IIM Bangalore to Open First Overseas Campus in Indonesia
Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced on 7 July that the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore will establish its first-ever international campus in Malang, East Java, during his state visit to Jakarta and bilateral talks with Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto. Speaking at a joint press statement, Modi said the campus would benefit young people across the wider ASEAN region and strengthen educational ties between the two nations. The move follows a memorandum of understanding tied to the Singhasari Special Economic Zone, where the campus will be located.
The campus will roll out in two phases: an initial focus on short-duration Executive Education Programmes for working professionals and business leaders, followed by degree-granting management programmes. Course offerings are expected to span management, artificial intelligence, digital transformation, global supply chains, sustainability and healthcare, with participants also gaining access to IIM Bangalore’s online learning resources on the SWAYAM platform. Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan described the development as a new chapter for India’s education sector.
The initiative aligns squarely with the internationalisation ambitions of the National Education Policy 2020, joining a growing wave of Indian institutions establishing overseas footprints, including IIM Ahmedabad in Dubai, IIT Delhi in Abu Dhabi and IIT Madras in Zanzibar. Officials framed the campus as evidence of India’s emergence as a global provider of affordable, high-quality management education across the Global South.
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AICTE Shuts 58 Engineering Colleges in 2025-26
The All India Council for Technical Education has closed 58 engineering and technical colleges during the 2025-26 academic year through a “progressive closure” process, under which affected institutions cannot admit fresh first-year students while currently enrolled students are permitted to complete their degrees. Alongside the institutional closures, the regulator also approved the discontinuation of more than 950 technical and engineering courses across the country during the same period.
Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra recorded the highest number of shutdowns at 12 each, followed by Madhya Pradesh with eight, and Telangana and Punjab with four each. Of the 58 institutions affected, three were government-aided while the remainder were privately managed. AICTE officials attributed the closures to a combination of poor student enrolment, shortages of qualified faculty, failure to meet infrastructure requirements and non-compliance with operational norms.
The consolidation reflects a broader correction in India’s technical education landscape, where demand-supply mismatches have left many private institutions struggling to fill seats. AICTE distinguishes progressive closure, which phases out an institution gradually, from complete closure, where courses are shut entirely and affected students are transferred elsewhere.
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NCTE Restricts ITEP Admissions to NCET 2026 Scores
The National Council for Teacher Education has issued an advisory declaring that admissions to the four-year Integrated Teacher Education Programme for the 2026-27 academic session will be conducted exclusively through valid NCET 2026 scorecards. The advisory effectively closes off any admission route outside the official national entrance test for the integrated B.Ed pathway.
The National Common Entrance Test is a national-level computer-based examination conducted by the National Testing Agency on behalf of NCTE, offered across multiple mediums nationwide. Eligible candidates are those who have passed or are appearing in the Class 12 examination through recognised boards, with the test serving as the single gateway into ITEP programmes at participating central, state and government institutions.
By standardising the entry route, the move tightens quality control over teacher preparation at a time when India is scaling up its integrated teacher-training model under NEP 2020. Participating universities will continue to run their own counselling and document verification, but only on the basis of NCET 2026 results.
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IIM Kozhikode’s MBA Batch Sets 66% Women Record
IIM Kozhikode has recorded the highest-ever proportion of women in the history of the Indian Institutes of Management, with female candidates securing roughly 66% of seats in its flagship Post Graduate Programme for the 2026-28 session. Of the 499 students admitted to the flagship programme, 329 are women, translating to nearly two in every three seats. Across all three full-time MBA programmes, the institute inducted 599 students along with 99 doctoral scholars.
The batch also marks a shift in academic composition: non-engineering graduates now account for 57% of the flagship PGP and around 59% across all three full-time programmes, reinforcing a long-running effort to build more multidisciplinary classrooms. The institute’s journey toward gender balance began over a decade ago, crossing 50% female representation in 2013 and climbing to 59% by 2024 before this year’s benchmark.
The milestone consolidates IIM Kozhikode’s reputation as a leader in inclusive management education and signals a broader trend of more women pursuing leadership and business careers through India’s premier institutions.
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OECD Frames Generative AI as a Guided Co-Instructor
The OECD’s Digital Education Outlook 2026 offers an evidence-based examination of how generative AI is reshaping education systems well beyond classrooms and lesson plans. Unlike earlier waves of education technology, the report notes, generative AI tools are often freely accessible and widely adopted outside institutional control, creating both fresh opportunities and significant governance risks. Its central finding is that AI can genuinely support learning when guided by clear pedagogical principles, but that unguided use tends to improve task performance without producing real learning gains.
The Outlook maps generative AI across three roles: a tutor for students, a partner in instruction shared by students and teachers, and an assistant supporting teachers’ own work. Survey data underline how quickly the technology is spreading, with more than a third of lower-secondary teachers reporting AI use in their work by 2024. At the same time, a large majority of teachers voiced concerns about academic integrity, fearing students could pass off AI-generated work as their own.
The report positions generative AI as a powerful ally for education systems, but only when steered by pedagogy, sound policy and a firm commitment to human-centred learning, effectively reframing the technology from a novelty into a structural component of teaching and learning.
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UNESCO: 273 Million Children Remain Out of School
UNESCO’s Global Education Monitoring Report 2026, themed around access and equity in the countdown to the 2030 Sustainable Development Goal 4 deadline, finds that 273 million children, adolescents and youth remain out of school, a figure that has now risen for a seventh consecutive year. That amounts to roughly one in six young people worldwide being excluded from education, even as global enrolment has surged by hundreds of millions since the turn of the millennium.
The report raises sharp concerns about every child’s right to a qualified teacher. In low-income countries, the share of academically qualified primary teachers fell from 89% in 2013 to 78% in 2024, and only a small minority of low-income countries require a bachelor’s degree to teach at primary level. On financing, only around a fifth of countries with available data met the international benchmarks of spending at least 4% of GDP and 15% of public expenditure on education, with more than half having reduced their education spending share since 2015.
Drawing on dozens of country case studies, the report stresses that progress is possible where equity is prioritised, policies are sustained, and systems focus on those furthest behind, offering lessons from nations that have expanded access at scale.
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Australia’s 2026 Visa Hikes Disrupt Study-Abroad Plans
Australia’s international education sector is absorbing a fresh round of visa fee increases introduced by the Department of Home Affairs, effective 1 July 2026 and rolled out with little warning or industry consultation. The student visa application fee for higher education and vocational study has climbed to AU$2,500, with a lower rate for ASEAN applicants, while the temporary graduate visa for post-study work has jumped to AU$5,750. Analysts note that the student visa fee has risen by close to 285% since 2022, making Australia’s one of the most expensive study visas in the world.
The fee hikes sit atop a National Planning Level cap of 295,000 international student commencements for 2026, which functions as a soft cap by slowing visa processing once providers exceed allocation thresholds. India, Australia’s second-largest source country, has also been reclassified into a higher-risk processing tier, and higher-education visa applications from India have fallen sharply from their 2023 peak.
By contrast, competitor destinations have held steadier: Canada and the United States have not raised core study-visa application fees since 2022, and the United Kingdom’s increases over the same period have been comparatively modest. The divergence is prompting many prospective students to weigh alternative destinations across Asia and Europe, signalling a gradual redrawing of traditional study-abroad pathways.
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The Bigger Picture
Today’s developments trace a single thread running through Indian and global education alike: systems are consolidating around quality, standardisation and strategic reach rather than sheer expansion. In India, that instinct shows up in very different guises — IIM Bangalore projecting the country’s management brand outward into ASEAN, AICTE pruning 58 under-subscribed engineering colleges, NCTE funnelling teacher-training admissions through a single national test, and IIM Kozhikode reshaping who sits in the classroom with a record-setting, more diverse cohort. Each is a bet that credibility and inclusion, not volume, will define the next phase of Indian higher education.
Globally, the same tension between ambition and access is playing out. The OECD’s reframing of generative AI as a guided co-instructor captures a system learning to harness a disruptive tool responsibly, while UNESCO’s sobering count of 273 million out-of-school children is a reminder that the basics of equity remain unmet even as technology races ahead. Australia’s abrupt visa hikes, meanwhile, show how national policy can redraw global mobility overnight — nudging Indian and other students toward newer destinations. Taken together, the day’s news suggests an education landscape simultaneously reaching for the future and struggling to bring everyone along with it.
