Around lunchtime on Sunday, July 12, the website of Brazil’s University for All Programme fell silent. For weeks it had hummed with the data of hundreds of thousands of candidates, each one hoping to trade a few exam points for a free or half-price degree. Now the portal closed, and with it the chance to grab one of 471,000 scholarships offered by the government for the second semester of 2026. The deadline had been extended once already, but when it finally arrived, it was absolute: at 23:59 Brasília time, the system stopped accepting the scans of identity documents, the proof of income below 1.5 minimum wages per person, the Enem scores that had to be at least 450, and the hundreds of thousands of personal essays that would not be written again.

The Brazilian ritual was one of many playing out across the world this week, as vast cohorts of students in the global south navigated the digital gateways that now define access to higher learning. In India, the University of Delhi reported that over 273,000 candidates had registered on its Common Seat Allocation System, with more than 206,000 of them finally clicking ‘submit’ on their programme preferences before the window shut on July 11. The simulated ranks released a day later sent families into a flurry of recalculation: girls outnumbered boys among the applicants, and the most fevered competition was for a BCom (Honours) seat, followed by English, Political Science, and the life sciences. A student in Patna or Kochi had until 4:59 pm on July 13 to rearrange her dreams, knowing that a single alteration could mean the difference between a spot at a top college and a year of despair.

In Mexico, the timeline stretched further ahead. The education ministry began accepting applications for its open and distance-learning university, offering 20,040 free places across twenty programmes. Unlike the breathless two-week sprints in Brazil and India, this process was a deliberate marathon: aspirants would first secure a folio by August 2, then endure a four-and-a-half-hour skills test, and finally a mandatory entry course running from late September to mid-October. Only in November would successful candidates learn they had a place, with the semester itself not starting until January 2027. The state, officials said, was working toward a target of 330,000 new higher-education seats by 2030, a goal that implied a brisk expansion of online degrees—credentials that in Mexico, as in many nations, still carry an ambiguous prestige.

In Indonesia, the new academic year began not with a whirring server but with coloured cardboard. On July 13, children across the archipelago returned to classrooms, and parents, teachers and local print shops had been busy for days churning out ‘Back to School’ posters, dense with cartoon characters, cursive well-wishes and the date of the first day. The ritual was the same in Jakarta and Surabaya: the first-day photograph, the ironed uniform, the board outside the classroom decorated with a bright welcome sign. Meanwhile, older students from poor families were logging into a different sort of platform: a portal for a state bank’s scholarship, which offered a monthly stipend of 300,000 rupiah (little more than the cost of a few meals) but promised mentoring and a potential path to a public university. The deadline was July 30, and the required uploads included a scan of the family’s electricity bills and photographs of every room in the house, a quiet audit of poverty.

Yet perhaps the strangest call to a new life came from Houston, Texas, where NASA began recruiting volunteers for a year-long Mars simulation. The agency wanted four people to live in a sealed habitat, grow vegetables, and walk on red-hued sand in augmented reality. The posting was frank about the hardships: isolation, time-delayed communication, and a ‘sol’ that lasts 40 minutes longer than an Earth day. But the opportunity was barred to most of the planet. Only US citizens or permanent residents could apply, a reminder that even the most transcendent journeys are bounded by the visa rules of a single country. So while a Brazilian teenager refreshed the Prouni site and an Indian graduate puzzled over her simulated rank, a Mexican engineer with perfect English and a STEM degree could only read the NASA announcement and wonder what 378 days in a windowless dome might feel like.