Cover feature

Elite Japanese universities are renowned for their strength in research, but does their reputation also reflect quality in teaching? Times Higher Education’s student-focused Japan University Rankings and student experience survey offer some fascinating insights

Psychologist Michal Kosinski’s work shows how digital footprints can predict a person’s sexual orientation, political views and more. Is it a danger or a warning about threats to privacy? John Morgan reports from California

Times Higher Education’s first major global survey of university staff views on work-life balance finds academics feeling stressed and underpaid, and struggling to fit time for personal relationships and family around their ever-growing workloads. Ellie Bothwell reports

With degrees now necessary for entry into more jobs than ever before, John Morgan considers the economic arguments for expanding higher education

Five academics talk about the issues associated with various disabilities and what should be done to improve support

Learning outcomes are frequently dismissed as a nuisance to be dutifully completed and swiftly put aside, but Frank Furedi believes their prescriptive nature and underlying utilitarian ethos make them an altogether more corrosive influence on higher education

Is the new student loans system an affordable, progressive system of graduate contributions - or a dodgy move to get debt off the books that could bring grave fiscal consequences? John Morgan sifts through the rhetoric, rates and RABs

A renowned immunologist whose life was turned upside down when it emerged that one of his postdoctoral researchers had falsified experimental results tells Paul Jump that the sector needs a culture change if it is to fulfil its duty to expose research misconduct

‘Agnotology’, the art of spreading doubt (as pioneered by Big Tobacco), distorts the scepticism of research to obscure the truth. Areas of academic life have been tainted by the practice, but some scholars are fighting back by showing the public how to spot such sleight of hand, reports Matthew Reisz

Universities benefit from the large pool of cheap labour provided by PhD students and postdocs, but there aren’t enough academic jobs to go around, so young scholars should prepare for the possibility of a future outside the academy, one postdoc advises