Registrarial comment and observations
Contrasting unofficial university promo videos
Certainly at least one of these is not endorsed by its University…
Must admit I found it difficult to get past about 4 minutes on this one:
No such trouble with this much more entertaining effort (not entirely suitable for younger viewers in parts).
“Middle-class students face £7,000 wallop”
Grave anxiety in the Times that middle-class students might have to pay higher contributions post-graduation:
Students from middle-class families may be denied grants and cheap loans and be charged higher tuition fees under a “double whammy” to be considered by a government review of university funding. It could add nearly £7,000 a year to the cost of university for a student from a family with an income of £50,000 a year.
The higher charges are being advocated after Lord Mandelson, the first secretary of state, announced £950m of cuts to higher education. Costs are expected to increase, whoever wins the general election. Lord Browne, the chairman of the government review, has the task of producing more money for universities without extra cost to the taxpayer and is expected to look favourably on cuts to what critics claim are middle-class subsidies.
Pure speculation of course but difficult to feel a huge amount of sympathy for this special pleading, especially in the light of another piece in the same edition of the paper which explains how much middle-class parents are prepared to stump up for extra tuition:
As many as half the children in London have received private tuition as parents become more and more desperate to win places at the best schools, new research has found. The latest edition of the Good Schools Guide has found the recession has had no apparent effect on parents’ willingness to pay between £20- £40 an hour to top up their children’s education.
The boom is being fuelled both by parents’ ambitions for children to win places at the best universities and by a glut of unemployed graduates tutoring part-time while they look for a full-time job. Tuition agencies report growth of 15%-100% last year, with popularity growing quickly in cities such as Birmingham and Manchester as well as in the traditional heartlands of London and the southeast.
Double standards?
“Substantial increases in entry to higher education for disadvantaged young people”
Widening Participation is working according to a new report from HEFCE:
The study, conducted by Dr Mark Corver of HEFCE’s Analytical Services Group, finds that there has been a substantial and sustained increase in the HE participation rate of young people living in the most disadvantaged neighbourhoods since the mid-2000s. The participation rate of young people living in the most disadvantaged areas has increased every year since the mid-2000s. Young people from those areas are now 30 per cent more likely to enter HE than they were five years ago. Participation rates have also increased in advantaged neighbourhoods over this period, but less rapidly.
These recent trends mean that more of the additional entrants to HE since the mid-2000s have come from disadvantaged neighbourhoods than advantaged neighbourhoods. This has reduced the participation difference between advantaged and disadvantaged neighbourhoods. The study places these changes in the context of the large differences in entry to HE that are found by where young people live. In the mid-1990s, one in eight young people from the most disadvantaged areas entered HE. That figure has increased to around one in five today but remains far lower than for the most advantaged areas, where well over half of young people now enter higher education.
So, this really does look like good news and a welcome relief to government given other recent reports highlighting the growth in inequality in Britain since 1980. However, there is still a long way to go. And the concern will be that in seeking to make savings universities will reduce spend on both widening participation activities and bursary schemes for those students most in need of additional financial support.
The Sun seems to have a new found interest in academic offences. It says that “160 exam cheats were booted out of university last year”.
According to the respected journal:
DIMWITS with notes scrawled on wrists and arms were among 160 exam cheats booted out of university last year. The brainless old wheeze of writing answers on body parts continued to beat hi-tech scams such as accessing the internet with mobile phones, The Sun can reveal.
We submitted a Freedom of Information request to discover the most popular ways of cheating – and which campuses had the most culprits. Worst was Teesside University in Middlesbrough – where 17 students were caught. Middlesex University expelled 15, followed by Kingston (10), Sheffield (7) and University College London (6).
Scams were: Notes written on SKIN, including palms and legs; BUYING coursework such as essays off the internet; STEALING – like the Chester University student who swiped another’s memory stick and passed work off as theirs. Faking ILLNESS to have poor results upgraded; Nipping to the LOO after hiding notes there; PLAGIARISING work on the web and HIDING notes in pencil cases and dictionaries; STAND-INS taking the exam; PRETENDING a bereavement affected performance – and lastly using a MOBILE.
Great to see tabloids interested in this particular aspect of higher education.
Russell Group and UCU lining up against government cuts
Rhetoric overload has kicked in pretty early. If we’re not careful we’ll have used the full armoury of adjectives to describe the cuts far too early in the campaign.
The UCU line, as reported in the Guardian, envisages huge class sizes and thousands of academics on the dole. The apocalyptic vision from the Russell Group is 30 university closures and ‘meltdown’ for all others.
Universities in the UK will be among the most overcrowded in the world within three years if savage government cuts to higher education go ahead, academics warned today.
The lecturers’ union, UCU, said more than £900m of cuts announced last month would fill lecture halls with “some of the biggest class sizes in the world” by 2013.
Sally Hunt, the union’s general secretary, said that “the dreams of many hardworking parents for their kids to go to university … will be over”. The cuts would send at least 14,000 academics to the dole queue.
The warning comes after top universities accused Gordon Brown of jeopardising 800 years of higher education, saying the cuts – which the Institute for Fiscal Studies says may reach £2.5bn – would “bring them to their knees”.
Leaders of the Russell Group of 20 leading universities, which includes Warwick, Liverpool and Glasgow as well as Oxford and Cambridge, said ministers failed to appreciate one of the “jewels in the country’s crown”. At least 30 universities could disappear and the rest faced possible meltdown.
Dramatic stuff (leaving aside the inexplicable omission of the University of Nottingham from the Russell Group list above). So dramatic in fact that it prompted a rather testy response from Lord Mandelson in The Guardian. In short his line is that the government has invested heavily in universities, this is not going to vanish overnight and the cuts are modest in the context of the global funding of HE:
The Russell Group of universities seemed to suggest our higher education system is teetering on the brink of collapse (Universities: cuts will bring us to our knees, 12 January).
“Cuts on university budgets will have a devastating effect,” they said, “not only on students and staff, but also on our international competitiveness, national economy and ability to recover from recession.” But the reality is different. While universities cannot escape the coming squeeze on public finances, nor are they under any kind of threat.
So the reduction of £950m in public funds over the period 2010-2013 is only one part of a complex funding picture. Given that the proposed reductions stretch between now and 2013, is it really reasonable to describe the equivalent of a reduction of under 5% over three years as “swingeing”?The Russell Group says “cuts of this magnitude in overall funding will impact on the sustainability of our research”. But teaching and research funding – even after the £180m efficiency savings and the reductions in December’s grant letter – will still actually grow between 2009-2010 and 2010-2011. Research funding will grow in real terms this year by 7%.
So, apocalypse now?
Interesting announcement this, linked to the latest Times Higher league table developments:
Thomson Reuters, a global leader in providing information, will address industry concerns over current profile systems with the Global Institutional Profiles Project. The 21st century research institution has many fluid layers, and Thomson Reuters is committed to developing an equally robust and dynamic dataset. The Profiles Project, launched in 2009, rests on the principle that one size does not fit all—as the world continues to flatten and specialize, profile databases must broaden in scope, deepen in content, and become increasingly flexible.
Our aim with the Global Institutional Profiles Project, which includes our work with Times Higher Education’s World University Rankings, is to develop a data source that provides the best informed and most effective resource to build profiles of universities and research-based institutions around the world. The Profiles Project will create data-driven portraits of globally significant research institutions, combining peer review, scholarly outputs, citation patterns, funding levels, and faculty characteristics in one comprehensive database. Thomson Reuters also brings a celebrated legacy of data transparency to the Profiles Project, operating with clear methodology and data gathering practices.
via Thomson Reuters
Whatever this actually means, and how they decide to represent the ‘fluid layers’ of the 21st century research institution, remains to be seen. Will be interesting to see how it pans out.
New Zealand claims to be top of the world in higher education
Some new year cheer from what is undoubtedly the most entertaining interpretation of league table data for some time from Education New Zealand:
In the global battle to attract international students, academic rankings have become an important tool and one of the main factors used to help students decide where they want to study. New Zealand’s consistently high quality of education has given this country the edge when it comes to staying ahead of the pack.
“University rankings have always been a bit controversial as they tend to favour older, larger universities,” says Education New Zealand’s Chief Executive Robert Stevens. “Given New Zealand’s small size, we are thrilled that our universities continue to put us on top of the academic world.”Stevens is referring to the latest Academic Ranking of World Universities released by Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China. It is one of the most used rankings in the world, and this year has featured five of New Zealand’s eight universities in its “Top 500” list.
Universities in the rest of the world clearly don’t measure up:
“No other country has 63% of its universities included on that list. We are absolutely leading the pack,” says Robert Stevens. The only country that came close to matching New Zealand’s performance was the Netherlands, with 61% of their universities on the list. Australia had 43% of their universities make the list, and the UK had 35%. The US, despite dominating the Top 100, had only 8% of their total number of universities feature on the rankings. The New Zealand universities which featured on the rankings were: University of Auckland, University of Otago, Massey University, University of Canterbury and Victoria University of Wellington.
Everyone else should probably just give up now.
Follow up to post a year ago on the big iPhone giveaway at Abilene Christian U.
How do you educate a generation of students eternally distracted by the internet, cellphones and video games? Easy. You enable them by handing out free iPhones — and then integrating the gadget into your curriculum. That’s the idea Abilene Christian University has to refresh classroom learning. Located in Texas, the private university just finished its first year of a pilot program, in which 1,000 freshman students had the choice between a free iPhone or an iPod Touch.
The initiative’s goal was to explore how the always-connected iPhone might revolutionize the classroom experience with a dash of digital interactivity. Think web apps to turn in homework, look up campus maps, watch lecture podcasts and check class schedules and grades. For classroom participation, there’s even polling software for Abilene students to digitally raise their hand. The verdict? It’s working quite well. 2,100 Abilene students, or 48 percent of the population, are now equipped with a free iPhone. Fully 97 percent of the faculty population has iPhones, too. The iPhone is aiding Abilene in giving students the information they need — when they want it, wherever they want it, said Bill Rankin, a professor of medieval studies who helped plan the initiative.
via Wired.com.
So, sounds like progress but will be interesting to see how sustainable this is and whether it leads to real changes in delivery and student learning.
A serious attempt to help us all make sense of all this difficult league table business.
The Institute for Higher Education Policy’s (IHEP) Ranking Systems Clearinghouse provides a road map of this complex rankings landscape, offering annotated links to these national and international ranking systems
and to research about rankings world-wide. It is an outgrowth of ongoing international efforts by IHEP, UNESCO-European Centre for Higher Education (UNESCO-CEPES), and the International Rankings Expert Group (IREG) to make rankings transparent and applicable for current higher education dialogue and for all engaged in this work to learn from each others experience.
The Ranking Systems Clearinghouse which is part of the rather respectable-looking IHEP certainly seems to have comprehensive coverage of the international tables. Most valuable though are the references (as implied by the title) to a host of articles covering a wide range of rankings-related topics.
Really useful stuff.
From Mark Harrison’s blog – Student Fees: Four Myths and a Certainty
Professor Mark Harrison (economist) offers an intelligent, well-argued, timely and rather pithy contribution to the fees debate:
Student fees are in the news again. These are the top-up fees paid by British and EU students to take degree courses at British universities, presently capped at £3,225 a year. They're called “top-ups” because they help to bridge the gap between the public money that goes to universities and the actual cost of degree programmes — which is considerably more. So, should our universities be allowed to raise their fees? The government has announced a review. The lobbies are brushing up their arguments. Everyone has their opinions about the justice or injustice of student fees. As it turns out, fairness and economics are closely connected, but not always in the way that the lobbies think.
He observes that low (or no) fees benefit primarily the middle-classes:
Hundreds of thousands of middle class families know they can benefit to the tune of tens of thousands of pounds from no fees or low fees for their children. In contrast, the gain to society from higher fees will be spread more thinly over millions of citizens, none of whom may feel confident of reaping a personal gain — particularly if they have children that may become students in due course.
It’s going to be an interesting review.
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