England’s new university access tsar must be a “strong public advocate” for the widening participation agenda in higher education, a leading sector expert has said.

Historians like to say that everything has a history. Yet the natural sciences remain somewhat removed from academic debates over what to do with monuments tied to dark chapters in American history.

The return that graduates get from higher education may be showing signs of plateauing in some countries, data from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s latest Education at a Glance report suggest.

For-profit higher education and international recruitment agents will benefit from the current wave of nationalism in the US and Europe, according to two leading scholars of international higher education.

Since Times Higher Education’s latest annual analysis of the pay packages of UK vice-chancellors was published, the focus on leaders’ remuneration has ratcheted up a fair notch or two.

The number of English-taught bachelor’s programmes being offered by European universities has increased 50-fold in the past eight years, according to a major study.

Publishing giant Elsevier is taking on Wikipedia with the launch of a new service that provides encyclopedia-style entries on key scientific topics.

New Zealand and Canada have been singled out as the countries that best prepare students for the future, in a major study that assesses the “effectiveness” of education systems.

A Stanford University professor has been named the winner of a new $4 million (£3 million) education prize in recognition of her research on the malleability of intelligence.

Taiwan hopes that attracting students from further afield, particularly mainland China, will help to address its higher education crisis.