New York Permits Foreign-Educated Doctors to Provide Care
New York State will permit qualified graduates of foreign medical schools to care for patients in hospitals, part of an effort to relieve pressure on frontline medical staffers. Andrew M. Cuomo, governor of the hard-hit state, has also sought to enlist medical-school students and retired health-care workers in an all-hands-on-deck response to the public-health crisis. One in four doctors in the United States is an immigrant. Still, foreign-trained doctors and nurses face visa restrictions and other limits on practicing.
Supreme Court Is Asked to Delay DACA Ruling
Lawyers representing so-called Dreamers are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to delay its ruling in a case that will decide the fate of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program amid the outbreak of Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. Some 27,000 Dreamers — young people brought to the United States as children — work in health care, and a ruling jeopardizing their legal status could be disastrous during a public-health emergency. “Health-care providers on the frontlines of our nation’s fight against Covid-19 rely significantly upon DACA recipients to perform essential work,” the lawyers write in a letter to the court. The justices are expected to issue a ruling this spring on President Trump’s effort to end the program.
New Index Measures Academic Freedom Around the World
And for some non-coronavirus news, a new index attempts to measure how well a country ensures academic freedom on its college campuses. Fifty-six of 144 countries measured received the highest rating for academic freedom, while 18, including China, Egypt, and Iran, were given the lowest grade. (The United States was not ranked because not enough scholars with expertise in American academic freedom took part.) Nations were judged against five core indicators, including freedom to research and teach, freedom of academic exchange and dissemination, and institutional autonomy. The authors of the index said they hoped the data would be used to inform policy making, as a screening mechanism for international research collaborations, and as a component of global university rankings. You can read more about the index and the tensions between academic freedom and global rankings in my international-education newsletter, latitude(s).
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