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This reminds me of a New Statesmen article about UK universities[1], which point out university attendance has gone up 500% since 1990 and First class honours w

This reminds me of a New Statesmen article about UK universities[1], which point out university attendance has gone up 500% since 1990 and First class honours went from being awarded to 7% to being awarded to 29% of students. Either universities figured out a way of being 4x as effective teaching 5x as many students (with measurements for average intake attainment basically flat) - which would be a miracle. Or the marketisation of higher education has incentivised selling the long term reputation of the institution. By changing the institutions incentives, we've managed to destroy the educational value of the institutions themselves - because we no longer incentivise it. [1]:https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/education/2019/08/great-university-con-how-british-degree-lost-its-value https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/education/2019/08/grea...

sago 7y ago
Universities should not be responsible for both education and assessment. All of this disappears in a moment if those two are separate. But universities would resist that kicking and screaming to high heaven. Because it would not only undermine their 'great institution' claims, but educational routes that aren't universities would trump them (in terms of cost for attainment) in very short order.
- foldr 7y ago
  >Universities should not be responsible for both education and assessment. Easier said than done. In more niche disciplines, the only people qualified to evaluate student attainment are other academics in the same discipline. At UK universities, grades are routinely reviewed by an "external examiner" from a separate institution. In my experience, the result of this additional scrutiny has usually be to put grades up rather than lower them.
  - red_admiral 7y ago
    One of the many metrics that UK universities are assessed on is graduate employability - I think it's something like average salary 3 years after graduation in the latest Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF). Yes, we have a TEF to evaluate us, as well as external examiners and student surveys and other things.
    - foldr 7y ago
      Yes, I know. None of these things seems to have done much to combat grade inflation.
  - chithanh 7y ago
    >> Universities should not be responsible for both education and assessment. > Easier said than done. In more niche disciplines, the only people qualified to evaluate student attainment are other academics in the same discipline. It is actually done in quite a few places. And even when there is no non-academic alternative, at the very least the examiners could entirely come from a different university than the lecturers. In Germany there is the concept of "Staatsexamen" where a government-run examination agency recruits examiners from representatives of the profession and academia.
- seeTheAstroturf 7y ago
  The only thing I can say I learned from Engineering school is math. 4 years of my career completely changed my mind about what Engineering is. I didn't know I would be solving problems. Good that they teach math, but there's a giant disconnect between academia and industry.
  - ludamad 7y ago
    In some ways, there is 'good disconnect' if the disconnect is that the academia merely informs your thinking, not your immediate actions. It shows that you learned the fundamentals in an insular environment that doesn't muddle them. If there is full disconnect, that is rough though
    - thisisnico 7y ago
      I Live in the Border city of Windsor to Detroit. We have a University that had been hailed for its engineering program. What I'm hearing from students/employers (big 3) is that the entire program is mostly mathematics, they have no usable engineering skills to begin work in the field because of minimal labs, and methods. Almost no CAD work/design control systems etc. They're so far behind the curve it's like they ignore that computers have automated so much of the math that they are teaching. More community college engineering graduates are getting jobs at the big 3 due to actually obtaining skills needed to do the job through labs and education that's on par with today's engineering.
      - non-entity 7y ago
        > More community college engineering graduates are getting jobs at the big 3 due to actually obtaining skills needed to do the job through labs and education that's on par with today's engineering. How does this work in Canada in regards to professional licensing? In the US, it my understanding that getting an engineering license requires an accredited program and that majority of a reddit programs are 4 year bachelors degrees. Even most master degrees dont have the right accreditation.
        7y ago
- throwaway32120 7y ago
  Very much this. Removing the monopoly universities have on the (fairly questionable) credentials used for employment would go along way toward solving many of these issues. Most of the discussion about the problem with universities seem to dance around the core problem.
  - mywittyname 7y ago
    I doubt it's a coincidence that programs which require a third-party qualification exam tend to be more rigorous. E.g., engineering, nursing, medicine, law, etc.
- anifow 7y ago
  This is not a revolutionary idea. Several professional programs (law, accounting, etc.) have certification exams that do just what you are describing. It seems to require a fairly healthy, non-profit professional body in order for this to work, and you can only ever assess a fairly slim chunk of the 4-year experience, so they end up pairing in a credit-hour requirement as well. I work in large-scale assessment, and can attest that we should hold a fairly skeptical/conservative position in the power of tests to get to the "real" skill level of prospective practitioners. All of the measures currently available are fairly weak at predicting outcomes.
easytiger 7y ago
Not to mention we have increased the amount of degrees in subjects with limited practical application to an idiotic degree. So a lot of the people who might have been practically useful to society now spend their lives screaming at it
red_admiral 7y ago
The cynical part of me says that as long as everyone's doing it, you can play this game and still keep your relative position in the league tables. The total value of any given degree might well go down, but where else are the employers who have always done graduate schemes going to hire people from? Captive market.
bigfudge 7y ago
One of the metrics in league tables is % 1st class degrees (and it's not reverse weighted, as one might hope). Gaming league tables drives almost all management decisions in UK universities, because it so directly affects the bottom line.
yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
> Either universities figured out a way of being 4x as effective teaching 5x as many students (with measurements for average intake attainment basically flat) - which would be a miracle. I mostly agree with your cynicism, but this doesn't actually strike me as completely implausible. Phased differently, is it really so astonishing that with 30 years of research and development we can massively improve performance? Once Upon a Time, calculus was a super advanced thing that only the very most advanced students at University could do. Now we have high school students doing it on the regular. Other fields don't usually have the rate of improvement the Computing has, but everybody is making progress.
- nradov 7y ago
  A careful review of the scientific literature will show you that there has actually been virtually zero progress in boosting educational effectiveness over the past several decades. Many new techniques have been tried with encouraging initial successes, but nothing has really worked at scale.
watwut 7y ago
If there are prestigious employers who favor first class honor and the other school gives more of them, then the other school will get more students into those prestigious jobs. Meaning every school have to give them out just to compete. Same with grades and everything. Once student having it has advantage outside, the school that is more strict will have more students loosing those advantages. And as for quality of education and knowledge, I honestly don't have a sense that careful knowledgeable thinkers would be favored by typical management.

sago 7y ago

Universities should not be responsible for both education and assessment. All of this disappears in a moment if those two are separate. But universities would resist that kicking and screaming to high heaven. Because it would not only undermine their 'great institution' claims, but educational routes that aren't universities would trump them (in terms of cost for attainment) in very short order.

foldr 7y ago
>Universities should not be responsible for both education and assessment. Easier said than done. In more niche disciplines, the only people qualified to evaluate student attainment are other academics in the same discipline. At UK universities, grades are routinely reviewed by an "external examiner" from a separate institution. In my experience, the result of this additional scrutiny has usually be to put grades up rather than lower them.
- red_admiral 7y ago
  One of the many metrics that UK universities are assessed on is graduate employability - I think it's something like average salary 3 years after graduation in the latest Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF). Yes, we have a TEF to evaluate us, as well as external examiners and student surveys and other things.
  - foldr 7y ago
    Yes, I know. None of these things seems to have done much to combat grade inflation.
- chithanh 7y ago
  >> Universities should not be responsible for both education and assessment. > Easier said than done. In more niche disciplines, the only people qualified to evaluate student attainment are other academics in the same discipline. It is actually done in quite a few places. And even when there is no non-academic alternative, at the very least the examiners could entirely come from a different university than the lecturers. In Germany there is the concept of "Staatsexamen" where a government-run examination agency recruits examiners from representatives of the profession and academia.
seeTheAstroturf 7y ago
The only thing I can say I learned from Engineering school is math. 4 years of my career completely changed my mind about what Engineering is. I didn't know I would be solving problems. Good that they teach math, but there's a giant disconnect between academia and industry.
- ludamad 7y ago
  In some ways, there is 'good disconnect' if the disconnect is that the academia merely informs your thinking, not your immediate actions. It shows that you learned the fundamentals in an insular environment that doesn't muddle them. If there is full disconnect, that is rough though
  - thisisnico 7y ago
    I Live in the Border city of Windsor to Detroit. We have a University that had been hailed for its engineering program. What I'm hearing from students/employers (big 3) is that the entire program is mostly mathematics, they have no usable engineering skills to begin work in the field because of minimal labs, and methods. Almost no CAD work/design control systems etc. They're so far behind the curve it's like they ignore that computers have automated so much of the math that they are teaching. More community college engineering graduates are getting jobs at the big 3 due to actually obtaining skills needed to do the job through labs and education that's on par with today's engineering.
    - non-entity 7y ago
      > More community college engineering graduates are getting jobs at the big 3 due to actually obtaining skills needed to do the job through labs and education that's on par with today's engineering. How does this work in Canada in regards to professional licensing? In the US, it my understanding that getting an engineering license requires an accredited program and that majority of a reddit programs are 4 year bachelors degrees. Even most master degrees dont have the right accreditation.
      - 7y ago
throwaway32120 7y ago
Very much this. Removing the monopoly universities have on the (fairly questionable) credentials used for employment would go along way toward solving many of these issues. Most of the discussion about the problem with universities seem to dance around the core problem.
- mywittyname 7y ago
  I doubt it's a coincidence that programs which require a third-party qualification exam tend to be more rigorous. E.g., engineering, nursing, medicine, law, etc.
anifow 7y ago
This is not a revolutionary idea. Several professional programs (law, accounting, etc.) have certification exams that do just what you are describing. It seems to require a fairly healthy, non-profit professional body in order for this to work, and you can only ever assess a fairly slim chunk of the 4-year experience, so they end up pairing in a credit-hour requirement as well. I work in large-scale assessment, and can attest that we should hold a fairly skeptical/conservative position in the power of tests to get to the "real" skill level of prospective practitioners. All of the measures currently available are fairly weak at predicting outcomes.

easytiger 7y ago

Not to mention we have increased the amount of degrees in subjects with limited practical application to an idiotic degree. So a lot of the people who might have been practically useful to society now spend their lives screaming at it

red_admiral 7y ago

The cynical part of me says that as long as everyone's doing it, you can play this game and still keep your relative position in the league tables. The total value of any given degree might well go down, but where else are the employers who have always done graduate schemes going to hire people from? Captive market.

bigfudge 7y ago

One of the metrics in league tables is % 1st class degrees (and it's not reverse weighted, as one might hope). Gaming league tables drives almost all management decisions in UK universities, because it so directly affects the bottom line.

yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago

> Either universities figured out a way of being 4x as effective teaching 5x as many students (with measurements for average intake attainment basically flat) - which would be a miracle. I mostly agree with your cynicism, but this doesn't actually strike me as completely implausible. Phased differently, is it really so astonishing that with 30 years of research and development we can massively improve performance? Once Upon a Time, calculus was a super advanced thing that only the very most advanced students at University could do. Now we have high school students doing it on the regular. Other fields don't usually have the rate of improvement the Computing has, but everybody is making progress.

nradov 7y ago
A careful review of the scientific literature will show you that there has actually been virtually zero progress in boosting educational effectiveness over the past several decades. Many new techniques have been tried with encouraging initial successes, but nothing has really worked at scale.

watwut 7y ago

If there are prestigious employers who favor first class honor and the other school gives more of them, then the other school will get more students into those prestigious jobs. Meaning every school have to give them out just to compete. Same with grades and everything. Once student having it has advantage outside, the school that is more strict will have more students loosing those advantages. And as for quality of education and knowledge, I honestly don't have a sense that careful knowledgeable thinkers would be favored by typical management.