Global Education News | Stay Informed with Edinbox

In a major attempt to boost overseas employment, Meghalaya government signed an MoU with Accel Skill Edutech Pvt Ltd. The agreement is a part of the Skills Meghalaya Programme and it will train and place the state youth in high-demand international jobs. It focuses on nursing, IT, hospitality and German Ausbildung apprenticeships and opens up doors to stable careers abroad as global skill shortages increase.

Structured  Training for Placement Abroad  

The Meghalaya State Skill Development Society (MSSDS) and DPIIT recognised startup Accel Skill Edutech will jointly identify, skill and place  eligible candidates from Meghalaya in countries like Germany, Austria etc. The focus areas include, technical training, foreign bearings (mainly German) cultural adaptation and interview preparation in order to meet global employer expectations.

Priority sectors:

• Nursing & Healthcare
• Hotel Management & Hospitality
• Automotive Mechatronics
• Logistics & Supply Chain
• Information Technology
• Ausbildung Vocational Tracks

A major highlight is that candidates are holistically prepared, from language proficiency, to soft skills, professional certification, and pre-departure orientation, before direct employer linkages.

Financial Aid & Ethical Recruitment Push  

MSSDS provides partial funding to ensure training is available throughout the state to help rural youth take advantage of the opportunities. Accel takes care of the entire process: recruitment, delivery, compliance and post-placement support - safe and sustainable jobs.

MSSDS Executive Director Jagdish Chelani, IAS, said that the MoU is a key step in strengthening Meghalaya’s skill ecosystem and connecting youth with credible global opportunities, while safeguarding their safety, dignity, and long-term growth. Accel co-founder Yashwinder Paal focused on the company's "ethical, outcome-focused pathways" that help families rise through global mobility.

Why this is important for Meghalaya Youth 

Unemployment is still an issue, but international demand is booming. Germany alone is in need of over 400,000 skilled workers a year. This MoU gives ethical recruitment channels to build on the skill agenda that Meghalaya has and promise better livelihood through structured jobs overseas. It is an important opportunity for the state's young workers who want to do German apprenticeships or Austrian hospitality jobs.

Stay tuned for application details on skillsmeghalaya.gov.in. This move aligns with India's rising skilled migration trends, boosting remittances and global exposure.

With a bid to combine sports and make a social impact, FIFA and Global Citizen have launched FIFA Global Citizen Education Fund during the Global Citizen NOW summit in this country since it aims to raise $100 million by the time of the final game during the 2026 World Cup. Through this initiative, it will focus on less-advantaged children globally because it brings education access and the power of football together with the goal of influencing 100,000 children affected by issues such as poverty and education.

The Fund makes equal investments in both: 50% of the investments are used for improving grass-root education in over 200 countries, and the remaining investments are channeled into FIFA's F4S initiative in partnership with UNESCO. Through this initiative, football acts as an integration tool in education programs with the goal of developing life skills, gender equity, and resilience in communities affected by over 250 million children not attaining a basic education.

The momentum gained speed on December 5 during the Final Draw of the FIFA World Cup 2026 in Miami when FIFA President Gianni Infantino and Global Citizen CEO Hugh Evans struck the rallying call. Already, over $30 million have been pledged, including a commitment by FIFA to put in $1 for every ticket sold for major events such as the 2025 Club World Cup. Its stellar advisory board took a leading role in this initiative. Such heavy hitters as The Weeknd, Hugh Jackman, Shakira, Ivanka Trump, and Serena Williams are behind this project.

Now, Grassroots Organizations all over the world can apply for funding in order to start an education and sports project in their local community with a grant from $50,000 to $250,000. The money given in form of donations goes to partners such as Shift4, with other partners including those in brackets.

The boil is elevated further in light of the imminent preparation of the entire world for a historic event in 2026, all across America, Canada, and Mexico. Such a budget puts FIFA not only in a giant in sports capacity but in a position of a change-making organization in the whole wide world. "Football changes lives," announced Infantino.

Indian students of management have emerged in increasing numbers. At the same time, an increasing number of Indian students go abroad for a management education and return to their country with a newfound sense of perspective and a sense of mission. Although this investment in it in an intellectual and experiential sense is steep, the returns on this investment are very clearly not just personal but also have a transforming impact on the future business climate of a country such as India.

Naveen Tewari, Founder & CEO of InMobi Group, took a different path after completing his graduation in mechanical engineering from IIT Kanpur. A master's degree in America seemed to be the obvious next step or at least this seemed so with research opportunities being offered to him. But a heart-to-heart talk with his father changed his plans. "You will be unhappy in research. You are a person who likes to make things happen," he advised him. So, he accepted an offer from McKinsey, a global consulting firm, which proved to be a major influence in his life.

This was a defining moment. At McKinsey, nearly 18 months of a three-year stint were occupied with a nascent project in 2001-02 called Reliance Infocomm at a time when the digital economy in India had barely gotten off the blocks. With hands-on experience in transformation projects, Tewari joined Harvard Business School to take a class for an MBA degree with a total of 900 students spread over the entire world.

No Isolated Incident This is not an isolated incident among Indians. Hundreds of Indian students are pursuing MBAs from Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, INSEAD, or other premier educational institutions abroad, where course fees far exceed $200,000. Such investments are not exorbitant for a future with far-reaching gains in terms of global network expansion, learning experiences with different background people, exposure to latest learning systems, and making connections in higher authority abroad. More in-depth interviews with returnees show some common threads emerging. A multicultural learning environment, case studies based on learning from dilemmas emerging from the real-world puzzle box, or an imersion in an atmosphere of debate and dissention can make a radical difference in how Indian students think of leadership and risk-taking. "The mindset shift that I think was most evident to me is with regards to risk-taking," says Vartika Bansal, AI Ops Partner at Elevation Capital, a Stanford MBA alumna. "It is far simpler to speak of an experience when you have had it. The danger is not in failing but in failing to try, and this sense of a chase for your wildest dream or experimenting with your potential is a far more satisfying option in terms of fulfillment than being safe in your decisions." Then, of course, for most people, this critical "Eureka Moment" gets triggered, making them see life in a whole new way, forever changed. 

Open Secret, healthy snacking company Founder & CEO, Ahana Gautam remembers one such moment in a class discussion in Harvard over PepsiCo. "When I heard a comment from a classmate on corporate social responsibility in a class discussion, this led to a whole series of self-introductions," she says. "My time at Harvard School of Business was all about a transition from ‘pleasure-seeking’ to ‘difference-making.’ " Global management education brings Indian students face to face with ‘best practices' in a global setting. They return with all this learning under their belt—and not just with another degree in their luggage. They come with a confidence and a clarity of thought increasingly being shaped in terms of ‘India’s start-up ecosystem, investment and corporate world.’ Their thinking now and their vocabulary increasingly reflect this new emerging reality in ‘India’s start-up ecosystem, investment and corporate reality.’ " Fellowship programs such as the Rhodes Scholarship and Dale Cowan Fellowship offered by Harvard have a critical role to play in this whole massive effort of exposing students to a totally different learning environment. "Of course, the Cambridge setting with Harvard being part of this setting, provided an ideal environment for learning," says a student.

Two students and an educator from India were on Thursday announced among 15 finalists from across the globe competing for the World Education Medals 2025.

The five shortlisted include Raul John Aju, a 16-year-old student from Kerala and founder of AIrealm Technologies Pvt Ltd, and Ashwat Prasanna, a Bengaluru student and founder of EyeSight in the "Students" category.

Vineeta Garg, head of IT at a Delhi school, is one of five finalists for the World Education Medal in the "Educators" category.

"With changemakers such as Raul John Aju, Ashwat Prasanna, and Vineeta Garg, I am sure we are moving in the right direction for the future," said Mayank Dhingra, Director and Global Head of Education Business and Strategy at HP - the IT company behind the medals.

"Their innovative work is a shining beacon of what is to come for education, as it must transform in order to meet the future needs of generations to come," he said. The World Education Medals were founded by HP to shine a light on groundbreaking work by innovators harnessing artificial intelligence (AI) to transform education and close the learning gap.

It celebrates achievers around the globe across three categories of Leaders, Educators, and Students, for demonstrating impact, leadership, and advocacy in using AI for social good.

"Research, including our own 'HP Futures 2025' report, shows the benefits of AI to close learning gaps and deliver equitable education, but only when deployed ethically and effectively," said Dhingra.

Raul has been selected for his signature venture, ThinkCraft Academy, that works towards democratizing AI education from rural schools to global universities.

His co-finalist, Ashwat, has been nominated for his work on making the learning of science, technology, engineering and mathematics accessible to visually impaired students.

Vineeta's selection in the Educator category is a result of EmpowerED with AI-an initiative developing multilingual AI resources, accessible tools and gamified learning platforms that enable students and teachers to understand, use and create with AI. Others shortlisted for this year's medals come from the US, the UAE and Philippines as well as Switzerland, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Italy and Greece. The winner of each of the three medals, selected from among the finalists by a Global Judging Academy comprising prominent individuals, will be announced next month and recognised at the Education Leaders Forum in London.

Meanwhile, universities and research institutions are competing for academic talent on every continent. At the same time, higher education systems have generally become more dynamic and uncertain, with a number of established institutions facing increased pressures as a result of geopolitical and structural shifts.

While recruitment remains vital to institutional success, it is no longer sufficient unto itself. In today’s interconnected, fast-changing research environment, excellence needs to be cultivated, not just acquired.

Globally competitive universities need to develop an internal capacity for fostering talent, a vibrant research culture, and continuous renewal. This is their main strategic shift: away from vacancy filling to long-term strategies for academic vitality.

Proactive recruitment

The search for the best researchers is now a global hunt: institutions are investing heavily in their international job calls, start-up packages, and mobility schemes. All too often, however, these are reactive, fragmented, and unlinked to wider institutional objectives. Even the most promising hires will struggle if they are placed in an environment devoid of strategic clarity, coherent academic structures, or possibilities of interdisciplinary growth.

Recruitment, without being situated within a larger vision of academic development, tends to be transactional rather than transformational.

From talent acquisition to faculty development

The institutional reputation remains one of the pull factors in attracting and retaining talent. At the same time, however, reputation is not an option on which leading universities can rely. This provides openings through which new regions and innovation clusters can compete. Researchers at every career stage consider seriously how well the institution supports academic growth.

This includes:

• Clear career pathways in line with the priorities of the institution and its research strengths. Given the above, institutions should provide transparent promotion models, structured development plans, and clear signals about how individual careers link into the wider mission.
• Support for early-career researchers by way of mentoring, training in disciplinary methods and transferable skills, teaching experience, and integration into scientific networks.
• Flexible appointment models that enable hybrid roles, intersectoral collaboration, and evolving academic careers across institutions, sectors, or national boundaries.
• An inclusion and recognition culture in which various academic trajectories find their place and are valued. Professorship is no longer the sole means of achieving success. Positions in science management, research coordination, communication, and data stewardship become highly relevant.

Successful universities therefore consider faculty not as static positions to be filled but as dynamic contributors to institutional evolution. The strategic field of career development shapes both academic identity and long-term excellence.

Innovation requires institutional learning

Innovation does not come from a brilliant mind working in isolation. Innovation needs an enabling environment that embraces collaboration, experimentation, and learning from failure. The universities that operate as learning organizations and not just knowledge producers are in a stronger position to stimulate innovation.

This involves:

• Stimulating interdisciplinary exchange: for example, a university might establish a centre for digital health to bring together experts from medicine, computer science and ethics. Shared laboratory space, open data platforms, and research seminars across faculties make disciplinary boundaries more permeable. Joint appointments further anchor such collaboration.

Leadership cultures encourage exploration, tolerate risk, and view failure as part of progress. Training in leadership can prize experimentation and learning. Institutions can provide funding for pilot projects that do not promise quick results and can reward staff for initiative that goes beyond typical performance measures.

• Developing institutional memory: Strategic learning depends upon the ability to retain and translate past experience into future direction. Institutions need to treat initiatives as part of a cumulative process, using insights from past efforts to strengthen foresight, adaptability, and organisational intelligence.

The successful universities in becoming innovative hubs realize that it all starts with structures, values, and capabilities they build:

Global competition: clarity, not just scale

In these times of global rankings and heightened competition, most universities equate success with size, visibility, or output metrics. But quantity is no guarantee of quality. What does matter, however, is coherence-meaning a clear institutional identity, purpose, and direction.

Strategic clarity includes

• The identification and cultivation of special strengths. Though many universities develop internal strategy and foresight units, some rely on external advisors. Clarity requires substance-not slogans.
• Long-term focus: Ensuring recruitment and development policies are aligned to long-term goals. All too often, recruitment is done as one-for-one replacement, appointing a successor at the same level and in the same field. Recruitment should instead be based on future needs and strategic priorities.
• Identifying institutional knowledge, tackling international/global challenges: health, climate change, democracy, or digital transformation. Institutions are right on track as long as they are able to translate global challenges into culturally rooted and regionally relevant responses.

Rather than attempting to be like elite institutions, especially smaller and mid-sized and research-intensive universities can derive great benefit from a focus on what is distinctive for them. Honest reflection helps define a unique niche and makes institutions more relevant to funders, policymakers, and international partners. Academic ambition needs to be grounded in strategic focus.

Leadership and policy: Enabling strategic renewal

Yet academic strategy cannot fly without leadership that recognises its transformative potential. Leaders have to balance short-term demands with long-term renewal. That takes courage, patience and institutional trust.

Supporting mechanisms include:

• There may be incentives for career development, interdisciplinarity and global engagement through dedicated funding for early and mid-career appointments, resources for cross-faculty collaboration and support for international initiatives, such as joint degrees or staff exchanges. • Rewarding institutional learning and organizational innovation: traditional funding schemes focus on individual excellence. Complementary models should also consider the extent to which institutions build mentoring systems, develop inclusive research cultures or introduce new ways of collaborating. • A dialogue between institutions, policy makers, and funders in order to harmonize expectations and support capacity-building: funding instruments should be fit for institutional needs, providing flexibility in programmes for strategic recruitment, structural reform, and performance metrics reflecting sustainable development. Renewing educational institutions means creating an enabling environment where research and education can flourish continuously. Investment in institutional capacity Universities are standing on a fork in the road: the global competitive pressures are very real, yet the opportunity to rethink how to build academic excellence is also palpable. Moving from talent pipelines to institutional innovation allows universities to evolve into adaptive, mission-driven knowledge creation centers. This needs long-term commitment and investment in people, culture and capacity. In addition, strategies that are at once visionary and rooted in the day-to-day work of academic communities will be needed. True excellence is not a matter of chasing prestige; it flows from the cultivation of environments in which talent grows, innovation prospers and purpose leads.

After months of elaborate discussion, the student government at the University of California, Berkeley, passed a Hindu Heritage Month proclamation. Hindu student groups called it a first such recognition by an American university.

A statement by CYAN Hindus at Berkeley and Hindu YUVA at UC Berkeley said the measure passed nine months after the ASUC Senate first voted down Hindu Heritage Month. The outcome is credited to extensive discussions with the office of the Executive Vice President and student leaders, with the result being termed a step towards Hindu representation in the student government.

According to the statement, the newly passed proclamation "represents a positive step toward better representation of Hindus in the student government," though the groups made it clear that "the new proclamation is by no means perfect."

They thanked the EVP and her office “for opening dialogue with our student organizations respectfully over the past six months, proving that conversations can be had despite even the most contentious disagreements.”

First, the proclamation includes a recognition where the ASUC Senate formally acknowledges the term Hinduphobia and a series of targeted attacks on Hindu temples in the Bay Area.

It acknowledges Sanatana Dharma and its ideals as a decolonial understanding of the term ‘Hinduism’ by the Senate. The Senate further notes that, out of the various unions and coalitions representing religious groups on campus, there is no Hindu caucus representing Hindu students.

The statement invites students and community members to juxtapose old and new proclamations and notice that the ASUC Senate originally voted down Hindu Heritage Month due to concerns over 'Hindu Nationalism, yet the new proclamation does not differ substantively from its predecessor. The groups go ahead to say that none of the two versions has talked about Hindu Nationalism.

The groups claimed the changes could have been worked out with discussion and that their student government holds Hindu students to a double standard. Still, they praised the Senate for a crucial first step toward better relations with the Hindu community.

They hope that the proclamation will “open the door to genuine, good-faith dialogue” between Hindu student organizations and ASUC leaders, pointing out their discussions with the EVP’s office showed such dialogue could happen.

"Too often, dialogue has been hampered by the conflation of Hindu and South Asian identity, leading to gate-keeping by 'South Asian' organisations on campus," the statement said. "Their statements and actions on issues affecting our community--ie, Pahalgam--have eclipsed the lived experiences of Hindu students--oftentimes made without their calling upon our communities directly."

"It is our sincere hope that henceforth discussions relating to Hindu identity and its representation would be informed not by outside political narratives but by the voices of Hindu students on campus," they said. Student leaders celebrated the milestone as the "FIRST EVER US university to recognise Hindu Heritage Month," aiming at finally acknowledging vandalised temples, rising Hinduphobia, among other things. They also congratulated student leaders @aryanshinde21 and Arya Kulkarni, encouraging students to reach out to CYAN. Hindu Heritage Month has gained visibility in recent years across several US states and municipalities, where diaspora organisations formalise recognition and bring awareness to what they term a rising tide of Hinduphobia. This year, UC Berkeley became an especially charged site for debates about Hindu identity and representation amid national conversations about free speech and minority rights.