Andrzej Mania is vice-rector for educational affairs at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. He has served two terms as a member of Poland’s State Accreditation Committee for higher education. Q: There’s a perception in the United States that we are beginning to slip behind, and that there are some competitors out there. Poland’s achievements in [...]

WARSAW, Poland — Foreign companies flock to invest. Its balance sheet is the envy of Europe. Top university programs crank out graduates whom everyone wants to hire. Such is the current reputation of Poland, which has continued to grow during the global financial crisis as neighboring countries decline, lining itself up for a strong run [...]

East Asian countries continued their dominance in international test results released Tuesday. The United States scored better than the majority of countries in all subjects, but failed to crack the top 10 in most subjects. Singapore was at or near the top of the pack in all the tests, while Finland slipped slightly from its [...]

Nearly half of all Americans have a dim view of the quality of U.S. higher education, and most think it’s not only too expensive but also only a fair or poor return on their investment, according to the results of a new survey. Most of those surveyed—particularly college-aged Americans themselves—agree that U.S. higher education must change [...]

Sergei Ignatov was appointed Minister of Education, Youth and Science for the Republic of Bulgaria in November 2009. He previously served as deputy education minister, president of New Bulgarian University in Sofia, and professor of Egyptology at the University of Sofia. The Hechinger Report spoke with Minister Ignatov about how the Bulgarian higher-education system has [...]

SOFIA, Bulgaria — Petar Stanchev is the kind of student Bulgaria needs to keep. Last year, according to the country’s Association of Private Universities, more than half of its college-bound students applied to institutions abroad. The 23-year-old planned to remain in this mountainous, verdant patch of southeastern Europe. For two years, working toward a bachelor’s [...]

Iowa has surprisingly global ambitions to improve its education system. That’s why I found myself moderating sessions at the Iowa Teacher and Principal Leadership Symposium with titles such as “Better Than We Used to Do is Not Good Enough” and “Leadership Lessons From Around the Globe” before a sold-out crowd at Drake University in Des [...]

DAEJON, South Korea—Any eighth-grader who wonders if anyone actually uses algebra should ask Hyungtae Lee, an electrical engineer who writes algorithms to build computers with the power of human sight. It’s a skill he learned first here in South Korea, where undergraduate students are five times more likely to major in engineering than their counterparts [...]

Americans who visit Chinese schools quickly realize that many of our beliefs and assumptions about education hold little water in China: In the United States, our urban public schools perform relatively poorly, but in China the urban systems rate among the nation’s best. Here we often regard private schools as a cut above public ones [...]

The campus of the largest university in the world, Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU), in southern Delhi, is surprisingly small and modest. A cluster of nondescript, one-story administrative buildings line the drive leading to a brick library, where fans whip the stuffy air and a few students hunch over outdated computers. Further down the [...]