Opinion

Where will higher education be in 2030? Our survey asks university leaders what they think the next decade holds for the sector

Michigan State is applying the scientific knowledge it’s developed over 150 years to its own campus to improve student success, says June Pierce Youatt 

Giving personalised, frequent feedback to students at scale is no longer the privilege of small, highly resourced universities, says Timothy Renick 

Training staff and students in ‘mental health first aid’ can help ameliorate the growing crisis, say Clemente Diaz and Douglas Medina

Countries around the world are increasingly seeing the benefits of a compromise between free fees and income-contingent loans, say Alex Usher and Robert Burroughs

The mooted merger of the universities of Adelaide and South Australia would cast a long shadow over the city’s other major university, says Gavin Moodie

Science blooms when colleagues’ ideas cross-pollinate. Impediments to free movement will lead to a disastrous withering, says Sir Keith Burnett

Feelings of isolation and the need to self-censor are familiar to the tens of thousands of Muslim students affected by the counterterrorism programme Prevent, says Akiqul Hoque

Senior leaders must lead the charge in changing higher education’s structural disadvantages for black and minority ethnic staff and students, say Kalwant Bhopal and Sally Hunt

While maintaining an anti-intellectual position, the far right is misrepresenting social science research to support its own agenda, observes Cynthia Miller-Idriss

A nation-wide survey has found that public opinion is on the side of student mobility and higher education, but new institutions must be built where socio-economic needs are greatest, says Jill Rutter

Conservative anger at initiatives to make campuses more inclusive to minority students is misplaced, say Kevin Singer, Laura Dahl, Matthew J. Mayhew and Alyssa N. Rockenbach

The UK’s new research mega-body has huge power to tackle long-standing inequalities, says its new diversity tsar Jennifer Rubin

The Migration Advisory Committee review showed little interest in understanding international students or how the UK labour market works, says Stanley Ipkiss

Asking social scientists to demonstrate academic impact ignores the messy reality of political lobbying, says Matthew Flinders

Although universities share a common goal, they face diverse challenges that make it unhelpful to view them as a homogeneous mass

The ease with which essays can be bought and the difficulty of grading them fairly means they should no longer be used for assessment, says Phil Race

European funders’ beefed-up open access mandate sounds the death knell for subscription publishing, but academic Armageddon is no closer, says Lenny Teytelman

A move to combat India’s love affair with predatory journals is an encouraging sign – even if it took a newspaper exposé to prompt it, says Pushkar

A labyrinthine visa process and perverse decision-making are making life increasingly untenable for non-Palestinian academics, says Raja Shehadeh

The former Bank of England governor’s broadside against academic pension cuts relied on ‘reckless’ and ‘absurd’ assumptions, say John Ralfe and Bernard Casey

John Morgan puzzles over committee’s use of questionable graduate earnings data as basis to reject return of post-study work visas

Nick Hillman explains why the much-anticipated UK review of overseas student policy gets it so wrong