Universities In Finland Aim To Enlist 150K Foreign Students By 2020

Universities in Finland aim to enlist 150K foreign students by 2020

The Lappeenranta University of Technology (LUT), along with four other Finnish higher education institutions and education export company Edunation’s International, wants to bring 150,000 new foreign students, Chinese and Indian in particular, by 2020. After Finland’s government decided to charge foreign students with tuition, higher education students’ applications for residence have fallen by a quarter. Edunation is developing a mobile app which would allow students to receive information on their enrolment just one day after they have sent in their applications.

“The current Finnish application process is extremely complex and clunky, and one of the main challenges in international recruitment,” LUT’s international affairs manager Janne Hokkanen says.

In later years, the rolling application process would run from September to May and those accepted will receive word of it one month after the application at the latest, enabling them to begin their studies the following autumn.

Egypt’s public university campuses are now subject to new dress codes

On Sunday during a meeting ahead of the new academic year, the Higher Education and Scientific Research Ministry Spokesperson, Adel Abdel Ghaffar, told Mada Masr, that the High Council for Universities instructed university administrations to bring “discipline” back to Egyptian campuses, which ignited a new trend of Egypt’s public university campuses which aim to subject the students to new dress codes.

The dress codes prohibit a range of fashion choices, from ripped and faded jeans (dean of the Monufiya University, Hanan Yashar), baggy or tight fitting pants, “revealing” clothes that “that evoke the desires of male students” and galabeyas and niqabs (as stated by the Dean of Alexandria University, Tarek Sorour), to certain hairstyles that some administrators have called “disgusting” and judge to be at the root of issues like sexual harassment or improper university behavior, since the university is a place to obtain knowledge and practice good morals.

Students have struck out against the new regulations, with some saying it amouned its to “moral guardianship.”

Chinese doctors opening restaurants to top their modest incomes

A group of doctors and lawyers who graduated from two of China’s leading universities have opened a restaurant in Beijing to supplement their incomes, mainland media has reported.

The average annual salary for a doctor in China is 90,000 yuan (just over 13,700 USD). Wang Jian and Cheng Si opened the barbecue restaurant in April with money and support from 16 stakeholders – all medicine and law graduates from Tsinghua and Peking Universities. “I need a second job so that I don’t have to worry about the financial burden and just focus on doing my job as a doctor,” Wang said.

The eatery has gained a reputation for using healthy cooking methods. It recently attracted wider attention for its promotional strategy of offering discounts to customers who had had academic articles published in Science Citation Index, Social Sciences Citation Index or Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index in the past five years. They opened the restaurant after graduation but had to continue studying for their professional qualifications.

Photo: Shutterstock

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