Tremendous changes are taking place in higher education. Educators and administrators, everywhere, are reevaluating the role of higher education and the best approach that will serve both, their host communities and the students who have now become the clientele. This change has been fueled by technology's impact on teaching and learning, the rise of competition for students in the form of distance education and for-profit universities, changing student demographics and the evolving role of community outreach.

The pace of change has accelerated phenomenally. Historically, while new trends in higher education had taken decades to establish themselves, present changes have a rapid nationwide impact after their emergence. The government and the public have come to think of higher education as an industry, with a key role in the economy, and not merely as a discrete entity that should be left to itself. The faculties and student bodies of colleges are much more diverse and assorted than they used to be.

New evolving times call for innovative and sprouting trends in almost every sphere of life, and education is no exception. In the wake of today's information age, economic knowledge and skills have become the key factors of competition, and as such they demand novel approaches to education and training, better suited to meet the needs of the times. This issue has been designed, keeping in mind, the need for a comprehensive and widespread analysis of the upcoming educational trends and employs a profound and detailed approach to the techniques in which, education plans to adapt itself to complement these needs. It probes into trends such as the participation of foreign institutions in education, burgeoning professional opportunities, and a holistic approach to all forms of studies which foster a global view. It opens with an article titled "Changing Scenario in the Higher Education Sector and GATS: The Indian Experience". The author Debarati Chatterjee talks about the introduction of General Agreements in Trade in Services (GATS) under World Trade Organization (WTO) and demands a rigorous review of the higher education sector. The higher education system in India is acutely suffering from the absence of an appropriate long-term policy on higher education, even today. She points out that the country needs to prepare more educated and skillful workers but at the same time, it also needs to enhance the quality of educational institutions in order to face intense global competition. More funds are required to upgrade the sector but with the ever-declining percentage of public spending on higher education, deterring private participation seems impossible. Thus, ensuring a proper regulated environment can give ample scope for quality check in this important sector of the economy.

Stimulating innovative and growth-oriented entrepreneurship is a key economic and societal challenge to which, universities and colleges have much to contribute. The article "Entrepreneurship Methodologies in Higher Education: An Experience in a Portuguese Business School", by Pedro Dominguinhos, Luísa Carvalho, Teresa Costa, and Raquel Pereira, examines the role that higher education institutions are currently playing through teaching entrepreneurship, and transferring knowledge and innovation to enterprises. The paper also discusses how they should develop this role in the future. The key issues, approaches and trends are analyzed and scrutinized.

Recognizing entrepreneurship education as an important issue in economic growth, promotion, competitiveness and job creation, this paper concludes that entrepreneurs are neither born nor made, they are both. In entrepreneurship education, such as in other areas of education, there is a crying need for active and innovative pedagogical methodologies where students are strongly involved, so that they too feel included in the apprenticeship process, which also includes the entrepreneurial community's involvement, as well as the encouragement of several actions to be taken by students that allows contact with the real business world.

For India to make the most of its `demographic dividend', it is imperative that high-quality higher education is imparted to its teeming youngsters by encouraging the participation of foreign institutions. Foreign participation in Indian higher education hinges on the ability of the domestic regulatory system, to successfully balance two conflicting objectives—building a world-class educational system, and ensuring that education remains a charitable activity that embodies national values and priorities. Fostering the `right' kind of foreign involvement will depend on understanding that the tension between these two objectives is not of a zero-sum nature. Regulators need to realize that, it is possible to have aggregate gains that promote both objectives without trading away anything except a degree of control over the system, which in its current state is highly controlled and inflexible. On the part of foreign institutions, it is prudent to be sensitive to local conditions and the objectives of education in a given context, and above all to accept a degree of control over institutional autonomy, in order to benefit from a long-term involvement. Lastly, it bears reiteration that foreign or private investment is by no means a panacea for the ills of the Indian higher education system. However, it can certainly contribute to a sector currently in dire need of improvement. The above pertinent issue is the focus of the paper on "Higher Education in India: Setting the Stage for Foreign Institutions", by Rohan Mukherjee.

Ararat L Osipian in his paper on "Investigating Corruption in American Higher Education: The Methodology", talks about corruption as a complex and multifaceted phenomenon. Forms of corruption are multiple. Measuring corruption is necessary not only for getting ideas about the scale and scope of the problem, but for making simple comparisons between the countries and conducting comparative analysis of corruption. While the total impact of corruption is indeed difficult to measure and especially the internal changes in corruption, some aspects of corruption may be quantified and measured. This article presents major conceptual approaches to corruption and develops a technique for measuring the distribution of graft in a higher education industry, by using some ideas about bribery and other forms of corruption in higher education institutions in America.

-- N C Padmini
Consulting Editor