4 ms·

Good article, but I want to clarify a point since it could leave the impression that it's universities themselves driving this growth race. In the UK at least,

Good article, but I want to clarify a point since it could leave the impression that it's universities themselves driving this growth race. In the UK at least, we used to have a model where universities were funded by the government (through tax, of course) but the government also set hard limits on how many students you could enrol, with penalties for going over. The current model which Tony Blair in effect started and David Cameron completed removed this cap, and so opened the way for the current growth race. Whether a university can survive under the new model, or even be better off than before without increasing student numbers depends on many things including the amount and kind of reasearch income, the proportion of international students they have and whether they're city-centre or campus-based. I would say most UK universities were faced with a choice between masively increasing student numbers or massively cutting expenditure to survive - lots of them seem to be doing a combination of both, which is one reason we've seen so many staff strikes this year. At least in several decent (Russell Group) universities that I know a bit about personally, it was very much a case of we have to grow by x% a year just to carry on paying our staff and bills. At least in the UK, I make a case that it's not just greedy unis and fat cat vice-chancellors driving this problem. To give some numbers - the fees for home undergraduates are capped at £9250 a year and in a science or engineering degree with high equipment costs, it's hard to break even on these fees. International students are where the money really comes from, a one-year MSc degree can set you back £25k-£30k in fees alone although that usually includes doing a supervised project over the summer as well as attending an academic year's worth of teaching. Or at least, it'll include whatever supervision you can get this summer.

amiga_500 7y ago
How did we used to do this in the 1970s where the state paid for it all? We now live in a world where you don't need a secretary, because you can type up documents yourself, you can instantly send written communication via email. You can publish agendas, and other campus wide information instantly on a website. You can automate. You can distribute notes to your students for free instead of endless photocopies. Why given these gifts bestowed upon us by the tech gods, are we so hopelessly inefficient in the West? What is the actual point in doing more research, when we have all this step jump in technology, and we can't seem to do anything any more?
- killjoywashere 7y ago
  > we can't seem to do anything any more? I disagree. We do some amazing shit. Elon Musk runs circles around ULA. My own research, as a far smaller example, has scaled up nicely despite the fact that in the old model it should be virtually impossible to do any research in the career track I'm in. Tech doesn't help people who are bored (boring?). But it is like hydrazine for people who need to get serious shit done on the fringes of society.
  - amiga_500 7y ago
    But the core functions of society are no longer working. Universities provided education that pushed society forward for centuries. In just 30 years of applying growth obsessed capitalism, that has stopped working. Tech isn't my complaint. Tech helps, yet despite this huge boost, we are going backwards.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - mschuster91 7y ago
    > Elon Musk runs circles around ULA. That is because there has been a severe lack of competition until SpaceX arrived. Let's be honest there is no real alternative to Airbus and Boeing for airplanes, and it has been the same situation for space before SpaceX. Or, to express it better: Why should ULA have tried to divert to agile processes or try out new ways of doing things when the status quo reliably keeps jobs in congressional districts and money in supplier companies? The goal of these semi-governmental mega companies is not to efficiently produce goods/services, the goal is to ensure distribution of public taxpayer money to jobs, no matter how wasteful they are, in order to essentially bribe voters. Airbus, for example, could drastically cut costs and time in airplane production if they would not have to send airframes and parts sometimes three times across Europe, but that would not fly well with politicians as voters would ask "we pay r&d money to Airbus but why aren't we getting anything back?"...
    - 7y ago

amiga_500 7y ago

How did we used to do this in the 1970s where the state paid for it all? We now live in a world where you don't need a secretary, because you can type up documents yourself, you can instantly send written communication via email. You can publish agendas, and other campus wide information instantly on a website. You can automate. You can distribute notes to your students for free instead of endless photocopies. Why given these gifts bestowed upon us by the tech gods, are we so hopelessly inefficient in the West? What is the actual point in doing more research, when we have all this step jump in technology, and we can't seem to do anything any more?

killjoywashere 7y ago
> we can't seem to do anything any more? I disagree. We do some amazing shit. Elon Musk runs circles around ULA. My own research, as a far smaller example, has scaled up nicely despite the fact that in the old model it should be virtually impossible to do any research in the career track I'm in. Tech doesn't help people who are bored (boring?). But it is like hydrazine for people who need to get serious shit done on the fringes of society.
- amiga_500 7y ago
  But the core functions of society are no longer working. Universities provided education that pushed society forward for centuries. In just 30 years of applying growth obsessed capitalism, that has stopped working. Tech isn't my complaint. Tech helps, yet despite this huge boost, we are going backwards.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- mschuster91 7y ago
  > Elon Musk runs circles around ULA. That is because there has been a severe lack of competition until SpaceX arrived. Let's be honest there is no real alternative to Airbus and Boeing for airplanes, and it has been the same situation for space before SpaceX. Or, to express it better: Why should ULA have tried to divert to agile processes or try out new ways of doing things when the status quo reliably keeps jobs in congressional districts and money in supplier companies? The goal of these semi-governmental mega companies is not to efficiently produce goods/services, the goal is to ensure distribution of public taxpayer money to jobs, no matter how wasteful they are, in order to essentially bribe voters. Airbus, for example, could drastically cut costs and time in airplane production if they would not have to send airframes and parts sometimes three times across Europe, but that would not fly well with politicians as voters would ask "we pay r&d money to Airbus but why aren't we getting anything back?"...
  - 7y ago