7 ms·

That makes no sense. It seems to me it is an elitist view that when you provide a service to the unwashed masses, it must be of lower quality. I believe it is f

That makes no sense. It seems to me it is an elitist view that when you provide a service to the unwashed masses, it must be of lower quality. I believe it is false. Curricula don't have to be easier if you have a large student body, and graduation requirements don't have to be lower. Taking in more students does not inhibit service quality, up to the capacity of the school, which can be easily scaled by hiring more teachers and more teaching space. Anyhow, the volume of students as a change driver for university quality explanation does not fit with the observations that: a) Universities employ disproportionately more non-teaching staff than they used to; and b) Academic staff has a harder time reaching tenure. The explanation lies elsewhere.

andyjohnson0 9y ago
> Academic staff has a harder time reaching tenure. Tenure in the US sense doesn't exist in the UK academic system. Lecturers/researchers with permanent contracts have the same employment rights as those in the private sector.
- oldcynic 9y ago
  Yes, but, the whole of the UK permanent workforce gets tenure in the US sense after, I think, the first year of employment. As do most EU countries. Long may it remain so. The Tories abolished tenure in the UK sense which roughly removed the right not to be made redundant but didn't affect the standard employment right not to be fired "just because".
  - djpowell 9y ago
    In 2012, under George Osborne, it was changed so that it is permissible for an employee to be unfairly dismissed in your first two years of employment.
sammoth 9y ago
Is it possible to just 'hire more teachers' though? The teachers that I had in university didn't seem to be the type of people you could just hire more of.
- romwell 9y ago
  Yes, it is. The fight for jobs in the academic market is fierce; there are far more people looking for academic jobs than there are positions.
imron 9y ago
> which can be easily scaled by hiring more teachers and more teaching space Neither of which scale easily.
gaius 9y ago
It seems to me it is an elitist view that when you provide a service to the unwashed masses, it must be of lower quality But it must be. An institution with AAA A-level students can teach more advanced material at a faster pace than one that admits EEEs. This is surely obvious, no? It doesn’t mean anyone is better or worse in a moral sense, it just means more or less academically able.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- kingkongjaffa 9y ago
  Not at all. The ability to learn at university is not correlated with A-level results. Mastery of the material can help give a good starting point, but I've worked with fantastic E/D/C students and terrible AAA students.
  - umanwizard 9y ago
    > The ability to learn at university is not correlated with A-level results. I’m very confident that this is false. Citation needed.
  - iguy 9y ago
    ability to learn at university is not correlated with A-level results This is incorrect. They are obviously not 100% correlated (even re-sitting the same exam isn't!) but the correlation is extremely strong.
  - MaxBarraclough 9y ago
    > I've worked with fantastic E/D/C students and terrible AAA students The existence of outliers doesn't disprove a correlation.
- beojan 9y ago
  But that's easily solved by having institutions for multiple A* students, and other institutions for EEE students. Which is the way it actually is.
ben_w 9y ago
> Curricula don't have to be easier if you have a large student body, and graduation requirements don't have to be lower. Only if everyone became a lot more skilled than their grades imply. Academic achievement is not be a perfect measure, but if you go from the top 3.4% of the population to the top 50%, the only possible situations are: 1) everyone is doing a lot better at school now 2) graduation rate goes down 3) standards go down Or some combination of those. That doesn’t mean there is no benefit in getting half the country to spend three more years in education, just that nobody should expect 18.7 times * as many of whatever made you want to get half the population into university in the first place. * population growth too.
- Malarkey73 9y ago
  That presumes That the top 3.4% really were just the smartest - not the also the wealthiest and best connected. There is probably both some dilution of talent and also more competition from all levels of society. And as to point 1. In the UK at least there is no doubt many many more are doing a lot better at school nowadays. Schools have evened up and pupils work far harder as most jobs require qualifications.
  - candiodari 9y ago
    Yes we must have social justice above all ! At the very least above average performance for all ! Are you really willing to believe that ability is randomly distributed among the population ? Because, frankly, that disagrees with a great many studies on the subject. But of course, what you can do, is lower the level of pupils until the difference between them disappears. You cannot lift everyone's level, that just doesn't work. Which do you think the government did ? Did it make everyone smarter ? Or did it lower the level until everyone performed ? What do you really think happened ?
    - Malarkey73 9y ago
      1. I don't mention nor advocate social justice. 2. I don't anywhere imply everyone should be average. 3. I don't say ability is random among the population but I don't actually understand what you are getting at here? 4. If we couldn't lift the ability of pupils or indeed people generally then we would still be living in caves. If we educate more people better then more people will be better educated no matter their innate starting ability. 5. Did the government make everyone smarter or lower standards you ask? I can walk and chew gum at the same time. I think that moving from 3.4% to 50% University population has possibly diluted the fraction of geniuses within academia but greatly increased the number of geniuses within academia and improved education and academia as a whole.
collyw 9y ago
Universities used to be elitist in that only the smartest got in.
- SolaceQuantum 9y ago
  I believe historically universities were elitist in that only the richest were meant to ever attend them, not the smartest...
  - collyw 9y ago
    Quite probably, I am just thinking back to my lifetime.
  - iguy 9y ago
    Well, a bit of both. For centuries they've been some mixture of upper-class finishing school, and a place for the very brightest of the next generation to concentrated. Using the rich kids to fund the scholars (and using some of the scholar's prestige to attract the rich) was on average quite a productive symbiosis.
c12 9y ago
At the university I studied at it was well known that their policy was opening up campuses in Africa and China so to entice international students to the campus in England. This was for the sole reason of increasing cash flow and I know several of the Chinese students that I did my Masters with were paying more than ten times what I was for the same course which both myself and our lecturers were ashamed of. It may not be all Universities but even ten years ago it felt that they had become less about excellence in teaching and more about printing money.
- smt88 9y ago
  This is rampant in the US as well. Many of the students cheated to get in, sometimes with the umiversity's knowledge, and weren't fluent enough in English to participate in class. There are lots of companies writing essays and otherwise facilitating the admissions cheating, and several major universities were caught a few years ago (I believe Duke was one).
  - mistermann 9y ago
    I've read many anecdotal stories like this of students complaining that the quality of their education is suffering due to a large portion of the class being utterly not qualified to be there, dragging everyone else down. I think it also has interesting potential long term implications for relative national competitiveness if you think about it regardless of whether that is a goal or not.
    - smt88 9y ago
      > complaining that the quality of their education is suffering due to a large portion of the class being utterly not qualified to be there, dragging everyone else down I'm not sure why those students are complaining... The wealthy foreign students aren't participating in class much, which effectively makes the class size smaller. They're also subsidizing the degrees of all the Americans. And a lot of them end up going back home after graduating, so they're not even competing in the same labor pool.
jdietrich 9y ago
>It seems to me it is an elitist view that when you provide a service to the unwashed masses, it must be of lower quality. That's exactly what happened, and it pre-dates the Labour government's goal of 50% participation. The Further and Higher Education Act 1992 allowed polytechnics and colleges of further education to become universities. Many of these institutions had little or no research output and had previously been dedicated to vocational instruction. There was an immediate and lasting change in how universities operated. Many of these post-1992 universities had extremely lax entrance criteria, in some cases tantamount to an open-door policy. There was a proliferation of degree courses that were obviously vocational and obviously far less demanding than a traditional degree - Sports Science, Hospitality Management, Fashion and Textiles etc. There was another drop in standards with the introduction of tuition fees. Before 1998, university teaching was funded primarily through government grants, with students paying nothing. The Labour government introduced fees of £1,000 per year, which were increased to £3,000 in 2004 and to £9,000 by the Conservative government in 2010. These higher fees were ostensibly a maximum, with the intention that universities could compete on price. The structure of the student loan system meant that there was little practical difference for students if they were paying lower fees, so all universities charged the £9,000 maximum. This fundamentally changed the character of British universities, shifting them away from the European social model and towards the American market model. Less selective universities started to aggressively advertise to lower-performing school leavers, because there was no cap on student numbers and their income was directly tied to putting bums on seats. Universities had a strong incentive to promote humanities subjects over science subjects, because the former are much cheaper to teach. International students have become a hot commodity, because they pay higher fees than domestic students; many universities now offer fast-track schemes for international students, with lower entry requirements than for domestic students. This move towards a market-led university system has driven a huge increase in pay for senior management and a huge increase in the use of casual and part-time lecturers. As in the US, we're now seeing managers earning salaries in the high six figures, while peripatetic lecturers are struggling to earn a living wage. There was a huge wave of strikes at the start of this year over cuts to university staff pensions, followed by collective legal action from students demanding compensation for missed lectures. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_universities_(United_Kingdom) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_universities_(United_Kingd... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_tuition_fees_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_tuition_fees_in_th... https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/2017/08/06/universities-stopped-sidelining-british-students-foreign-teens/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/2017/08/06/universitie...

andyjohnson0 9y ago

> Academic staff has a harder time reaching tenure. Tenure in the US sense doesn't exist in the UK academic system. Lecturers/researchers with permanent contracts have the same employment rights as those in the private sector.

oldcynic 9y ago
Yes, but, the whole of the UK permanent workforce gets tenure in the US sense after, I think, the first year of employment. As do most EU countries. Long may it remain so. The Tories abolished tenure in the UK sense which roughly removed the right not to be made redundant but didn't affect the standard employment right not to be fired "just because".
- djpowell 9y ago
  In 2012, under George Osborne, it was changed so that it is permissible for an employee to be unfairly dismissed in your first two years of employment.

sammoth 9y ago

Is it possible to just 'hire more teachers' though? The teachers that I had in university didn't seem to be the type of people you could just hire more of.

romwell 9y ago
Yes, it is. The fight for jobs in the academic market is fierce; there are far more people looking for academic jobs than there are positions.

imron 9y ago

> which can be easily scaled by hiring more teachers and more teaching space Neither of which scale easily.

gaius 9y ago

It seems to me it is an elitist view that when you provide a service to the unwashed masses, it must be of lower quality But it must be. An institution with AAA A-level students can teach more advanced material at a faster pace than one that admits EEEs. This is surely obvious, no? It doesn’t mean anyone is better or worse in a moral sense, it just means more or less academically able.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
kingkongjaffa 9y ago
Not at all. The ability to learn at university is not correlated with A-level results. Mastery of the material can help give a good starting point, but I've worked with fantastic E/D/C students and terrible AAA students.
- umanwizard 9y ago
  > The ability to learn at university is not correlated with A-level results. I’m very confident that this is false. Citation needed.
- iguy 9y ago
  ability to learn at university is not correlated with A-level results This is incorrect. They are obviously not 100% correlated (even re-sitting the same exam isn't!) but the correlation is extremely strong.
- MaxBarraclough 9y ago
  > I've worked with fantastic E/D/C students and terrible AAA students The existence of outliers doesn't disprove a correlation.
beojan 9y ago
But that's easily solved by having institutions for multiple A* students, and other institutions for EEE students. Which is the way it actually is.

ben_w 9y ago

> Curricula don't have to be easier if you have a large student body, and graduation requirements don't have to be lower. Only if everyone became a lot more skilled than their grades imply. Academic achievement is not be a perfect measure, but if you go from the top 3.4% of the population to the top 50%, the only possible situations are: 1) everyone is doing a lot better at school now 2) graduation rate goes down 3) standards go down Or some combination of those. That doesn’t mean there is no benefit in getting half the country to spend three more years in education, just that nobody should expect 18.7 times * as many of whatever made you want to get half the population into university in the first place. * population growth too.

Malarkey73 9y ago
That presumes That the top 3.4% really were just the smartest - not the also the wealthiest and best connected. There is probably both some dilution of talent and also more competition from all levels of society. And as to point 1. In the UK at least there is no doubt many many more are doing a lot better at school nowadays. Schools have evened up and pupils work far harder as most jobs require qualifications.
- candiodari 9y ago
  Yes we must have social justice above all ! At the very least above average performance for all ! Are you really willing to believe that ability is randomly distributed among the population ? Because, frankly, that disagrees with a great many studies on the subject. But of course, what you can do, is lower the level of pupils until the difference between them disappears. You cannot lift everyone's level, that just doesn't work. Which do you think the government did ? Did it make everyone smarter ? Or did it lower the level until everyone performed ? What do you really think happened ?
  - Malarkey73 9y ago
    1. I don't mention nor advocate social justice. 2. I don't anywhere imply everyone should be average. 3. I don't say ability is random among the population but I don't actually understand what you are getting at here? 4. If we couldn't lift the ability of pupils or indeed people generally then we would still be living in caves. If we educate more people better then more people will be better educated no matter their innate starting ability. 5. Did the government make everyone smarter or lower standards you ask? I can walk and chew gum at the same time. I think that moving from 3.4% to 50% University population has possibly diluted the fraction of geniuses within academia but greatly increased the number of geniuses within academia and improved education and academia as a whole.

collyw 9y ago

Universities used to be elitist in that only the smartest got in.

SolaceQuantum 9y ago
I believe historically universities were elitist in that only the richest were meant to ever attend them, not the smartest...
- collyw 9y ago
  Quite probably, I am just thinking back to my lifetime.
- iguy 9y ago
  Well, a bit of both. For centuries they've been some mixture of upper-class finishing school, and a place for the very brightest of the next generation to concentrated. Using the rich kids to fund the scholars (and using some of the scholar's prestige to attract the rich) was on average quite a productive symbiosis.

c12 9y ago

At the university I studied at it was well known that their policy was opening up campuses in Africa and China so to entice international students to the campus in England. This was for the sole reason of increasing cash flow and I know several of the Chinese students that I did my Masters with were paying more than ten times what I was for the same course which both myself and our lecturers were ashamed of. It may not be all Universities but even ten years ago it felt that they had become less about excellence in teaching and more about printing money.

smt88 9y ago
This is rampant in the US as well. Many of the students cheated to get in, sometimes with the umiversity's knowledge, and weren't fluent enough in English to participate in class. There are lots of companies writing essays and otherwise facilitating the admissions cheating, and several major universities were caught a few years ago (I believe Duke was one).
- mistermann 9y ago
  I've read many anecdotal stories like this of students complaining that the quality of their education is suffering due to a large portion of the class being utterly not qualified to be there, dragging everyone else down. I think it also has interesting potential long term implications for relative national competitiveness if you think about it regardless of whether that is a goal or not.
  - smt88 9y ago
    > complaining that the quality of their education is suffering due to a large portion of the class being utterly not qualified to be there, dragging everyone else down I'm not sure why those students are complaining... The wealthy foreign students aren't participating in class much, which effectively makes the class size smaller. They're also subsidizing the degrees of all the Americans. And a lot of them end up going back home after graduating, so they're not even competing in the same labor pool.

jdietrich 9y ago

>It seems to me it is an elitist view that when you provide a service to the unwashed masses, it must be of lower quality. That's exactly what happened, and it pre-dates the Labour government's goal of 50% participation. The Further and Higher Education Act 1992 allowed polytechnics and colleges of further education to become universities. Many of these institutions had little or no research output and had previously been dedicated to vocational instruction. There was an immediate and lasting change in how universities operated. Many of these post-1992 universities had extremely lax entrance criteria, in some cases tantamount to an open-door policy. There was a proliferation of degree courses that were obviously vocational and obviously far less demanding than a traditional degree - Sports Science, Hospitality Management, Fashion and Textiles etc. There was another drop in standards with the introduction of tuition fees. Before 1998, university teaching was funded primarily through government grants, with students paying nothing. The Labour government introduced fees of £1,000 per year, which were increased to £3,000 in 2004 and to £9,000 by the Conservative government in 2010. These higher fees were ostensibly a maximum, with the intention that universities could compete on price. The structure of the student loan system meant that there was little practical difference for students if they were paying lower fees, so all universities charged the £9,000 maximum. This fundamentally changed the character of British universities, shifting them away from the European social model and towards the American market model. Less selective universities started to aggressively advertise to lower-performing school leavers, because there was no cap on student numbers and their income was directly tied to putting bums on seats. Universities had a strong incentive to promote humanities subjects over science subjects, because the former are much cheaper to teach. International students have become a hot commodity, because they pay higher fees than domestic students; many universities now offer fast-track schemes for international students, with lower entry requirements than for domestic students. This move towards a market-led university system has driven a huge increase in pay for senior management and a huge increase in the use of casual and part-time lecturers. As in the US, we're now seeing managers earning salaries in the high six figures, while peripatetic lecturers are struggling to earn a living wage. There was a huge wave of strikes at the start of this year over cuts to university staff pensions, followed by collective legal action from students demanding compensation for missed lectures. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_universities_(United_Kingdom) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_universities_(United_Kingd... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_tuition_fees_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_tuition_fees_in_th... https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/2017/08/06/universities-stopped-sidelining-british-students-foreign-teens/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/2017/08/06/universitie...