Degrees for sale
The conferring of a "university college" title on a
business signals the British government’s desire to
expand the private sector in higher education.
Jessica Shepherd
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What is a girl worth?
On Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, 12-year-old Abigail Appetey is forced to miss her classes at primary school to sell fried fish door-to-door.
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Poor funding for PhD students
The UK may be missing out on talented EU research
students because of a refusal to pay living costs.
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If you do it, do it right
A<i> Guardian</i> investigation has exposed how easy and cheap it is for British university students to get small businesses to do their coursework. We posed as Josephine, a 23-year-old student who wanted two assignments done. One was her second-year undergraduate computer science homework.
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Let’s ban emails
When it was suggested that I might forgo the use of email for a day my response went something like this: "Are you actually kidding me?" My alarm was well founded. Checking my email is the first thing I do in the morning and I do it almost constantly until I go to bed.
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A life’s journey
Nur knew that as a Bedouin — an Arab nomad — living in poverty in Israel’s Negev desert, the likelihood of going to university was remote. As a woman, it was almost unheard of. Tribal norms and finances ruled it out. So the 18-year-old applied in secret to Ben-Gurion University — and was accepted. Nur (a pseudonym) knew that she needed her father’s permission to go and that he had denied it.
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Anthropologist takes no bull
If there is one thing Professor Melissa Leach has no time for, it is “bullshit research”. The social anthropologist jokes with her husband, fellow anthropologist James Fairhead, that she is going to set up an IBRD (Institute for Bullshit Research Development). “It’s easy,” she says, “to come up with narratives about deforestation: all the world’s trees are disappearing fast; or water scarcity will lead to water wars.