.
From 2020, the scheme will offer about 200 students a year additional help, including structured study at home and two weeks of residential study at Oxford, before the start of their degree course.
“It’s clear that a couple of hundred students from deprived backgrounds who meet or exceed our standard entry requirements do apply but they don’t get in. So those are the students we’re are going to focus on,” Richardson said.
“Tutors are looking at a range of students who are at the margins, they have to pick some of them to come. And I think they will be more inclined to pick one of these kids thinking that they will have the added advantage of the opportunity programme.
“The students will have met the academic requirement, there’s no lowering of standards, but this is a way of giving somebody an edge.”
Richardson said that the programmes would reshape Oxford, resulting in a broader range of students and backgrounds.
“We may be disappointing slightly different people under this initiative but those we will be disappointing will not have higher grades than those we let in,” she said.
Publicație : The Guardian
The UK’s international education strategy needs more internationalisation
Efforts to accrue more overseas fees could be vetoed by the Home Office and will do little to make UK students more culturally savvy, warns Peter Brady
In March, the UK government published a new International Education Strategy: the fifth in 25 years. The document – subtitled “global potential, global growth” – is so similar to the 2013 strategy – subtitled “global growth and prosperity” – as to make little difference.
A “champion for international education” is to be appointed, and a fairly modest target has been set for international students on campus to reach 600,000 by 2030 – compared with 377,000 in 2017-18. But there is no real change in what the government will do to help this happen. The document offers the same reassuring words as its predecessor about the UK being welcoming and there being no limit on student visas – but student numbers remain in the net migration figures.
A bonus for international recruiters is a version of post-study work, but it is nowhere near as attractive as the old post-study work visa or the offerings of the UK’s competitors. And how it will operate will be determined by the Home Office, whose priority is to keep net migration down.
As a tacit acknowledgement that increasing on-campus student numbers will remain challenging, there are three action points specifically on transnational education.
The first is typical of a government document failing to be a strategy: “The Department for Education and Department for International Trade will work with the higher education sector and the British Council to identify more accurately the overall value of TNE to the UK economy.” No doubt this will be followed by a paper that gives a “more accurate” – in other words much larger – guesstimate of that value. Perhaps they hope that this could “prove” that the economic contribution from TNE is bigger than that from international students within the UK; then the DfE and the Home Office could join hands and only allow the “best of the best” into the country. This is wishful thinking.
But the real failure of this strategy, like its predecessors, is its lack of any ambition on the internationalisation of UK students. Set in the context of education’s contribution to the government’s overall exports strategy, it is all about increasing university income from overseas students. Of course, nice things are said about outward mobility. The government will “continue to support” the campaign to double outbound numbers by 2020. That sounds impressive, but even if it is achieved, it will only mean that 13 per cent of UK undergraduates will spend some period of study abroad.
The biggest contributor to those outward mobility numbers is Erasmus and we don’t know what will happen with that post-Brexit. The government is “open to exploring” ongoing participation, but few will find that reassuring given the feverish state of British politics.
The existing Erasmus figures given in the strategy document put outward mobility from the UK to the EU at 100,000 and inward mobility at 130,000. This means that a new Erasmus could contribute 30,000 to net migration. That will not be acceptable if the government’s pledge to keep immigration down to the tens of thousands remains – especially if the Home Office notices that the outbound figure is calculated over two years and inbound figure over only one!
Equally, while mass recruitment of international students brings in funding, it is not necessarily conducive to internationalisation. You only have to look at UK business schools with more than 50 per cent Chinese students on their programmes to see that. The government needs to develop a properly funded strategy for internationalisation of home students, but it should be part of a strategy that takes in schools and other parts of society, too.
After all, the future success of British industry will require the UK to reposition itself post-Brexit in a globalised and interconnected world, making new and different connections. To do this, people who understand and can work across cultures will be crucial – not just in universities but across society. If the government does not exhibit more ambition on internationalisation, such people will be in short supply.
Publicație : The Times
Dutch to rein in scramble for research grants in sector shake-up
‘Competition in scientific research has gone too far,’ says government-appointed committee proposing wide-ranging reform package
The Netherlands is set to shake up its university funding system to reduce competition between academics for research grants, cutting the time spent on largely unsuccessful funding applications.
Changes proposed in a major review of the sector mark a turn away from a competitive philosophy, reflecting growing Dutch concerns that the costs of pitting academics against each other in pursuit of funding have begun to outweigh the benefits.
Some €100 million (£88 million) a year should be transferred away from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, which distributes competitive grants, and instead go directly to universities, according to a committee tasked by the Dutch government to come up with reforms.
“Competition in scientific research has…gone too far,” the committee concluded, announcing its findings in a report called Changing Track.
The move should “decrease the wasted hours that academics spend on writing proposals that will never see the light of day”, said Thijs Bol, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Amsterdam, who has investigated the impact of grant competition.
In some fields, success rates have dropped as low as 10 to 15 per cent, he said. With such “insanely low” win percentages, “it becomes very arbitrary who gets or doesn’t get a research grant”, Dr Bol said.
Excessive workload and stress have emerged as key concerns in Dutch academia: tens of thousands of lecturers and teachers demonstrated in The Hague in March to demand better pay and working conditions. But whether this latest suggestion relieves pressure on academics depends on how universities spend the extra money, Dr Bol cautioned.
The committee has also recommended shifting money towards science and technology students to accommodate labour market demands. There has been a surge of candidates wishing to study these fields, which has forced universities to introduce grade thresholds to cope, the committee notes as evidence of the need for more resources.
Such a shift could mean big budget increases for some of the country’s universities of technology, including Delft (8 per cent) and Eindhoven (8 per cent), according to calculations by Carel Stolker, the rector of Leiden University.
But it would also mean reductions for less technically focused institutions such as the Dutch Open University and Maastricht University. If money is shifted to science and technology, this will “necessitate substantial and damaging budget cuts for the humanities, social sciences and medical sciences”, warned Pieter Duisenberg, president of the Association of Universities in the Netherlands.
“These disciplines, which are of major importance to society, are already besieged by excessive workload and other problems,” he said.
The committee also wants to end the link between university funding and enrolment numbers, arguing that this creates “perverse” incentives for excessive growth. The idea is also to give universities more stable funding to improve long-term planning.
These proposed changes are so far only recommendations. The government is set to respond to them in June. A spokesman for the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science said that the minister, Ingrid van Engelshoven, had described the suggestions as “very interesting” and had praised the committee chair, Martin van Rijn, a former Labour party politician, as having done a “very good job”.
Publicație : The Times
UK plans quality mark for PhD supervisors
Certification scheme will give academics the recognition they deserve, says initiative’s architect
A certification scheme for PhD supervisors that is set to launch in the UK will help to give academics the recognition that they deserve, according to its architect.
The UK Council for Graduate Education is consulting on a planned research supervision recognition programme in a bid to drive up national standards.
To gain accreditation, academics would have to submit evidence of their performance across key areas of PhD supervision practice, which would be reviewed by a two-person panel of experienced supervisors.
Stan Taylor, the former director of the Centre for Academic and Researcher Development at Durham University, who drew up the criteria for the new quality mark, said that supervising PhD students was a “crucial role” for scholars and had become “much more complex” in recent years.
While supervisors did “a good job, by and large” – as evidenced by the results of the Postgraduate Research Experience Survey conducted by Advance HE – it was “not often acknowledged by institutions”, said Dr Taylor, now an honorary fellow in Durham’s School of Education.
Because many universities do not allow time for supervision in their workload model, it is still viewed as the “old labour of love that it was years ago”, said Dr Taylor, who noted that in some cases it is not included in universities’ promotion criteria.
“It’s a kind of unrecognised activity at the moment,” he said.
The recognition programme is being trialled in 13 universities across the UK. After the consultation, which ends on 31 May, UKCGE hopes to launch the national scheme at its annual conference on 1 July.
The quality mark would assess supervisors’ skills across 10 areas of good supervisory practice, including recruitment, relationships, feedback and career development. It would also require academics to demonstrate their commitment to research supervision as an area of academic practice, including self-reflection and participation in developmental activities.
The initiative has developed out of the Outstanding Research Supervisor of the Year prize presented each year at the Times Higher Education Awards, which is supported by UKCGE.
The “ultimate hope” is for it to become an international benchmark for research supervisor quality, said Dr Taylor.
“A lot of good could be done in this context if this sort of thing is made available in emerging countries, where there are relatively small numbers of supervisors,” he said. “We are hoping it might become a kind of Kitemark and help that growth there.”
The most recent edition of the Postgraduate Research Experience Survey, published last October and based on the responses of nearly 17,000 UK PhD students, found that 86 per cent of respondents were satisfied with the supervision that they had received.
Gill Houston, UKCGE’s chair, said: “In addition to enabling supervisors to demonstrate their ability to colleagues and candidates, it is our ambition that the criteria underpinning the programme will create a benchmark that becomes the standard for effective supervisory practice.”
Publicație : The Times
English fee cut ‘could torpedo Welsh funding settlement’
Cardiff policymakers unlikely to be able to make up lost tuition fee income while continuing generous maintenance support
Wales’ post-Diamond review funding settlement could be sabotaged by a cut to tuition fees in England, experts have warned.
Last autumn, Wales replaced its old system of tuition fee grants with loans, and used the savings to provide means-tested maintenance grants. The model has been praised for its progressiveness because, under it, the poorest graduate with the smallest debts – in England, the reverse is true.
However, some commentators have questioned whether the generous maintenance package is sustainable. The poorest Welsh students – those whose parents earn less than £18,370 a year – are entitled to an £8,100 maintenance grant and a £900 maintenance loan. The balance between these two payments operates on a sliding scale all the way up to students whose parents earn more than £60,000, who receive a £1,000 grant and an £8,000 loan.
Funding experts said that questions about the system’s future could come to a head much sooner than expected if England’s review of post-18 funding recommends a cut in tuition fees to £7,500, as is expected.
Given the large cross-border student flows between the two countries, and the comparatively small size of the Welsh sector, it is thought likely that Wales would have to follow suit in cutting fees.
Gavan Conlon, a partner at the London Economics consultancy, said that the Cardiff government would struggle to make up the value of the lost fees while spending so much on maintenance grants.
“To pay for this, some of the core components of the Diamond review may have to be revisited,” Dr Conlon told Times Higher Education, namely “the generous maintenance grants”.
Dr Conlon, who sat on the Welsh review panel chaired by former University of Aberdeen principal Sir Ian Diamond, said that the expected changes in England “could have serious implications for the Diamond review recommendations and reverse the very significant positive impacts that it has already had”.
According to Nick Hillman, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, Wales faces a “financial double bind”. “It’s politically unlikely that fees in Labour-led Wales can stay higher than in Tory-led England,” he explained. “The other risk is that, if England chooses to spend less on higher education, there is a knock-on impact on Wales’ public spending.”
A host of additional factors, including outstanding graduate loan debt being reclassified as public debt this year, make the Welsh system “look unsustainable”, he said. “Wales has to decide whether to hit universities or other areas of public spending. The former is more likely…it may be that students lose financial support.”
While the tuition fee cap in the two sectors is about the same at the moment – up to £9,000 a year in Wales, and £9,250 in England – it would be impractical if “Welsh students studying in Wales faced a higher tuition fee than English students sitting alongside them”, Dr Conlon said. Of 11,250 students who started degrees at Cardiff University in 2017, for example, about 5,100 came from the English school system, he said.
Amanda Wilkinson, director of Universities Wales, said that the Diamond settlement had helped to improve access to higher education and that it was therefore “essential [that] Wales’ continued ability to deliver on Diamond should be maintained”.
The representative body has been conducting a review of the impact of the English review, led by Philip Augar, on the UK’s devolved nations. This report, and the Augar review itself, was expected to be published later this month.
Publicație : The Times
Clément Armato (Uni): «L’Unef ne parle plus aux étudiants de gauche»
INTERVIEW - Après la démission de 86 membres du syndicat historique de gauche, Clément Armato, le délégué national de l’UNI, proche des Républicains, donne son analyse sur ce nouveau coup dur pour l’Unef.
Dans un long communiqué interne que Le Figaro a pu se procurer ce 19 mai, 86 membres de l’Unef, le principal syndicat étudiant de gauche, ont annoncé qu’ils démissionnaient de l’organisation. Les deux raisons invoquées sont le manque de représentativité du syndicat dans les universités et les scissions entre différences tendances politiques en interne. Clément Armato, le délégué général de l’Uni, principale organisation de droite, explique comment l’Unef est structurellement divisée et livre son avis sur les raisons du déclin de l’Unef.
LE FIGARO ETUDIANT -Récemment, 86 membres de l’Unef ont démissionné, en arguant notamment que le syndicat est «sclérosé et divisé par son système en tendances». Quelle est votre analyse?
CLÉMENT ARMATO - L’Unef est divisé en deux «tendances» depuis 2001 et le rapprochement de deux unités: l’UNEF-ID, plutôt proche du parti socialiste, et l’UNEF-SE, proche des communistes. Dès cet instant et jusqu’à aujourd’hui, l’organisation a donc décidé que l’organisation fonctionnerait avec une coexistence de ces deux mouvances. Tous les deux ans lors de leur congrès, ils élisent quelle sera la tendance majoritaire, qu’ils appellent la «majo». Or en ce moment la majo est plutôt proche de Benoît Hamon. Le problème c’est qu’en plus de ce scrutin national, il existe des «assemblées générales des étudiants» dans chaque université qui décide de la tendance dans une fac ou dans une ville. Ainsi à Rennes, l’université Rennes 1 est proche de la majo, mais celle de Rennes 2 est proche de la «Tendance unité et action syndicale», marquée très à gauche et qui a en partie quitté l’Unef ce week-end.
Pour Clément Armato, il y a une recrudescence de l’extrême gauche à l’université.
Pourquoi l’Unef ne parvient-elle plus à récupérer la place de leader des syndicats étudiants, qu’ils ont laissé à la Fage il y a deux ans?
L’Unef ne parle plus aux étudiants, y compris aux étudiants de gauche. Les récents scandales qui ont entouré le syndicat, notamment l’annulation de la pièce «Les suppliantes» à La Sorbonne sur fond de décolonialisme ou les tweets moqueurs au moment ou la charpente de Notre Dame de Paris prenait feu, sont autant d’exemples qui divisent les étudiants proches de la gauche républicaine. De plus, le parti socialiste étant mal en point au niveau national, l’Unef avait besoin de faire sa mue pour attirer de nouveaux profils de jeunes qui se désintéressent de la politique, et elle ne l’a pas faite. Une mue qui consiste à se recentrer sur les étudiants, parler des universités et d’enseignement supérieur!
L’Unef arrive-t-elle à trouver sa place entre les syndicats d’extrême gauche, très voyants dans certaines universités, et la Fage, syndicat majoritaire plutôt centriste?
Effectivement, il y a une recrudescence de l’extrême gauche dans certaines universités, comme par exemple un renouveau du syndicat Solidaires. Cela vient du fait que les universités se dépolitisent, ce qui pousse la gauche à radicaliser son discours. Certains étudiants proches de l’Unef sont attirés par cette mouvance. D’autres, ceux qui sont plus centristes ou qui envisagent une carrière politique après, rejoignent les rangs de la Fage.
Qui est responsable, au sein de l’Unef, de ces délitements récents?
Je ne crois pas que Lila Le Bas et Mélanie Luce, l’ancienne présidente et la nouvelle, soient responsables. Elles ont hérité d’une situation qui a couvé pendant des années et qui a commencé avec la présidence de William Martinet (du 13 décembre 2013 au 23 septembre 2016, NDLR). À l’époque le syndicat sortait renforcé du quinquennat de Nicolas Sarkozy, comme souvent lorsque l’Unef a été un vrai syndicat d’opposition. Mais l’ère Hollande a marqué le début du déclin. Il y a toujours eu une relation conflictuelle entre l’Unef et la gauche au pouvoir. Ils attendaient de grandes avancées sociales à l’université, notamment dans le cadre de la loi Fioraso, et ont été déçus. Depuis, ils ne s’en sont pas vraiment remis.
Publicație : Le Figaro
États-Unis: un milliardaire paye les dettes de 400 étudiants envers leur université
VIDÉO - La somme de ces dettes, s’élevant à une quarantaine de millions, sera intégralement prise en charge par Robert F. Smith, un homme d’affaires noir. Un geste qui profitera à plus de 400 diplômés afro-américains en Géorgie.
Ce cadeau, les étudiants de l’université de Morehouse à Atlanta ne l’oublieront pas. Alors qu’ils étaient réunis dimanche pour leur remise des diplômes, un milliardaire est venu annoncer à la promotion 2019 qu’il allait se charger de la totalité de ses dettes estudiantines: une quarantaine de millions de dollars en tout. «Ma famille va créer une bourse pour effacer vos prêts étudiants», a précisément déclaré Robert F.Smith. La fortune de cet homme d’affaires noir s’élève à 4,4 milliards de dollars.
Le plus gros don de l’histoire de l’université
«Ceci est ma promotion», a ajouté Robert F. Smith, qui se trouvait à la cérémonie pour recevoir un diplôme honorifique. Des vidéos de ses propos étaient partagées dimanche sur les réseaux sociaux. Un porte-parole a indiqué qu’il s’agissait du plus grand don de l’histoire de l’université, qui a été fréquentée par Martin Luther King Jr., le réalisateur Spike Lee et le comédien Samuel L. Jackson. L’établissement créé en 1867 a toujours eu pour vocation de permettre aux Afro-américains de suivre une éducation supérieure.
L’annonce a évidemment été accueillie par les cris de joie et les applaudissements des quelque 400 diplômés et de leurs parents. «Si j’étais capable de faire un salto arrière, je le ferais», a dit un étudiant, Elijah Dormeus, au journal. «Je suis fou de joie». Le jeune homme dit avoir une dette estudiantine de 90 000 dollars. Sa mère, Andrea Dormeus, est conductrice de bus de ramassage scolaire à Harlem, à New York.
«Je sais que ma promotion perpétuera» cette action et aidera à améliorer les vies d’autres Américains noirs, a encore déclaré Robert F. Smith. Il avait déjà dit plus tôt cette année qu’il allait donner 1,5 million de dollars à l’établissement, mais l’annonce de dimanche a été une surprise, y compris pour le personnel de Morehouse, selon le Atlanta Journal and Constitution.
Mille milliards de dette des étudiants aux États-Unis
Smith, diplômé des prestigieuses universités de Cornell et Columbia, est devenu en 2015 l’Afro-Américain le plus riche selon le magazine Forbes. Sa fortune dépasse celle de la célèbre et influente Oprah Winfrey - qui a aussi donné à Morehouse.
Le coût faramineux de l’éducation universitaire aux États-Unis, et le nombre croissant de personnes dans l’incapacité de rembourser leurs dettes, ont fait de la question des prêts étudiants une affaire nationale, au cœur du programme de certains démocrates cherchant à être investis par leur parti pour la présidentielle de 2020. La dette estudiantine dépasse aujourd’hui les mille milliards de dollars, selon l’agence Fitch.
Publicație : Le Figaro
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