Can’t pay? Won’t understand.
What angers me most about the opposition to raising the cap on student fees probably isn’t the rioting and vandalism that the protesters get up to. It’s the ignorance, stupidity and ill-informed manner with which the opposition is presented and articulated.
“I can’t afford nine grand”, “it will put poor kids off university”, “we shouldn’t have to pay because Clegg and Cameron didn’t”. Wrong, dangerous, and cobblers.
Of course in some ways it’s very easy for me to comment, my student debt is pretty small compared to some leaving University now, it’s not much more than £10k. On the other hand I was expected to stump up my tuition fees in September each year, the state basing the amount on the means of my parents, regardless of their willingness to support me; it was expected of them. How very progressive.
Others are leaving University this year with debt of more than twice what I have behind me, yes their tuition was free at the point of need, but their debt is a mill stone around their necks as they embark on the hard journey to getting a job and paying it back. It’s debt they can’t afford leaving many in a perilous financial state in harsh economic times. Except of course that’s total nonsense.
I wouldn’t give a toss if my SLC debt was £100k or more, it wouldn’t cause me a second thought. Know why? It isn’t real debt. I have real debt and you can tell the difference pretty quickly.
The problem with the current debate on student debt is the ignorant misconception that it’s like a mortgage. It isn’t anything like a normal loan. You will and can never default on the debt. No one will ever chase you with a stick demanding payment. The interest rate is inflation, so effectively zero – this year inflation was flat so it really is zero. You’ll never lose your house, car, shirt off your back or anything else if you can’t keep up with repayments, because the repayments have to keep up with you. You pay 9% of everything you earn over a threshold of £15k a year by PAYE or in your tax return. If an average graduate gets paid £20k on leaving University, they’ll be paying £450 a year in repayments. When I was working I spent more than that in a year on breakfast. And I don’t eat breakfast.
If you have SLC debt and are thinking of paying it back as quickly as possible, do yourself a favour – wise up, and don’t pay back any more than your statutory repayments, no one will thank you for doing anything else. If you’re that desperate for the extra £50 disposable income, get a paper round.
So you cry at me you can’t afford £9000 a year because you’re from a working class background, your parents can’t afford to fund you through university, you’re not like the Eton toffs behind the policy. That may very well be true, but it isn’t what will stop you going to University. The NUS and Labour Party telling you that you can’t afford it will. Your own ill-informed prejudice will. You’ll be expected to pay nothing upfront, and nothing until you earn £22k. Yes you’ll be asked to pay 1% on top of inflation, but that’s still the cheapest debt you’ll ever have. And just like now, if you never earn enough to pay back the full amount, after 25 years, the debt dies. No one holds it against you, the state just writes it off as a favour between friends.
So what is really the problem here? Is it really that the policy is regressive, discriminatory and inherently unfair? Or are we having and uninformed debate, lead by party political combatants seeking an easy poll pleaser playing on the fears of people they aren’t giving the whole story to?
The villains of this piece aren’t the Lib Dems or the Conservatives, it’s the duplicitous, malicious, scaremongering left.
Alias,
Agree with much of what you say. Personally, I went into a job initially where I felt I would be repaying society for their contibution to my education. I did have other possibilities, particualy in guided missile technology with a number or firms. Same when I emigrated to Canada which country was desperate for experienced engineers. I did do a calculation to determine wheter or notI I had repaid my personal debt to society through my increased taxes; I was earning twice the average wage at that time. I don’t claim in the least to be a “saint” but I did hope that some fellow students did realize the debt they owed to others and acted appropriately; but I’m not naive – more usually “self” comes first..
If we want to make university attractive to students from les well off families that have a shorter financial time outlook, make the first year free. If they love their subject they will stay, and we will all be better off.
Some of the talk here about it ‘not being real money’ reminds me of the way we got into the housing bubble and current economic downturn. The making available of funds from never-never-land is a good way to encourage the education providing market to increase costs till they match the money which is available to pay for them.
To train someone as a chiropodist takes at most six weeks, yet I believe the current BScs take three years.
Basically, if there is a need for trained personnel in a field, should not the industry be paying for the training, and if there isn’t, should the training be allowed to take place at all?
Do we need a degree in drama? If we do, can it not be got over with in 1 year rather than 3? Why is it that army officers can qualify after two terms?
The legal profession works by homing in on two people with a legal dispute, and using this to extract their money until there is none left. The educational establishment works on a similar principle: if there is more than one candidate for a job, it sells one party higher and higher qualifications until his rivals run out of money and he sails into it.
I seem to be the only person who thinks that economy means not spending money when you do not need to, and especially when you do want to.
Mack’s numbers are generally spot on but in this case I think the cost of annual maintenance has been left out – usually assessed at £6K per year, so another £18K on top of the cost of fees for a total start-off debt of around £45 K (although the government will not provide loans to the full value of the cost of maintenance). This is an addition to the £30-45K one can reasonably assess to be the level of earnings foregone whilst taking the degree – although given that many people taking degrees would presumably in fact, in the short run, be able to get higher paying jobs having a high level of academic qualification at 18, the real amount foregone may be higher.
Add to this the fact that the differential between graduate and non-graduate earnings is generally overestimated – figures are frequently taken from graduate recruitment agencies, which cater for specific types of graduate jobs, not the job market in total. The figures provided by the Office for National Statisitics are always lower. I don’t know of any studies that follow through earnings for specific kinds of degree (aside from the obvious, such as medical). In addition, differentials are often quoted on the basis of variation in graduate and non-graduate salary for people say, in the their mid-30s: i.e. for a cohort when around 15% of the population went to university, rather than the 40% today. Obviously this expansion in student numbers is going to cause the differential to shrink. It thus becomes highly debatable whether a degree will pay for very many people.
I dislike the new fees arrangement, but the objections to not just rest on the finances. Education is arguably a public good, where peope are taught to think, discuss, and engage in wider public debate, as well as acquire skills related to ‘employability’. These social benefits are not easily captured in market returns, and indeed to try and do so could be seen to undermine some of their most salient virtues. Degrees are not to be differentially priced (and if they were, why not A-levels too?). Equally, the premise of this reform is essntially the privatisation of great swathes of university teaching. This government is very keen on providing new, stirring narratives of national history, but it is no longer prepared to invest in the teaching of history as a good of wider benefit to the populace.
Those who believe Nick Clegg when he argues most universities will not charge near the fee limit are completely wrong. Universities have no choice – in most cases, teaching an undergraduate costs £7500, and there aill have to be a buffer aganist variation in numbers, and a likely decline (given that we must expect students to behave like any other group purchasing a good – is demand so inelastic that a trebling of price will make no difference?). everyone who can is going to charge £9K – and indeed, they are worried that charging less than this will be seen as a marker of lower quality devaluing the degree. I’m a university insider, and this is what I see happening.
I think the whole debate in general has been hijacked by vested interests so as to persuade the turkeys to vote for Christmas.
90% of courses are not worth €27k, 90% of courses (or more) could be delivered for a fraction of that cost. Universities don’t just teach undergraduate’s – but why should they, and not taxpayers generally subsidise the other activities if society deems them valuable?
@Alias
The essential point there is that the ordinary taxpayers is being asked to invest via taxation in increasing another person’s earning potential in the marketplace where no benefit will accrue to the investor
Yes. There is only an indirect benefit. But let’s think of the cost.
9k per year. 9 * 7 = £63k.
That should be enough to pay for a whole year of teacher time (standing in front of a class or preparing classes or exams).
Given an 7.5 hour day and 220 working days a year that is 1650 hours a year. That is probably enough to deliver 1 year’s worth of college level teaching.
So after the first 7 pupils on a course, is it fair to say that any additional students are paying for the facilities (buildings, heating & electric, general running costs for teaching) as well subsidising research projects (and their use of the facilities), perks for staff, junkets, conferences etc, and general waste within the system.
How is this fair?
Business 101 – you charge at value not cost. British universities (like their American counterparts) are doing neither. They are ripping off students.
Another way to think of this is to as WWMoLD?
What Would Michael O’Leary Do?
My guess is he would segment college places into various graduate premium and discount levels. I.e. Like the business next day travel, a place on a medicine course might be regarded as a valuable premium product. He would charge accordingly.
The premium products would be used to cover most of the fixed costs (buildings, running costs for the courses).
The remaining courses would be used to generate extra profits by maximizing the utlisation of resources. So what might happen is that once a non-premium course had attracted a sufficient number of overseas students to pay the lecturer’s wages, prices would be heavily discounted for locals. That way a social anthropology degree would probably only cost £1,000 per year, or maybe even £1 (+ taxes)..
Also, my guess is that lectures would run right throughout the year and courses (advertised for three) would finish in 2 (at your scaled down graduation ceremony a tape recorder will play a little trumpet)..
I think Michael O’Leary could probably provide most (non-premium) undergraduate university degrees for less than £5k – all in!
& the guys at Overstock.com could probably do it online for £500…
These social benefits are not easily captured in market returns, and indeed to try and do so could be seen to undermine some of their most salient virtues. Degrees are not to be differentially priced (and if they were, why not A-levels too?).
Exactly.
It could be emulated in health service policy – more fees there?
Or it could be emulated even in schools as well.
Or even the police service! Why should society pay for the police to come out and check out *my* burglary?
The concept of taxation is one that the state lifts money or redistributes blocks of wealth for the benefit of society – for wider social reasons, not just for the individual – which is what these fees are all about – loading the individual with debt.
Currently we have two very wealthy leaders – the PM and deputy PM, both of whom have enough disposable cash to see beyond the necessity of the state and just because they can pay high market prices for education and health, doesn’t mean others can.
Rather than cutting the individual loose, the battle of hearts and minds needs to be won on the concept of progressive taxation, of effective regulation and of legislation.
@Tierney
Good point about cost of living expenses. There may an element of doubling counting in including that, but some students may incur extra expenses above and beyond those they would have incurred had the worked for the three / four years (and lived at home, gave their liver a break for example)..
. Universities have no choice – in most cases, teaching an undergraduate costs £7500
I doubt it. In an undergraduate course with 100 students that is £750,000 per year. How many man hours are spent lecturing them, or preparing them? Per year for most courses I’d would venture less than 2000. (That is 60 hours per week lecturing and preparation * 30 weeks is 1800 (just over the cost of one f/t lecturer) – even an incredibly excessive 300 hours per week gives you 9000 hours which is equivalent to the workload of just over 5 full-time teaching lecturers).
What’s being bundled up here are all the inefficiencies of the university system, coupled with a proportion of the costs incurred by universities other activities (and low utilisation of resources).
Academia provides a nice lifestyle for those lucky enough to work in it. Expecting undergraduates to bear the bulk of that cost (60% according to the fees facts link) is unreasonable, unless the system is streamlined to meet their needs (rather than suiting the work lifestyle of the staff).
90% of courses could be delivered a for a fraction of that cost? Really? this time I am more dubious about Mack’s numbers. A subscription to a journal on-line can cost hundreds of pounds. Any effective working university needs very many of these subscriptions to be able to effectively operate even one course – aside from costs of books, lab equipment, etc. etc.
Yes, there is undoubtedly ‘cross-subsidy’ from teaching to research – just as well, given the slashing of the research budget. At least fees present a means to make up losses in the cutting of the teaching budgets. But without good research what, pray, would there be to teach? These are not independent processes, whatever accountants might think.
Junkets? Perks? Could you tell me what these are exactly? Are conferences not a legitimate part of academic life all of a sudden? I suppose businesses shouldn’t hold ‘meetings’ either – ripping off the customers! In practice, most academics pay at least some conference costs out of their own salaries. Indeed, in some universities it is now offical policy that academics on higher salary scales actually have to pay their own conference costs (as well as membership of learned socieities, journal subscritions, etc.). Academics in the UK are not badly paid (whilst not being especially well paid by northern European standards). And there is without doubt scope for efficiency savings in many parts of university life. But I am not sure where waste as a systemic problem is.
Certainly, the introduction of a market that still imposes strong constraints on courses that the government doesn’t actually pay for any more, and relfects neither cost to the provider or benefit to the consumer, is a strange market indeed.
I feel this could be preached on the text of 1 Timothy, 6:10.
The longer this thread drags on, the more obvious it is that the difference between us amounts to
¶ the concept of what “education” is;
¶ why proper “education” is different from “training” or “instruction” or “(pre-)work experience”; and
¶ what a university should be.
We are therefore locked into a sterile conflict of personal versus societal gain.
We are a degenerate lot. I doubt that any previous generation (or most societies outside the UK) would reduce the benefits of education to a mere “personal” good.
For those who cannot see the point of a wide “liberal education”, I suggest they consider the implications of unbridled scientific experiment where moral scruples are not present. We have, after all, been there in the not too distant past.
For those of a whit more imagination and culture, I suggest Dickens, back in 1854, illustrated the matter in Hard Times. See if that opening paragraph seems familiar:
Continue reading and you meet the delightful and imperfect Mr Sleary, and how his view defeats the utilitarianism of Mr Gradgrind.
@Tierney
You are getting very defensive.
The issue is who should pay for these and why?
If there are inefficiencies, I don’t think these costs should be visited upon the student.
Example : Costs in the industry I work in (Software) have been revolutionised by open source, wiki’s and the web. Information and licenses that were once incredibly expensive are now free.
Why should student’s subsidise the producers of academic journals? (Look at what is happening to other publishing industries today).
(Also aren’t these fixed costs that can be reduced by scaling?)
Junkets? Perks? Could you tell me what these are exactly? Are conferences not a legitimate part of academic life all of a sudden?
This is very defensive. The cost of this shouldn’t be visited upon the student. They benefit from it only very indirectly and randomly. Research & knowledge sharing does push out the boundaries but it is a slow process, and undergraduates only ever need to hear about a tiny fraction of it.
The value they receive is from the teaching, that is what they are paying for.
If society in general wants to subsidise it (and I have no particular objection to that) then that is fine. But foisting these costs on students, via predatory vendor financing is immoral.
@ mack,
Well, that’s how the accountants price it. I’m very happy for undergraduates to directly carry less or none of that cost – so long as somebody pays for all the costs that are currently allocated to teaching.
Since when have lecturers been supposed to work 60 hour weeks (some do and some don’t, but that’s besides the point)? Of course universities don’t administer themselves – academics play a major role here – as well as other functions (welfare, for example). Again, I don’t dispute the scope for improved efficiencies, but I doubt they are of the scale you imply.
It should be noted at some point too that students don’t get given degrees for merely turning up at university for 3 years. Some of them actually work for them. This is obviously true of anyone doing any kind of course, but too often university degrees are being discussed as if they are some kind of gift, and that they did not actually require some effort to get there, and complete them.
@Tierney
I suppose businesses shouldn’t hold ‘meetings’ either – ripping off the customers!
The way to think of this (which might diffuse the situation) – is that the customers don’t pay for the meeting.
Let’s say Samsung employees spend half their time in meetings, but Apple employees only a couple of hours a week.
Would you be willing to pay substantially more for a Samsung Nexus S, if they decided to double the cost to subsidise those meetings, or would you stick with an iPhone 4?
@Tierney
Since when have lecturers been supposed to work 60 hour weeks (some do and some don’t, but that’s besides the point)?
They’re not, there’s 52 weeks in the year (220 working days, 7.5 hours per day). I’m just getting a handle on what the cost might be if academics only taught students. As that’s really the only cost students should be covering..
@mack
I agree that the costs shouldn’t be foisted on students, so we’re all sweetness and light there. I dispute (in an entirely friendly fashion) your description of costs, and our ability to differentiate usefully between ‘teaching’ costs and others. To put it another way, can universities reasonably accuratelt attribute the contribution of particular activities to the marginal value of teaching? It is rather doubtful, any more than companies can in many cases clearly distinguish what exactly contributed to the development of any particular product.
The objection to the 60 hour week still stands, doesn’t it? given that, in fact, academics are supposed to be spending 40% of the year doing research and other acitivites. Equally, much as I generally admire your facility with numbers, the ‘meetings’ comparison is spurious, because it suggests that students receive no benefit at all from conference attendance (again, I note, I would not charge the students these tuition fees). I can tell you very plainly as an academic teacher that this is not true. Conferences can feed very directly into teaching – and ensures they get access to the latest research.
As for the price of academic publishing, this may be right (publishers are charging according to salebable value and not cost, perhaps? To be honest prices are virtually entirely determined by the American market). But open access may be difficult to reconcile with a culture where peer review is a an essential marker of quality, that leads to an inevitable hierarchy of journals and information. Students who write their essays off Wikipedia don’t do so well.
As for the ‘junkets’, clearly this is a pejorative word as you well know, so please tell me what they are, so I can make sure I am riding that particularly gravy train, or at least enjoy the fact that I am riding it in the full knowledge of doing so!
@Tierney
Most people would regard flying off to a conference in a foreign city of a few days a ‘junket’, I’ve even been on a joint academic / private sector conference ‘junket’ myself.
The objection to the 60 hour week still stands, doesn’t it
No, I think there is still confusion here. Normally businesses charge at value, if the costs exceed the value you don’t have an ongoing business.
One alternative structure, that might give insight into pricing, might be to imagine an ecosystem in which public universities focused on research and didn’t teach undergraduates. Dedicated, privately run universities would teach the undergraduates (but not do research).
The teaching universities would hire lecturers from the public universities to teach and prepare courses on hourly contract rate.
So, a given course might require 60 hours per week (sometimes called ‘man hours’ – because any person can fulfil those hours, it’s not necessarily the same person) to deliver the course. The cost of running the course to the teaching college would 60*lecturers’ hourly rate + cost of maintaining their facilities. I sincerely doubt that cost to the teaching-only colleges would be anywhere near £7,500k.
(Especially if there were people like O’Leary or the WalMart team let loose on driving out any inefficiencies out of the teaching colleges).
@ mack
Okay – you could abolish the ‘research-led teaching’ we are all told to do – and which is clearly better. And you could indeed set up the kind of structure you suggest. I’d suggest in turn that the division of costs is still aribtrary, but we can agree to disagree on that. I don’t reall see what it has to do with your imputation of a 60-he week to a fill-time lecturer either.
On the junkets, fair enough, I engage in research with colleagues in various different countries. If we’re effectively to work together, we have to meet face-to-face occasionally. If doing this is a ‘junket’, so be it (in fact most meetings are tagged onto conferences to save costs). But it’s not how people usually describe business travel. Sometimes the conditions for doing this are pretty nice (we’re not all fools). Sometimes they’re not (1-2 day trips to the west coast of America to be inside a hotel the whole time and come straight back again… ? Hmmmm… unless hanging round airports is your idea of a good time.)
Mack @ 11:08 am:
Let’s say Samsung employees spend half their time in meetings, but Apple employees only a couple of hours a week.
Would you be willing to pay substantially more for a Samsung Nexus S, if they decided to double the cost to subsidise those meetings, or would you stick with an iPhone 4?
[No: because one runs Android and the other a great OS.]
However, that was the moment the argument flushed itself away.
Android is a product of Google (and a goodish one, apparently). Google has an astonishingly liberal attitude to its employees. Cross-fertilising ideas over demarkations (tech/non-tech) is positively encouraged (as in a proper university). Indeed, Larry Page’s concept, the Google HQ at Mountain View, CA, operates very much as an ideal university campus, but without faculty/student division, and with free cafeterias, hair-care, laundry, dry-cleaning, transport …
Result: ever-improving productivity and exponentially-improving revenues.
@Tierney
Sounds positively terrible, perhaps you should consider an alternative career as a miner?
I’m not an academic, although family members are. It’s 10 years since I’ve been in a university, I don’t know how your working day breaks down today. I do have an idea roughly of what it was like to do an undergraduate course (and even a pg course).
The structure suggested is a though experiment so that you can separate out the delivery of the service to the student and the other activities and work out a way to put a cost on the service delivered to the student. If lecturers are contracting their non-research time to the private colleges they can provide any service (just like any software contractor) to their employer. You could transfer over any service provided directly to the students there is no need to drop anything. It’s all just fungible time at an hourly rate within the constraints that services of direct benefit only are charged for (preparation or service delivery) – other academic functions get paid for by the state.
You are a smart bloke, I know you could do this, even if it is moderately complex, but my guess now is you are opposed to doing it on principle.
It reminds of the old anecdote about the monkey’s beating each other up over company policy, because, we’ll that’s just the way it is
http://mistupid.com/people/page058.htm
@Malcolm
And their services are delivered free to the end user too.
And the advertisers pay directly for measurable value.
Hurrah! No one is getting ripped off..
@Malcolm
Although cynics have suggested the purpose of the free food, laundry etc is to reduce the need for young staff members to go home
separate out the delivery of the service
Is teaching a service?
Trouble is as Mister Redfellow highlights:
‘¶ the concept of what “education” is;
¶ why proper “education” is different from “training” or “instruction” or “(pre-)work experience”; and
¶ what a university should be.’
Now if you start stretching the definition of things such as superimposing marketable terms onto lecturers and teaching with that you stretch the definition of what it is to be lecturer and teacher.
The theory becomes all the more ropey as do the concepts if you stretch private sector definitions over long understood public sector ones.
What I’ve come to learn over the last while is that having the private sector run public services under contract is an entirely different thing to the marketisation of public services itself. Such as students becoming customers and hospital patients consumers of hospital services.
It is a flawed theory. You need to ask yourself whether this customer service approach to public services is done by design, or lazy default (which could be more appealing in terms of pitching the policy to the public in an understandable way, but over the long run it may not be actually be such an effective approach in practice.)
Ok DC, just continue to charge the students for the whole shebang…
@ Mack
Of course, I realize that the whole of the rest of society works in the vast mining industry I look down on from my ivory tower, and so I count my blessings every morning (though don’t y’know that libraries can be very dusty?). Aside from a few in software, of course. I hear with terrible industrial accidents they sometimes get trapped for months in front of flickering screens with no hope of rescue.
Of course, you hit the nail on the head. I am not inclined to go for the solution you propose, which is close to models some people in higher eucation would very much like to see – usually managers rather than academics. As is often found with shoehorning institutions that are actually quite flexible and innovative into solutions to satisfy accountants, I suspect you would just greatly increase bureaucractic costs, while reducing the extremely valuable synergies between teaching and research (even if sometimes done by the same people) and provide a worse service to students (who value proximity to research, which would be harder to maintain for various reasons which I won’t go onto now). It’s true that this might vary from subject to subject, which is perhaps an argument against the one-size fits-all model that to some degree exists in the UK. But we can get round the problem of charging supposed direct costs to students simply by not trying to charge the students a notional full value tuition fee, and be done with the whole argument. Unsurprisngly I am in the camp with others who see education as a public good. But even if I wasn’t, would the intervnetions required to put an imputed cost on the direct service to the student actually save money or add value? I doubt it.
Your model though probably points the way ahead in that students (who by and large have very little idea of how lecturers spend their time or what goes into preparation) are going to hold staff to account for their time to an increasing degree. Contact hours will increase, which will be a good thing, on balance (and students will perhaps make better use of them too). Becuase the academic process is relatively poorly understood, people are going to start treating contact time as if it is indeed an hourly fee and there is going to be a lot of upset as a result. In fact, ‘hourly rates’ don’t even remotely reflect input into teaching. Students these days don’t quite expect lecturers to be on e-mail call 24/7, but it’s moving in that direction (and this can in fact promote good habits of academic inquiry and discussion) – aside from the myriad things that go into preparation.
At least, with new funding constraints, they won’t be paying much for conferences, you’ll be pleased to hear, as these will have to be externally- or self-funded anyway.
A final ote – given its international profile and publishing record – albeit aided by being the original home of English – one could argue that the UK university system already has a strong claim to being the most efficient in the world, given the low spend on higher education as a share of GDP. Perhaps the people running Harvard and Yale should be wondering how Oxford and Cambridge do it on a third of the money?
Well Mack – if education is a service and I want a product of say a 2:1 can i get a refund if the service doesn’t deliver me that end 2:1 product?
@Tierney
It’s not a solution, it’s a thought experiment that allows you to separate the various costs that can be used into inputs to determine a reasonable ceiling for fees. In my view it isn’t anywhere near £7,500 (or £9,000) for most courses.
@DC
Of course not. You can expect a reasonable quality of teaching and rigour and fairness in grading (you do want that 2:1 to mean what it says), but not any particular outcome.
Can I sue Nike because I didn’t get scouted by Man Yoo after I bought my predators?
Well if I pay money to get my car serviced I expect it to be done right and to a certain definable standard, not the same thing then for education?
I’m not against the concept of tuition fees or raising money off the back of those people that have gone through university and got the benefit of it, but if there is to be a balance it’s best to make sure the conceptual analysis is right – and definitions mean what they say they mean.
I think the service approach in education could work if universities offered: a 1st or a 2:1 – or your money back approach
Well if I pay money to get my car serviced I expect it to be done right and to a certain definable standard, not the same thing then for education?
Yes, it is exactly the same, the equivalent service is the teaching (and not the result – driving / marks). You don’t sue the garage if you drive out of their premises and straight into an oncoming truck.
The students still have to take the materials they are given and make the best use of them.
Not quite the same thing Mack – but you are right I wouldn’t sue the university for say carrying out a wrong operation despite having left their institutions fully qualified as a doctor, qualified up to a certain professional standard.
It’s the getting qualified to a certain standard bit I’m concerned about, as a fee payer.
@DC
I don’t you can purchase qualifications – only teaching or the right to sit an exam. If you could, no employer, customer or patient would trust them and they’d be inherently worthless – so why pay for them?
DC @ 1:50pm:
Nice to see you back so promptly after PMQs.
I think the service approach in education could work if universities offered: a 1st or a 2:1 – or your money back approach.
That’s already a significant problem in HE. Have you not heard of “grade inflation”? Who, in that view, controls the teaching, and to what end? Take it further, and what cannot be gained from “distance learning” that requires the face-to-face teacher?
My previous reference to Dickens (way above your heads, obviously) reminds me of a recent conversation. This, too, illustrates for me the difference between “university education” (as I understand the term) and an instructional degree-mill (which is what others, including people who should know better, intend for us).
Anecdote begins:
I entered one of my usual resorts to see an acquaintance gazing dismally into a half-empty glass. I bought the refill and hoped to engage him in uplifting literary conversation.
However, he narrated the cause of his despair.
He is an expert in 19th literature, teaching at honours-degree level. With a colleague he had been explicating the structure of Dickensian fiction to a class. The colleague was carried away to illustrate the episodic nature of a typical Dickens novel, which derives from original publication as fortnightly magazine episodes.
Up went a student’s hand: “Question! Will this be in the exam?”
The only possible answer there is on the lines of “not specifically; but it’s probably necessary to bear in mind, to understand how the piece works, how the writing was done, and how it impacted on the original readership.”
Soon after the lecture, my acquaintance and his mate were summoned to Higher Authority. A complaint had been lodged by students about deviation from the prescribed syllabus. Reprimands were administered.
Anecdote ends
Michael Shilliday – I salute you. I completely agree.
I’m also rather annoyed at you as I was intending on writing this very blog post tonight.
I think I will anyway…We need more common sense talkers.
[...] Shilliday has a post in response to this refrain over at Slugger O’Toole. He [...]