The Tories love their Market Economy model. Now universities are going to set against each other.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-13927710

WHy not?
If your paying for something you might want to be assured that you will receive a quality product. If a University is going to put a load of gumph in its prospectus then shouldn't they be held to account to it?
Or should the government (of any political persuasion) only ever do what everyone agrees on regardless of whether its the right thing to do?


At the university level, yes it is. Its not a right, IMHO.

if you look around the world, there are obviously places that think so and other places that don't. I suspect there is no definitive answer as to whether it should be the case or not.

The fact is though, Universities have been competing for students for, well, ages. Just that in the past they were paid by central government a standard rate per student enrolled within set limits, whereas now they're getting the money direct from the students themselves. The processes of student recruitment won't really change at all. What might change is the expectation as Bobbdobbs suggests - when you pay for something directly from your own pocket, you'll probably expect more for it than when you were paying for it indirectly through taxation on the population as whole.

Do a google for the phrase 'University of bums on seats', it's a well worn issue in the academic community.

Jon

Personally I think it might shake up the system

For example instead of 3 or 4 years (at £9K plus expenses a year) with long holidays maybe some one will do an "Accelerated Degree" - i.e the same weeks of study but over 2 years with only short holidays. That would save on a whole years cost of study

And it has worked so well in every other sector that they have tried it in. We now have more people in fuel poverty, energy shortages expected in the next few years and massive profits for the industry. They will not increase capacity without a subsidy. The only benefit was that it eliminated the power of the unions to hold the country to ransom.

Quick question - in your head, do you imagine that the university staff are all packed away on holiday for the student holidays? Or are they actually still doing work that's pertinent to the running of the course?
I'm currently doing a fast track qualification - 8 weeks training, essays and study squeezed into 1 week. It's not fun.

There are a few things fundamentally wrong in tertiary education. Treating learning establishments as businesses is fundamentally wrong. The onus is placed upon getting the students through with a pass, regardless of the ability displayed. Once you start doing that, the value of a pass is diminished. I've yet to see the word 'fail' written anywhere at work - it's always couched in phrasing like 'if the student passes or otherwise' or 'the student did not yet complete the requirements'.
I'd like to think that this culture won't spread higher up the ladder, but the more we push education to adopt business models, the more 'happy' (passed) 'customers' (students) we're going to see.
At which point we've watered the value of a degree down ever further, and you may as well just punt the Uni however many thousand and ask for the certificate.

Most universities senior academics have their own projects in the breaks. During which they either write their books or do some TV series which gets them famous and helps the university attract students. Imagine when Harry Kroto won he Nobel prize and Sussex University could get students wanting to study under him. Also some professors are recruited on the condition that they get to go their own research. If they were stuck with teaching alone they will leave to go to a university where they can do such research.

Those professors typically do very little teaching anyway, they tend to leave it all to junior lecturers and post grad students. This is perhaps why the Open University is consistently rated so highly for its teaching quality even though it ranks very low on world university charts. Those charts tend to favour research and the number of papers published and subsequently cited in others.

The breaks which academics take to carry out research or author weighty tomes tend to be sabbaticals, and as such wouldn't be affected either.

I'm not sure that's fundamentally wrong, it may not be typically a good idea, but I see no reason per se why, done correctly, it shouldn't be a great idea. Over the last couple of decades, there has been a huge increase in student numbers, but it has been accompanied by an observable increase in junk courses for lazy halfwits. I am reminded of the degree in nutrition taught by a London university that was thrown together by the man who claims that vitamin C cures AIDS.

It seems to me that universities must already have been competing with each other much like other businesses, the preponderance of dog poo degree courses presumably arises when the losing organisations, who can't attract serious students, drop trou and accept whatever comes their way. So what we had before was competing businesses and perverse incentives, which must be the wrong way to do it.

I don't agree with the view that academic opportunity should be restricted to x proportion of the populace, I think everyone should stay in education until they are at least 21. But kids who leave 6th form with minimal academic skills should be going into courses that will improve those skills, not given worthless degrees that are designed simply to acomodate their shortcomings.


There is an important element lacking from your analysis.If the crap students are made happy in this way, then all the good hard working students (of which I am sure there are many) will be made unhappy due to the devaluation of their effort.

There is no apparent incentive that I can see for unis to accommodate poor students in this manner unless they are required to offer refunds for all students that fail. Technically these refunds are on offer, you get the refund by never earning a decent wage in your life, and thus never paying the fees. Crucially, the university gets its money regardless of your lack of effort.

Ultimately, if students actually take to this scheme and use the information to make well informed prudent decisions (the sort of behaviour for which students are justly famous), they will force universities to offer good courses, with good teaching, and useful subject matter. So we would see the proportion of students that study maths and sciences rise. Perhaps compensated for by a fall in degrees in something quite hard + business studies or humanities.

In all likelihood though, the above is a pipe dream. Students will continue to do dumb things like flock in their hundreds to degrees in forensic science because they have watched too much CSI, even though the number of jobs on offer is in the tens. You see, market reforms based on canny interested consumers invariably fall foul of the fact that people are uncannily lazy.

I can say with great sincerity that I damn well don't get the whole summer off . In fact if anything I'm busier in the summer than I am when the students are around. All the real major infrastructure work - the disruptive stuff - has to be crammed into the summer when they're not here, because woe betide us if things don't work when a student might want to use them. And that's now. Imagine if you'd paid 9 grand to be there and the building's unusable because it's being redecorated, or the computer network is down, or the canteen isn't open. You'd be raising hell and quite frankly you'd have a right to.

And that's apart from the academic stuff like revising of lecture series and bringing forward new things and all the admin stuff that needs to be done to shift 10,000 'customers' in and 10,000 'customers' out.

All of that kind of stuff, all done in pretty much 8 weeks. And we pretty much have a moratorium on doing anything while clearing and enrolment is on. That two weeks, nothing gets changed. They're so utterly paranoid about disrupting clearing & enrolment that the only things that get done are fixing anything that goes wrong (and fixing it NOW). Other than that you. touch. nothing. But you can't just take those two weeks off on holiday, oh no, because what if something does go wrong?

The nearest equivalent to it I've seen is 'crunch time' in video games manufacture. And that's something companies have been sued for forcing their staff to do before now.

Jon

I am listening to Newsnight and the Tories want to have a table to see how useful and valuable a degree would be. If the degrees are to be vocational then they should be taught at polytechnics.

That'd be ruddy hilarious. Even better, weight it by subsequent mean income over say the ten years after graduation.. You could call it the 'you wasted three years of your [LIFTED] life doing a media studies degree and now you're stacking shelves in Tescos' ratio.


There are no polytechnics any more. The last lot turned them all into 'Universities'.

I think that degrees are overated. I totally support them for certain careers, law medicine and engineering among many, but do you need degrees for every career? In fact the most successful people have no degrees in general, or their degrees are irrelevant to their career. In fact some degrees actually lower your earnings potential. An example was a man studing a Fine Arts degree would actually earn less because of the degree. Not much over their career but noticable to statistician. Most people do not get that much more with a degree than someone else with a few years extra experience.

Those two quotes clearly contradict each other. The first presumes that a degree should be valued for more than the financial gain it may offer, the second entails that it has no value beyond that gain. Which would you prefer to disown?

Or perhaps you studied the wrong degree. Nuanced studies such as philosophy, history, classics and so on may not provide direct income for their graduates, nor fit them out for any particular job, but they teach critical reasoning skills, which are sorely missing among the general public at large. The skills required to present a cogent and non contradictory argument are of course closely related to those required to read arguments and notice inconsistencies. Good decision making relies on both sets.

If improved reasoning skills are all that you acquire from a degree course, I would contend that doesn't make it a waste of either time or money.

I have no issue about technical qualifications. Degrees in civil engineering may be useless when HND would be sufficient. Though do you need a degree in plumbing or car mechanics. Though if you want to be an F1 engineer then maybe.

As for degrees having value. I also appreciate that History Classics have their benefits to society, and to lose these through a market based education system is bad. Though as you say they do teach other skills which are useful for a job, such as reasoning presenting results in a report etc. It is the broad range of subjects that enhances us as a nation.