The arts-science divide used to be a thing in British universities. The artsy (humanities and languages) undergraduates looked down on the nerdy scientists, and the scientists considered themselves a good deal brighter than the average arts student. That divide began to fade when even artsy students began to regard nerdiness as cool and respectable thanks to Bill Gates and the dotcom bubble of the 1990s.
Even before that the divide had begun to blur with the growing popularity of the social sciences . Subject fields grew up which combined the old humanities with scientific enquiry. Nowadays it is hard to say where economics, psychology, anthropology or geography would sit in the old arts/science divide. The rise and rise of joint honours degrees and combinations like physics with philosophy or engineering with Chinese have further smudged the edges.
But now the old division has returned with a vengeance, with the UK governments’ proposal to fund the old STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) from taxes as part of its review of higher education funding, while leaving the humanities wholly dependent on fees charged to students.
Humanities students could, under current proposals end up paying £6000-£9000a year for an undergraduate degree, while Scientists may have lower fees, subsidized by government funding.
The arts-science divide has suddenly remerged in sharp focus. All learning is not equal. The arts and humanities are being divided again, this time by the monetary value put on them by policymakers.
Some humanities students have seen the writing on the wall already. Many try to hedge their bets by combining history, say, with economics or business in order to increase their earning power in a market that is saturated with humanities graduates but values economics and finance. That they do this at all shows a pragmatism about the humanities and the sciences that simply did not exist in the era when ne’er the twain would meet.
Those who have watched these trends over decades say there is no doubt that there will be a shift towards the sciences at undergraduate level if the current proposals become policy. The surplus in humanities graduates will soon disappear, and we could see some not very motivated science students, mainly intent on getting an affordable first degree rather than pursuing science. The big shifts from the pure sciences into economics and business degrees that occurred in the 1990s could well be reversed in the scramble for an affordable degree.
So where will this new divide take us? There could be some creative solutions such as new hybrid degrees that compromise funding with inclination for the humanities – chemistry with history, mathematics with law, for example, so that the chemistry and mathematics part will be taken in subsidized ‘science’ departments and perhaps reduce the cost of a full degree.
Or will courses like Psychology and Geography become ‘sciences’ with more modules of biology in Psychology and more geophysics in geography in order to qualify for government money and attract more students?
And who will teach the humanities in schools? Will there be enough good, inspirational English and history teachers who genuinely passionate about their subjects? The situation where economics graduates are hired to teach maths A level because of a shortage of maths teachers may become a thing of the past. In 30 years time we may either be importing history teachers from other countries, or history will be taught in schools by people with a maths degree topped up with a year max of history training.
Interesting that this should be happening at a time when China and Singapore have realised that they may have overemphasized the sciences, and that to have good managers and civil servants they need to develop the teaching of humanities and social sciences in their universities. They see the limitations of technocratic management. Singapore has invited in Yale University to set up a liberal arts campus. Hong Kong's universities are shifting to four-year degrees so that students can get a strong grounding in the liberal arts in their first year, before specialising.
The real problem, whether in Britain or Asia, is the huge difference in attitudes towards the humanities on the one hand and the sciences on the other by governments and policy makers. What we really need is a mixture of both and of individuals passionate about their chosen subject rather than forced by economic circumstances or government diktat to chose another calling.
Showing posts with label universities. Show all posts
Showing posts with label universities. Show all posts
Friday, 5 November 2010
Sunday, 24 January 2010
Stuff and Nonsense
Or How Much Do You Need to Know
Graduates pop out of the University sausage factory, clutching their certificates, and weeping with the exhaustion of juggling a 20 hour job to pay for courses that cost as much as a family starter-home, while slogging to get a First, without which you cannot be short-listed for any decent job. But employers (what a demanding bunch they are!) still insist that graduates these days know very little Stuff.
That is nonsense. Graduates have never known enough Stuff.
It seems the problem is getting worse, because in the internet age, employers have realised how much Stuff is out there, a whole Googleful of Stuff, several internet universes and galaxies of it.
Stuff is what is all around you and happening all the time. You can never know all of it because it is constantly changing, there is new Stuff every day.
Employers want graduates to apply their specialist knowledge to new Stuff. In some quarters (the high tech industries) this is known as 'innovation'. But in most service-oriented companies such as banks, it means that young recruits must hold their own at a cocktail party and make intelligent pronouncements on topical and ethical issues. Topical is important: the best Stuff is what is in the newspapers, it’s what everyone is talking about. You need to have an opinion on President Obama’s health reforms in America even if you have always used the NHS, because you need to understand that Obama’s reforms can affect the direction of US politics. You must know about the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and how they are impacting on Life As We Know It, you must be conversant on the Great Climate Change Debate (if you don’t know what happened at Copenhagen, bone up on it now) so that you can knowledgeably discuss economic losses from global warming (if you are an economist) or legal implications of (if you’re studying law).
All that is Stuff.
In the old days, before Facebook, and before newspapers and TV were dominated by vacuous celebrities, you got most Stuff from the news media. Early lessons in developing instant opinions on Stuff came from hearing Dad shout at the TV.
But that was then and this is now.
You no longer pick up Stuff. You have to go in search of it. Usually via Google, which does not necessarily provide the best overview of Stuff you need, much of it being out of date. Stuff has become pretty random, and therefore elusive and even more sought after than before.
The need to know Stuff has become so important, it is being taught.
New courses are springing up on campuses, like weeds between the cracks of education, and some of them are at quite prestigious institutions, too.
The London School of Economics has just started its own Bluffers guide to Stuff opaquely called “LSE 100”. (100 what? 100 facts? 100 lessons? 100 per cent?). It is compulsory for all students a bit like “study skills” tends to be, but packaged as “skills graduates need in the modern world”, a marketing slogan that could apply to anything in education.
LSE 100 will involve “group work, debates and exercises” so that students form opinions about events around them and are able to articulate them. In other words, they will talk to each other. In that sense, it is completely different from other undergraduate interactions like snooker, table football and karaoke.
Why does the LSE need to do this? One reason is that it has set the grade barrier so high for entry, particularly in Economics, that it is getting too many number-crunching nerds and not enough communicators who can tell you why on earth they are crunching all these numbers. Students need learn to debate, predict and to “think”. Now there’s a thing - a world-class institution where students aren’t particularly good at “thinking”.
The LSE has a particular problem because its courses are mostly delivered in huge lectures with next to no interaction between lecturer and students. Its “teaching”, unlike its research, has consistently been given low marks by students. In other words the only value added that LSE seems to provide, is its brand stamp on the CV of its students, not on their knowledge or thinking. That did not matter in boom times when graduates went straight from the LSE into the top banks and consultancies. It does now when employers are picking and choosing.
Imperial College has for some time had “communication skills” as a course for its students. Many science degrees at other universities include some non-science – philosophy or history of science is popular. They must not only prepare for careers in theoretical physics these days, they must also apply their scientific learning to Stuff and be able to tell non-scientists about it in an interesting way.
Less specialised institutions are so concerned that their students are lacking in Stuffing that they are redesigning courses, some are even talking about introducing liberal arts degrees, which can be anything you want them to be, and are generally a foundation course in Stuff. Other institutions are introducing general courses in the first (or even second) years of study. General courses cover a fair bit of Stuff, which, after all, used to be called General Knowledge.
Employers are a canny bunch, they are adept at spotting where there is a shortage. So, for example, they shout about British and American graduates not having foreign languages, and demand fluency in at least two before they will hire, even if recruits never, ever use those languages again. Because employers see fewer and fewer interviewees who can hold their own on Stuff, they want candidates to have a lot of it, whether or not they need it.
I have a theory, when books have disappeared, and have been completely replaced by Stuff, most of it only digitally available, employers will be looking for recruits who are proficient in Literature and only books of 500 pages and above will count.
Institutions like the LSE that do not now do so, will add literature and philosophy courses. They will have to, or their students will be well and truly stuffed when they come out into the real world of never having enough.
Graduates pop out of the University sausage factory, clutching their certificates, and weeping with the exhaustion of juggling a 20 hour job to pay for courses that cost as much as a family starter-home, while slogging to get a First, without which you cannot be short-listed for any decent job. But employers (what a demanding bunch they are!) still insist that graduates these days know very little Stuff.
That is nonsense. Graduates have never known enough Stuff.
It seems the problem is getting worse, because in the internet age, employers have realised how much Stuff is out there, a whole Googleful of Stuff, several internet universes and galaxies of it.
Stuff is what is all around you and happening all the time. You can never know all of it because it is constantly changing, there is new Stuff every day.
Employers want graduates to apply their specialist knowledge to new Stuff. In some quarters (the high tech industries) this is known as 'innovation'. But in most service-oriented companies such as banks, it means that young recruits must hold their own at a cocktail party and make intelligent pronouncements on topical and ethical issues. Topical is important: the best Stuff is what is in the newspapers, it’s what everyone is talking about. You need to have an opinion on President Obama’s health reforms in America even if you have always used the NHS, because you need to understand that Obama’s reforms can affect the direction of US politics. You must know about the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and how they are impacting on Life As We Know It, you must be conversant on the Great Climate Change Debate (if you don’t know what happened at Copenhagen, bone up on it now) so that you can knowledgeably discuss economic losses from global warming (if you are an economist) or legal implications of (if you’re studying law).
All that is Stuff.
In the old days, before Facebook, and before newspapers and TV were dominated by vacuous celebrities, you got most Stuff from the news media. Early lessons in developing instant opinions on Stuff came from hearing Dad shout at the TV.
But that was then and this is now.
You no longer pick up Stuff. You have to go in search of it. Usually via Google, which does not necessarily provide the best overview of Stuff you need, much of it being out of date. Stuff has become pretty random, and therefore elusive and even more sought after than before.
The need to know Stuff has become so important, it is being taught.
New courses are springing up on campuses, like weeds between the cracks of education, and some of them are at quite prestigious institutions, too.
The London School of Economics has just started its own Bluffers guide to Stuff opaquely called “LSE 100”. (100 what? 100 facts? 100 lessons? 100 per cent?). It is compulsory for all students a bit like “study skills” tends to be, but packaged as “skills graduates need in the modern world”, a marketing slogan that could apply to anything in education.
LSE 100 will involve “group work, debates and exercises” so that students form opinions about events around them and are able to articulate them. In other words, they will talk to each other. In that sense, it is completely different from other undergraduate interactions like snooker, table football and karaoke.
Why does the LSE need to do this? One reason is that it has set the grade barrier so high for entry, particularly in Economics, that it is getting too many number-crunching nerds and not enough communicators who can tell you why on earth they are crunching all these numbers. Students need learn to debate, predict and to “think”. Now there’s a thing - a world-class institution where students aren’t particularly good at “thinking”.
The LSE has a particular problem because its courses are mostly delivered in huge lectures with next to no interaction between lecturer and students. Its “teaching”, unlike its research, has consistently been given low marks by students. In other words the only value added that LSE seems to provide, is its brand stamp on the CV of its students, not on their knowledge or thinking. That did not matter in boom times when graduates went straight from the LSE into the top banks and consultancies. It does now when employers are picking and choosing.
Imperial College has for some time had “communication skills” as a course for its students. Many science degrees at other universities include some non-science – philosophy or history of science is popular. They must not only prepare for careers in theoretical physics these days, they must also apply their scientific learning to Stuff and be able to tell non-scientists about it in an interesting way.
Less specialised institutions are so concerned that their students are lacking in Stuffing that they are redesigning courses, some are even talking about introducing liberal arts degrees, which can be anything you want them to be, and are generally a foundation course in Stuff. Other institutions are introducing general courses in the first (or even second) years of study. General courses cover a fair bit of Stuff, which, after all, used to be called General Knowledge.
Employers are a canny bunch, they are adept at spotting where there is a shortage. So, for example, they shout about British and American graduates not having foreign languages, and demand fluency in at least two before they will hire, even if recruits never, ever use those languages again. Because employers see fewer and fewer interviewees who can hold their own on Stuff, they want candidates to have a lot of it, whether or not they need it.
I have a theory, when books have disappeared, and have been completely replaced by Stuff, most of it only digitally available, employers will be looking for recruits who are proficient in Literature and only books of 500 pages and above will count.
Institutions like the LSE that do not now do so, will add literature and philosophy courses. They will have to, or their students will be well and truly stuffed when they come out into the real world of never having enough.
Saturday, 12 December 2009
A world in which every graduate is a lawyer or economist
“We used to be divided up into the left brained and right brained, now there’s only lawyers and economists.” I heard this wry quip at the University of London Union the other day, and at first I thought it was a new wrinkle on the old “arts versus sciences” divide.
It wasn’t. It was a reflection of how student subject choices are converging around a far smaller number of subjects than before, despite a huge range of new degree offerings in all sorts of subjects, including Golfing, Surfing and Acupuncture.
In the past the verbally inclined studied History and English and a range of other “essay type” subjects. Those who might once have studied the humanities are turning in increasing numbers to studying Law. The more mathematical who might have done Science or Maths, are enrolling in Economics and Business Studies courses in droves, causing severe shortages in the Sciences and Engineering.
Medicine has always been popular, but the biologists and sociologists of old are turning increasingly to Psychology. Psychology is the generic social science.
Law, Economics, Psychology have been among the decade’s fastest growing degree subjects. Talk to ambitious sixth formers and, including Medicine, you’d think there was nothing else.
Whole areas of academic study are contracting. Languages graduates and sociologists are among the endangered species. And any kind of pure science is met with blank stares of pure incomprehension. You want to do what?
Of course the bunching up of subject choices is as much a result of rising student debt and salary expectations as it is due to fashion. It is the economics of studying economics, that counts not the subject itself. It is the logic (in career terms) of studying Law that drives the choice.
Universities have colluded in this, cashing in deftly on rising demand. Law can be delivered at relatively low cost, you just pack more students into the same lecture theatre. Law departments can be expanded more easily than say Dentistry, Veterinary Science and Architecture, which require considerable investment in space and training equipment.
The US has long believed it has too many lawyers. There is a widely held belief that great deal of litigation occurs simply to keep them in business. Yet law schools continue to churn out more and more of them. And why do we need so many Economists? One wit suggested to me that it was draw up projections of how many lawyers a company needs.
In some fields, students cotton on early that a fad is passing. In the 1990s, particularly in the run up to the dot.com boom, many were rushing to study Computing and Computer Science. Nowadays these graduates are the most likely to be still seeking a job six months after graduation. Many countries trained too many nuclear physicists in the 1970s and 80s as planned nuclear power stations failed to come on stream thanks to strong environmentalist lobbies. A nuclear scientist is a rare beast these days. Other gluts such as Medics in Germany in the 1980s and 1990s and Economists in the Netherlands in the 1990s were exported to shortage countries elsewhere in the European Union, so that the oversupply was not so apparent.
Law tends to be more country-specific so it is easier to spot an oversupply of lawyers.
Even the Law Society in England seems to think we have too many law graduates. It has been warning for some time that there aren’t enough training places for the vast numbers coming out of university law courses. In other words, the chances of actually becoming a lawyer are becoming slimmer.
In an unprecedented move this summer the Law Society started a campaign to warn university and secondary school students against choosing law as a career and is examining other ways to keep student numbers down.
Of course those will law degrees don’t necessarily want to be lawyers. Many politicians, thinktank wonks, businessmen, civil servants and even film-makers have law degrees, the training that they get at university is very transferable. But all the evidence points to students actually wanting to become lawyers. In 2007 shortly after the demise of Lehmann Brothers, which precipitated the recession, I spoke to the careers department of the London School Economics. Suddenly those who had been considering Banking as a career were now considering Law. How else would they pay off the cost of their degree?
I for one, think it is remarkably honest and brave of the Law Society to tell it how it is. Usually there is a conspiracy of silence around a glut. Some years ago Media Studies was all the rage despite the general derision in which such degrees were held by practicing journalists.
Universities piled on Media courses and they were lapped up. Some universities even invested in state of the art newsrooms and TV studios, nowadays forlorn and empty as a rust-belt car plant save for the occasional student editing some footage for a YouTube spot.
For a while it did not matter as so many tech-savvy media studies graduates were hoovered up by the expanding online-world. Every company had to have its webpage. That web page had to be constantly renewed, then redesigned and upgraded. That Media Studies graduates had been hoping to be TV news babes rather than webmonkeys was put aside. From the point of view from the universities, their graduates had jobs and could begin paying off their student loans.
But now the contraction in the traditional media industry has become so severe and, the skills mismatch has become heartbreakingly evident.
The problem is that unlike even a decade ago, degree subjects are not selected on the basis of individual talents or interests, but on trends and income (on graduation).
Everyone is looking out for the next big thing and if they find it, they are damned as hell going to go for it - all of them at once. It is a brave student who is maverick enough to study Latin or Linguistics without a thought for what they will do afterwards. If I were an employer I would hire them for simply daring to be different, and for not caring about the economics of graduate subject choice.
Still, there is a trend that intrigues me, a glimmer on the horizon: the growth and growth of philosophy and theology degrees. Those must be the ones philosophic about their future, or else praying that eventually something will turn up.
It wasn’t. It was a reflection of how student subject choices are converging around a far smaller number of subjects than before, despite a huge range of new degree offerings in all sorts of subjects, including Golfing, Surfing and Acupuncture.
In the past the verbally inclined studied History and English and a range of other “essay type” subjects. Those who might once have studied the humanities are turning in increasing numbers to studying Law. The more mathematical who might have done Science or Maths, are enrolling in Economics and Business Studies courses in droves, causing severe shortages in the Sciences and Engineering.
Medicine has always been popular, but the biologists and sociologists of old are turning increasingly to Psychology. Psychology is the generic social science.
Law, Economics, Psychology have been among the decade’s fastest growing degree subjects. Talk to ambitious sixth formers and, including Medicine, you’d think there was nothing else.
Whole areas of academic study are contracting. Languages graduates and sociologists are among the endangered species. And any kind of pure science is met with blank stares of pure incomprehension. You want to do what?
Of course the bunching up of subject choices is as much a result of rising student debt and salary expectations as it is due to fashion. It is the economics of studying economics, that counts not the subject itself. It is the logic (in career terms) of studying Law that drives the choice.
Universities have colluded in this, cashing in deftly on rising demand. Law can be delivered at relatively low cost, you just pack more students into the same lecture theatre. Law departments can be expanded more easily than say Dentistry, Veterinary Science and Architecture, which require considerable investment in space and training equipment.
The US has long believed it has too many lawyers. There is a widely held belief that great deal of litigation occurs simply to keep them in business. Yet law schools continue to churn out more and more of them. And why do we need so many Economists? One wit suggested to me that it was draw up projections of how many lawyers a company needs.
In some fields, students cotton on early that a fad is passing. In the 1990s, particularly in the run up to the dot.com boom, many were rushing to study Computing and Computer Science. Nowadays these graduates are the most likely to be still seeking a job six months after graduation. Many countries trained too many nuclear physicists in the 1970s and 80s as planned nuclear power stations failed to come on stream thanks to strong environmentalist lobbies. A nuclear scientist is a rare beast these days. Other gluts such as Medics in Germany in the 1980s and 1990s and Economists in the Netherlands in the 1990s were exported to shortage countries elsewhere in the European Union, so that the oversupply was not so apparent.
Law tends to be more country-specific so it is easier to spot an oversupply of lawyers.
Even the Law Society in England seems to think we have too many law graduates. It has been warning for some time that there aren’t enough training places for the vast numbers coming out of university law courses. In other words, the chances of actually becoming a lawyer are becoming slimmer.
In an unprecedented move this summer the Law Society started a campaign to warn university and secondary school students against choosing law as a career and is examining other ways to keep student numbers down.
Of course those will law degrees don’t necessarily want to be lawyers. Many politicians, thinktank wonks, businessmen, civil servants and even film-makers have law degrees, the training that they get at university is very transferable. But all the evidence points to students actually wanting to become lawyers. In 2007 shortly after the demise of Lehmann Brothers, which precipitated the recession, I spoke to the careers department of the London School Economics. Suddenly those who had been considering Banking as a career were now considering Law. How else would they pay off the cost of their degree?
I for one, think it is remarkably honest and brave of the Law Society to tell it how it is. Usually there is a conspiracy of silence around a glut. Some years ago Media Studies was all the rage despite the general derision in which such degrees were held by practicing journalists.
Universities piled on Media courses and they were lapped up. Some universities even invested in state of the art newsrooms and TV studios, nowadays forlorn and empty as a rust-belt car plant save for the occasional student editing some footage for a YouTube spot.
For a while it did not matter as so many tech-savvy media studies graduates were hoovered up by the expanding online-world. Every company had to have its webpage. That web page had to be constantly renewed, then redesigned and upgraded. That Media Studies graduates had been hoping to be TV news babes rather than webmonkeys was put aside. From the point of view from the universities, their graduates had jobs and could begin paying off their student loans.
But now the contraction in the traditional media industry has become so severe and, the skills mismatch has become heartbreakingly evident.
The problem is that unlike even a decade ago, degree subjects are not selected on the basis of individual talents or interests, but on trends and income (on graduation).
Everyone is looking out for the next big thing and if they find it, they are damned as hell going to go for it - all of them at once. It is a brave student who is maverick enough to study Latin or Linguistics without a thought for what they will do afterwards. If I were an employer I would hire them for simply daring to be different, and for not caring about the economics of graduate subject choice.
Still, there is a trend that intrigues me, a glimmer on the horizon: the growth and growth of philosophy and theology degrees. Those must be the ones philosophic about their future, or else praying that eventually something will turn up.
Sunday, 15 November 2009
Are University Vice-Chancellors the new Bankers?
We may not stop loathing bankers any time soon, but we might have a new hate-figure: university vice-chancellors on fat salaries intent on pushing up university tuition fees when they come up for review sometime next year.
Why do VCs want families currently forking out £3,200 a year for an undergraduate degree, to pay £7000-£20,000 a year in tuition fees in addition to the income received from taxes? They all say it is so that universities can remain “world class”.
But the real reason, many including junior lecturers suspect, is so that vice-chancellors and other senior university staff can increase their pay. Earlier this year a number of institutions were forced to freeze VC pay after an outcry by lecturers and students over the higher-than-the-prime-minister pay of many VCs, and many-times-higher-than-inflation pay rises over the past few years.
The prime ministers remuneration is emerging as a benchmark for many top public sector salaries, whether they are universities, the BBC, or other civil servants. Everyone who earns more than the PM must now justify it. VCs earn on average £194,000 a year including benefits. That’s £10,000 more than the PM. A number of top-hitting VCs draw more than £300,000 a year from the public purse.
That may seem a lot to you and I and the PM, but for VCs it’s peanuts when across the Pond almost two dozen college “presidents” earn over US$1 million. When VCs say world class, they really mean world class lectures and tutorials, they mean world class salaries.
Their argument for “deserving” this is similar to the argument used by bankers: if they don’t get big bucks, they’ll leave for the countries where they can. But all is not well in the land of academia-honey, where salaries are the world class benchmark. Students and families are up in arms in California in ferocious protest against a 30 per cent tuition fee hike. They are out in the streets, perhaps for the first time since the Vietnam war. That’s a pretty serious protest, and not one that VCs want to see here.
The Netherlands, the first European Union country to introduce tuition fees in the mid-1980s, increased them by around 5-10 per cent a year. But in the mid-1990s when the government proposed a 50 per cent fee hike, students blocked railway lines, bringing transport to a halt. The government was forced to back down, finally agreeing to a 25 per cent fee rise over three years.
If anything that should indicate the limits to world class fee rises. Yet in this country VCs seem to think increases of 100 per cent or more are realistic.
The government is attempting to call their bluff somewhat, by focusing on value-for-money education after embarrassing parliamentary committee hearings on dumbed down university exams, and institutions that provide only two hours of tutor-student contact time for £3,200. But VCs continue to push the notion that world class universities don’t come cheap. Recently they even evoked the twin globalisation bogeymen hoping to frighten us into emptying our pockets. India and China will “catch up and overtake” us if we are not careful. Now, anyone who has seen the average university lecture theatre in Beijing or Delhi will be stifling their guffaws, only to be laughing on the other side of their faces when they realise this argument is seriously being used to make us pay more towards tuition.
I am no expert on the world class university, so lets hear from the experts:
“There is no universal recipe or magic formula for making a world class university, but nonetheless, one cardinal rule seems to be that money alone will not buy you a coveted spot on the annual list of the world’s elite institutions,” said Jamil Salmi in his report for the World Bank on “The Challenge of Establishing World Class Institutions,” hot off the presses this summer.
World class status is not achieved by self-declaration either, the report notes. Rather, elite status is conferred by the outside world on the basis of international recognition.
I’m willing to go with the World Bank on that. But the World Bank does say that a major feature of worldclassness is the ability to attract talent from other countries and yes, big research budgets do count.
So lets examine that, because VCs have been saying they will lose the best talent to “abroad” without higher tuition fees (read VC salaries). Cambridge University VC Alison Richard was lured back to Britain from Yale University in 2003, which is the opposite direction to what VCs are saying. And for more than a decade, English universities have been a magnet for academics from the rest of Europe. The brain gain in favour of Britain has far, far outweighed the brain drain in the last 15 years, even without high tuition fees. We’ve even gained scientists from the US, because during the Bush era, stem cell research was a no-no in the US, but was flourishing here.
But back to the people who count: those who want an education and have to pay for it. World class university status is irrelevant to the majority of school leavers who are applying for undergraduate degrees in their own country. What matters to them is the national standing of the university – and as it happens, we have four universities in the world’s top ten, not just world class but world leading, for them to aspire to. Postgraduates and researchers look at courses in different countries before making a choice. But postgraduates are already charged “the market rate” in England, so the link between fees and worldclassness is not really about them.
World class is really not about class or standards at all. It is a euphemism for the “global market”. A recent study John Aubrey Douglas at the University of Berkeley and Ruth Keeling at Cambridge University found that university fees are driven up towards to what the student “market” will bear, not just within countries but globally. The higher the price, the better the institution, the market seems to believe. In the US “pricing equals prestige” is now the major influence on fees for graduate students, in particular for professional degrees such as medicine, law, engineering and business, the study of two dozen universities in the US and Europe concluded.
This trend, which started in the US, is now becoming apparent in Europe, often, the study notes, irrespective of any link with the quality of the teaching or with institutional costs. In fact, the authors detect a “growing disassociation between pricing and the actual costs of an educational programme.”
The problem with these trends is that they are dependent on students taking out huge loans and believing that future earnings will help them pay them off. That belief has been severely shaken by the recession. Despite the recession, the study predicts that institutions that are globally competitive will continue to “look over their shoulder at what their perceived peer or near-peer institutions are charging for specific degrees and programmes.” That does not bode well, if say, the US emerges from recession long before we do.
Some universities are even using the recession as an excuse for wanting to charge more, because university budgets - paid out of taxation - are being squeezed.
Andrew Oswald, professor of Economics at Warwick University (whose vice chancellor is one Prof. Nigel Thrift, oh the irony of it) wants it both ways. “It would help if there was more public sector funding in Research and Development, but students need to pay for their own education,” he told the Daily Telegraph.
Demanding more public funding while wanting pay levels like the private sector? Very much like bankers, then.
Why do VCs want families currently forking out £3,200 a year for an undergraduate degree, to pay £7000-£20,000 a year in tuition fees in addition to the income received from taxes? They all say it is so that universities can remain “world class”.
But the real reason, many including junior lecturers suspect, is so that vice-chancellors and other senior university staff can increase their pay. Earlier this year a number of institutions were forced to freeze VC pay after an outcry by lecturers and students over the higher-than-the-prime-minister pay of many VCs, and many-times-higher-than-inflation pay rises over the past few years.
The prime ministers remuneration is emerging as a benchmark for many top public sector salaries, whether they are universities, the BBC, or other civil servants. Everyone who earns more than the PM must now justify it. VCs earn on average £194,000 a year including benefits. That’s £10,000 more than the PM. A number of top-hitting VCs draw more than £300,000 a year from the public purse.
That may seem a lot to you and I and the PM, but for VCs it’s peanuts when across the Pond almost two dozen college “presidents” earn over US$1 million. When VCs say world class, they really mean world class lectures and tutorials, they mean world class salaries.
Their argument for “deserving” this is similar to the argument used by bankers: if they don’t get big bucks, they’ll leave for the countries where they can. But all is not well in the land of academia-honey, where salaries are the world class benchmark. Students and families are up in arms in California in ferocious protest against a 30 per cent tuition fee hike. They are out in the streets, perhaps for the first time since the Vietnam war. That’s a pretty serious protest, and not one that VCs want to see here.
The Netherlands, the first European Union country to introduce tuition fees in the mid-1980s, increased them by around 5-10 per cent a year. But in the mid-1990s when the government proposed a 50 per cent fee hike, students blocked railway lines, bringing transport to a halt. The government was forced to back down, finally agreeing to a 25 per cent fee rise over three years.
If anything that should indicate the limits to world class fee rises. Yet in this country VCs seem to think increases of 100 per cent or more are realistic.
The government is attempting to call their bluff somewhat, by focusing on value-for-money education after embarrassing parliamentary committee hearings on dumbed down university exams, and institutions that provide only two hours of tutor-student contact time for £3,200. But VCs continue to push the notion that world class universities don’t come cheap. Recently they even evoked the twin globalisation bogeymen hoping to frighten us into emptying our pockets. India and China will “catch up and overtake” us if we are not careful. Now, anyone who has seen the average university lecture theatre in Beijing or Delhi will be stifling their guffaws, only to be laughing on the other side of their faces when they realise this argument is seriously being used to make us pay more towards tuition.
I am no expert on the world class university, so lets hear from the experts:
“There is no universal recipe or magic formula for making a world class university, but nonetheless, one cardinal rule seems to be that money alone will not buy you a coveted spot on the annual list of the world’s elite institutions,” said Jamil Salmi in his report for the World Bank on “The Challenge of Establishing World Class Institutions,” hot off the presses this summer.
World class status is not achieved by self-declaration either, the report notes. Rather, elite status is conferred by the outside world on the basis of international recognition.
I’m willing to go with the World Bank on that. But the World Bank does say that a major feature of worldclassness is the ability to attract talent from other countries and yes, big research budgets do count.
So lets examine that, because VCs have been saying they will lose the best talent to “abroad” without higher tuition fees (read VC salaries). Cambridge University VC Alison Richard was lured back to Britain from Yale University in 2003, which is the opposite direction to what VCs are saying. And for more than a decade, English universities have been a magnet for academics from the rest of Europe. The brain gain in favour of Britain has far, far outweighed the brain drain in the last 15 years, even without high tuition fees. We’ve even gained scientists from the US, because during the Bush era, stem cell research was a no-no in the US, but was flourishing here.
But back to the people who count: those who want an education and have to pay for it. World class university status is irrelevant to the majority of school leavers who are applying for undergraduate degrees in their own country. What matters to them is the national standing of the university – and as it happens, we have four universities in the world’s top ten, not just world class but world leading, for them to aspire to. Postgraduates and researchers look at courses in different countries before making a choice. But postgraduates are already charged “the market rate” in England, so the link between fees and worldclassness is not really about them.
World class is really not about class or standards at all. It is a euphemism for the “global market”. A recent study John Aubrey Douglas at the University of Berkeley and Ruth Keeling at Cambridge University found that university fees are driven up towards to what the student “market” will bear, not just within countries but globally. The higher the price, the better the institution, the market seems to believe. In the US “pricing equals prestige” is now the major influence on fees for graduate students, in particular for professional degrees such as medicine, law, engineering and business, the study of two dozen universities in the US and Europe concluded.
This trend, which started in the US, is now becoming apparent in Europe, often, the study notes, irrespective of any link with the quality of the teaching or with institutional costs. In fact, the authors detect a “growing disassociation between pricing and the actual costs of an educational programme.”
The problem with these trends is that they are dependent on students taking out huge loans and believing that future earnings will help them pay them off. That belief has been severely shaken by the recession. Despite the recession, the study predicts that institutions that are globally competitive will continue to “look over their shoulder at what their perceived peer or near-peer institutions are charging for specific degrees and programmes.” That does not bode well, if say, the US emerges from recession long before we do.
Some universities are even using the recession as an excuse for wanting to charge more, because university budgets - paid out of taxation - are being squeezed.
Andrew Oswald, professor of Economics at Warwick University (whose vice chancellor is one Prof. Nigel Thrift, oh the irony of it) wants it both ways. “It would help if there was more public sector funding in Research and Development, but students need to pay for their own education,” he told the Daily Telegraph.
Demanding more public funding while wanting pay levels like the private sector? Very much like bankers, then.
Monday, 12 October 2009
Goodbye Oxbridge, Hello Golden Triangle
There was elation this week in Bloomsbury, London’s university enclave, and a dark, dark cloud over Oxford as the latest Times Higher-QS higher education rankings put University College London (UCL) ahead of Oxford for the first time.
UCL emerged as number four in the world, just behind Harvard, Cambridge and Yale. Non-Oxford academics could barely hide their smirks: Oxford had taken its eye off the ball and allowed an upstart without so much as a single “dreaming spire” to steal its crown. Just as galling, Oxford shared fifth place with Imperial College, another London upstart!
Oxford is still top in other rankings, but that is not the point. Oxford never considered any other rival outside of Cambridge. Both have their centuries-old traditions, medieval cloisters and quadrangles and a term symbolising academic quality and leadership that they share -Oxbridge. What does London University have to match that? A massive “Stalinist” art-deco structure (Senate House) that would not look out of place in a batman movie and said to have been earmarked by Hitler as his likely headquarters once he had conquered Britain.
Imperial College has been snapping at Oxford’s heels for some time. But the “technical college” did not count. Oxford still produced the country’s politicians and lawyers, and convinced itself it could hold its own in pure science, while Imperial was for “engineers” (said with a slight sneer).
Not far from Bloomsbury in a straight line that runs from Holborn, to Aldwych and the Strand with their hotch-potch of Victorian and more modern buildings are the London School of Economics and Kings College. They are further down the rankings but both have formidable reputations.
So what is behind the rise and rise of London? There are a few obvious areas. UCL and Imperial are world class institutions for biomedical research and UCL has been described as having “the world’s best medical school”. Certainly, Oxford and Cambridge medical students seem to spend a lot of time in their second and third years worrying how to get “down” to London to further their careers.
Oxford and Cambridge have huge and ancient endowments but the Wellcome foundation, Britain’s largest charity, and many others provide massive funds to UCL and Imperial for research.
Meanwhile, many science postgrads take one look at Oxford’s manky old-fashioned facilities and make a bee-line for Imperial with its spanking state-of-the-art laboratories in leafy Kensington, or send off for prospectuses for US universities.
But it is not just about science. There is a difference in atmosphere in humanities and social sciences. Oxford is cosy, smug, traditional and quintessentially British.
UCL is edgier, slightly bohemian, more modern in outlook and a great deal more outward looking (it calls itself the Global University). The same is true of LSE - if rather less bohemian and edgy - with more than half its students from overseas.
For years banks and top legal firms favoured Oxbridge, not just as academic powerhouses, but the collegiate atmosphere meant their graduates were eminently clubbable, very suitable for a life in legal chambers and bank board rooms. But there were changes afoot with globalisation and emerging markets. The British club had given way to the global village.
The LSE was closer to the City and specialised in the subjects the City wanted in an era of globalisation. Imperial had the mathematical and scientific brains for that and the new knowledge economy.
A partner in a magic circle law firm recently told me that in recruiting new graduates they took “ten from Oxford, ten from Cambridge and ten from “elsewhere, with an international background,” a euphemism for London, with a sprinkling from Warwick, Edinburgh and St Andrews.
Oxford still believed it was turning out leaders rather than technocrats. It should have seen the warning signs. Oxford has not disappeared from the top, but the top has become a little more crowded.
The Foreign Office and Whitehall threw open their doors beyond Oxbridge more than a decade ago looking for talent with an international outlook. Recruitment agencies, which burgeoned during the boom years, had begun to refer to the Golden Triangle of Oxford, Cambridge and London. Elite (ie. private) schools began to notice how hard it was to get their top scholars into London’s best colleges. Last year the head of a top boys school which regularly gets 30-40 pupils into Oxbridge was enraged when not a single offer of a place was forthcoming from UCL. He complained to the admissions office and was given short shrift.
Preparing pupils for Oxford and Cambridge and their idiosyncratic admissions processes (particularly the interview) had been honed to a fine art by such schools. They successfully turned their pupils into the kind of people those universities wanted. They had not yet got a handle on how London (interviews are a rarity) worked.
The emergence of UCL has been a wake up call for them, too. One highly sought-after school has rewritten its prospectus. Its 2008 edition said “we regularly get many pupils into Oxford and Cambridge.” The new one says “We regularly get many pupils into the Golden Triangle of Oxford, Cambridge and London Universities.”
UCL emerged as number four in the world, just behind Harvard, Cambridge and Yale. Non-Oxford academics could barely hide their smirks: Oxford had taken its eye off the ball and allowed an upstart without so much as a single “dreaming spire” to steal its crown. Just as galling, Oxford shared fifth place with Imperial College, another London upstart!
Oxford is still top in other rankings, but that is not the point. Oxford never considered any other rival outside of Cambridge. Both have their centuries-old traditions, medieval cloisters and quadrangles and a term symbolising academic quality and leadership that they share -Oxbridge. What does London University have to match that? A massive “Stalinist” art-deco structure (Senate House) that would not look out of place in a batman movie and said to have been earmarked by Hitler as his likely headquarters once he had conquered Britain.
Imperial College has been snapping at Oxford’s heels for some time. But the “technical college” did not count. Oxford still produced the country’s politicians and lawyers, and convinced itself it could hold its own in pure science, while Imperial was for “engineers” (said with a slight sneer).
Not far from Bloomsbury in a straight line that runs from Holborn, to Aldwych and the Strand with their hotch-potch of Victorian and more modern buildings are the London School of Economics and Kings College. They are further down the rankings but both have formidable reputations.
So what is behind the rise and rise of London? There are a few obvious areas. UCL and Imperial are world class institutions for biomedical research and UCL has been described as having “the world’s best medical school”. Certainly, Oxford and Cambridge medical students seem to spend a lot of time in their second and third years worrying how to get “down” to London to further their careers.
Oxford and Cambridge have huge and ancient endowments but the Wellcome foundation, Britain’s largest charity, and many others provide massive funds to UCL and Imperial for research.
Meanwhile, many science postgrads take one look at Oxford’s manky old-fashioned facilities and make a bee-line for Imperial with its spanking state-of-the-art laboratories in leafy Kensington, or send off for prospectuses for US universities.
But it is not just about science. There is a difference in atmosphere in humanities and social sciences. Oxford is cosy, smug, traditional and quintessentially British.
UCL is edgier, slightly bohemian, more modern in outlook and a great deal more outward looking (it calls itself the Global University). The same is true of LSE - if rather less bohemian and edgy - with more than half its students from overseas.
For years banks and top legal firms favoured Oxbridge, not just as academic powerhouses, but the collegiate atmosphere meant their graduates were eminently clubbable, very suitable for a life in legal chambers and bank board rooms. But there were changes afoot with globalisation and emerging markets. The British club had given way to the global village.
The LSE was closer to the City and specialised in the subjects the City wanted in an era of globalisation. Imperial had the mathematical and scientific brains for that and the new knowledge economy.
A partner in a magic circle law firm recently told me that in recruiting new graduates they took “ten from Oxford, ten from Cambridge and ten from “elsewhere, with an international background,” a euphemism for London, with a sprinkling from Warwick, Edinburgh and St Andrews.
Oxford still believed it was turning out leaders rather than technocrats. It should have seen the warning signs. Oxford has not disappeared from the top, but the top has become a little more crowded.
The Foreign Office and Whitehall threw open their doors beyond Oxbridge more than a decade ago looking for talent with an international outlook. Recruitment agencies, which burgeoned during the boom years, had begun to refer to the Golden Triangle of Oxford, Cambridge and London. Elite (ie. private) schools began to notice how hard it was to get their top scholars into London’s best colleges. Last year the head of a top boys school which regularly gets 30-40 pupils into Oxbridge was enraged when not a single offer of a place was forthcoming from UCL. He complained to the admissions office and was given short shrift.
Preparing pupils for Oxford and Cambridge and their idiosyncratic admissions processes (particularly the interview) had been honed to a fine art by such schools. They successfully turned their pupils into the kind of people those universities wanted. They had not yet got a handle on how London (interviews are a rarity) worked.
The emergence of UCL has been a wake up call for them, too. One highly sought-after school has rewritten its prospectus. Its 2008 edition said “we regularly get many pupils into Oxford and Cambridge.” The new one says “We regularly get many pupils into the Golden Triangle of Oxford, Cambridge and London Universities.”
Monday, 5 October 2009
There's more to books than reading
As the annual Frankfurt Book Fair is about to kick off, the publishing event of the year is not the latest Dan Brown thriller, or even China (theme of this year’s fair), it is the possible launch of Amazon’s e-book reader Kindle in Britain and Europe.
Speculation over the launch date of the Kindle, till now only available in the US, is reaching a frenzy among nervous book industry people.
But who will dump books and switch to the Kindle and other e-book readers? The Sony reader is already available here, and has made no impact on reading habits.
If literary festivals are anything to go by, the main readers of novels are women over fifty, and few of them are digital natives. Not that they aren’t embracing new technology - many have joined Facebook reading groups, recommending books and discussing them online. But that hardly signals the end of the paperback.
The real impact will not be on those who choose to read, but those who have to for work or education.
The legal profession has been long interested in e-readers. Rather than wheeling in truckloads of fat ring binders and box files – as much a hallmark of the legal profession as wigs and gowns, Item#28867 can be instantly called up on their e-book readers, without shuffling through a myriad of papers (for which they charge their clients £30 per copy),
That might put out of work some court porters, and a large number of Edwardian-era trolleys, but I don’t see too many other downsides.
Commuting businessmen also like the idea of the Kindle to download documents and the daily newspaper, it slots easily and neatly into their briefcases.
But the really big users will be schools and universities. They will determine the success or not of e-readers.
Arnold Schwarzenegger, Governor of California put the cat among the pigeons in June by announcing the end of the annual buying of textbooks. He was denounced as a philistine and a killer of books, but for once the terminator had called the villain’s bluff with skill rather than muscle. For years, text book publishers over-charged schools and universities. They were about to get their comeuppance, thanks to a cheaper technological alternative.
The average textbook in California cost $75-100. $75-100! Why? Because the textbook publishers can, and the state pays up to the tune of $350 million in California alone. That’s the amount that state set aside for school books last year.
Schwarzenegger’s new policy may have depressed textbook publishers but it got the people at Amazon (who market the Kindle) pretty excited, even though he said nothing about e-book readers. In fact, he said schools could take advantage of digital textbooks without computers or laptops. Teachers could simply print off material from the web.
In this country, teachers have for a long time bypassed the textbook in the pre-GCSE years posting lesson plans and worksheets online to be printed off. They created open-source text-books, if you like.
Attempts to have everyone “on the same page” of a laptop in class did not work because teachers felt they could not see what each pupil was up to. They wanted control. They got that through interactive white boards (one per classroom) and worksheets. Hence textbooks are still the mainstay of teaching and learning and computers are an adjunct.
E-readers are just another way of delivering textbooks. They don’t get dog-eared and chewed, and can be easily updated without having to buy a whole new stack. If governments decide that is a better way to buy textbooks, the shift to e-readers in schools could be achieved overnight. But teachers would still be in control of how they are used.
Universities will not be far behind. Or will they? Last year Princeton University started an e-reader pilot programme which saw 50 students received free Kindles (worth $300) from Amazon with their course texts for the semester already downloaded for no charge.
Who would complain at that? But it would appear the Kindle experiment was a flop.
Students said they could not flip through the book, annotate, highlight or bookmark in the way they were used to.
They are saying something quite fundamental. The e-book isn’t really better than a traditional book. It may save a trip to the university library, but that’s about it. They are also saying that education is about more than reading the text. It’s about annotating, highlighting then synthesizing, digesting and discussing. And for that the paper book was a better book.
But all is not lost for the e-book. In the pamphlet ‘Network Citizens’ the think tank Demos said that companies reap huge benefits from finding ways to capitalise on networks of people outside their organisations. And there lies the key. If e-books can connect learners to each other, and to teachers they could become indispensable. They would be more than books but interconnected books. And that would be a whole new ball game of highlighting, annotating and commentating, with input from others. It would be easier to do than with traditional books.
In short, it could be a better book. And what student would resist that?
Speculation over the launch date of the Kindle, till now only available in the US, is reaching a frenzy among nervous book industry people.
But who will dump books and switch to the Kindle and other e-book readers? The Sony reader is already available here, and has made no impact on reading habits.
If literary festivals are anything to go by, the main readers of novels are women over fifty, and few of them are digital natives. Not that they aren’t embracing new technology - many have joined Facebook reading groups, recommending books and discussing them online. But that hardly signals the end of the paperback.
The real impact will not be on those who choose to read, but those who have to for work or education.
The legal profession has been long interested in e-readers. Rather than wheeling in truckloads of fat ring binders and box files – as much a hallmark of the legal profession as wigs and gowns, Item#28867 can be instantly called up on their e-book readers, without shuffling through a myriad of papers (for which they charge their clients £30 per copy),
That might put out of work some court porters, and a large number of Edwardian-era trolleys, but I don’t see too many other downsides.
Commuting businessmen also like the idea of the Kindle to download documents and the daily newspaper, it slots easily and neatly into their briefcases.
But the really big users will be schools and universities. They will determine the success or not of e-readers.
Arnold Schwarzenegger, Governor of California put the cat among the pigeons in June by announcing the end of the annual buying of textbooks. He was denounced as a philistine and a killer of books, but for once the terminator had called the villain’s bluff with skill rather than muscle. For years, text book publishers over-charged schools and universities. They were about to get their comeuppance, thanks to a cheaper technological alternative.
The average textbook in California cost $75-100. $75-100! Why? Because the textbook publishers can, and the state pays up to the tune of $350 million in California alone. That’s the amount that state set aside for school books last year.
Schwarzenegger’s new policy may have depressed textbook publishers but it got the people at Amazon (who market the Kindle) pretty excited, even though he said nothing about e-book readers. In fact, he said schools could take advantage of digital textbooks without computers or laptops. Teachers could simply print off material from the web.
In this country, teachers have for a long time bypassed the textbook in the pre-GCSE years posting lesson plans and worksheets online to be printed off. They created open-source text-books, if you like.
Attempts to have everyone “on the same page” of a laptop in class did not work because teachers felt they could not see what each pupil was up to. They wanted control. They got that through interactive white boards (one per classroom) and worksheets. Hence textbooks are still the mainstay of teaching and learning and computers are an adjunct.
E-readers are just another way of delivering textbooks. They don’t get dog-eared and chewed, and can be easily updated without having to buy a whole new stack. If governments decide that is a better way to buy textbooks, the shift to e-readers in schools could be achieved overnight. But teachers would still be in control of how they are used.
Universities will not be far behind. Or will they? Last year Princeton University started an e-reader pilot programme which saw 50 students received free Kindles (worth $300) from Amazon with their course texts for the semester already downloaded for no charge.
Who would complain at that? But it would appear the Kindle experiment was a flop.
Students said they could not flip through the book, annotate, highlight or bookmark in the way they were used to.
They are saying something quite fundamental. The e-book isn’t really better than a traditional book. It may save a trip to the university library, but that’s about it. They are also saying that education is about more than reading the text. It’s about annotating, highlighting then synthesizing, digesting and discussing. And for that the paper book was a better book.
But all is not lost for the e-book. In the pamphlet ‘Network Citizens’ the think tank Demos said that companies reap huge benefits from finding ways to capitalise on networks of people outside their organisations. And there lies the key. If e-books can connect learners to each other, and to teachers they could become indispensable. They would be more than books but interconnected books. And that would be a whole new ball game of highlighting, annotating and commentating, with input from others. It would be easier to do than with traditional books.
In short, it could be a better book. And what student would resist that?
Monday, 28 September 2009
There's no A in SUCCESSFUL
Grade inflation is everywhere. No, call that hyper-inflation. Nowadays, when British universities reprint their prospectuses the photographs are still the same, fashions and hair-dos have not altered, but the grades required for entry have risen yet again.
Recently I found a dusty prospectus for a top ten university. Several popular courses including Economics required ‘only’ AAB grades at A Level. Surely a prospectus from the end of the last century? I thought, thinking myself wise about grade inflation. But it was just three years old and three years is a long time in university admissions. Just a year ago you would have been hard pressed to find an Economics or Law course at a top ten university willing to accept anything less than 3 As at A Level.
This year the new A* (90%+) A level grade is painfully evident in newly-minted prospectuses even though this grade will only be awarded for the first time in June 2010. In addition, some two dozen universities have increased the number of subjects requiring AAA for 2010 entry. The University of Exeter newly requires AAA for Politics, Nottingham for History, and Southampton for Electronic Engineering. According to one newspaper survey over 180 courses now require a minimum of AAA for 2010 admission.
It won’t stop there. Cambridge, with a few A* requirements dotted around its current prospectus, has already announced it wants A*AA for all undergraduate degrees for 2011 entry. Soon universities will be stamping new grade requirements over the old ones like the Mark notes in the Weimar Republic. And I’m not being flippant. Last year Warwick raised its requirements for Economics months after its prospectus went out. 2008-9 was already a bad year for grade inflation.
And there are universities who say the ABB or AAB grades in their brochure “are merely a guide”, in case they have to “upgrade the course” once the applications are in. Some universities deliberately print lower grades in the prospectus to attract more applicants, knowing full well that they will turn most away. That way they can point proudly to the competition for places. After, all when Warwick is claiming 23 applicants per place for Law, ten applicants per place at your own university might sound like there is something wrong with the course. The more competition for places, the more desirable the university will appear.
Statistics show that 12% of pupils get three As. But equally there are very bright pupils who just miss an A in one of their subjects, usually one they are not going on to study at university. This year legions of bright pupils missed out on extortionate AAA offers and had nowhere to go. Next year an A* will mean nothing if your third A Level is a B.
The pressure is not just on pupils, who know they cannot slacken off because even half way decent universities are asking for impossible grades, but schools as well. Timetable hours for each A level subject has increased. Some years ago it averaged at 6 periods per subject per week, then it was 7, and this year it has risen to 8 periods a week in many schools.
Not surprisingly, heads are wondering where it will all end. But there are some enlightened people out there in the wilderness.
One of the more open-minded universities, University College London blocks out student grade predictions before it hands the forms to admissions officers interviewing candidates. That way they hope talent will mean more than grades.
UCL’s provost Malcolm Grant has gone on the record to say A level grades are “reaching the margins of utility”.
UCL isn’t just a top ten university in Britain. It is among the top ten in the world. It turns away hundred of students with straight As and is asking for A*AA in a number of subjects including history for entry in 2010. But demanding higher and higher grades may not be the answer. “The worst thing you can do is fill your institution with geeks…you want people to have a hinterland so that when they come under stress, they have other lines, other strengths upon which they can draw,” Grant told the UCL union newspaper.
There is something to be said for that. A well-known private girls’ school on the outskirts of London began its rise and rise in the school league tables when the then headmistress made sure she did not just pick girls who came top in the ferociously competitive entrance examinations but also those with a specific talent.
If, say, they had been a champion gymnast or ice skater, then she would give less consideration to their exam scores. She took on talented linguists, scrabble players, and chess prodigies. They could be champions at tiddly winks but what mattered was that they knew how to stand out and win at something. More importantly they knew how to concentrate and spend time perfecting their hobby. That headmistress has now left and the school is dropping in the league tables even though the current head selects from among the best of the best in terms of exam results.
I recently interviewed the Headmaster of one of the elite grammar schools in Berlin. Germany still has a selective secondary school system and the school creams off the top scorers from primary schools around and has a high percentage of academically gifted children. The school teaches them well and sends them to the best universities. “They would all get decent jobs”, the head said. He should be happy with his intake, but he is not. The world outside is changing, he said. Globalisation has increased the competition. “We have to think for the first time how do we make these kids compete in the world,” he told me. “What should we be teaching them? Is it enough to have a high IQ? Should we be looking for more creativity in selecting our pupils, not just high exam scores?”
Perhaps, he said, they should look for lower exam scores but seek out qualities not necessarily revealed by primary school exams.
Malcolm Gladwell in his popular book “Outliers, the story of Success” says that the relationship between success and IQ works only up to a point. An IQ above 120 does not translate into any meaningful real world advantage according to studies. Harvard researchers have also found that creativity rises with IQ but tapers off and even falls after an IQ of 120.
Other studies have found that a scientist with an adult IQ of 130 is just as likely to win the Nobel Prize as one with an IQ of 180.
The universities might get some top performers and those who are good at exams, but they might be missing out on a whole lot more.
The problem with hyperinflation is that it soon reaches a level where everyone suffers. Then a new currency is required. That point might soon be approaching for A Levels.
Recently I found a dusty prospectus for a top ten university. Several popular courses including Economics required ‘only’ AAB grades at A Level. Surely a prospectus from the end of the last century? I thought, thinking myself wise about grade inflation. But it was just three years old and three years is a long time in university admissions. Just a year ago you would have been hard pressed to find an Economics or Law course at a top ten university willing to accept anything less than 3 As at A Level.
This year the new A* (90%+) A level grade is painfully evident in newly-minted prospectuses even though this grade will only be awarded for the first time in June 2010. In addition, some two dozen universities have increased the number of subjects requiring AAA for 2010 entry. The University of Exeter newly requires AAA for Politics, Nottingham for History, and Southampton for Electronic Engineering. According to one newspaper survey over 180 courses now require a minimum of AAA for 2010 admission.
It won’t stop there. Cambridge, with a few A* requirements dotted around its current prospectus, has already announced it wants A*AA for all undergraduate degrees for 2011 entry. Soon universities will be stamping new grade requirements over the old ones like the Mark notes in the Weimar Republic. And I’m not being flippant. Last year Warwick raised its requirements for Economics months after its prospectus went out. 2008-9 was already a bad year for grade inflation.
And there are universities who say the ABB or AAB grades in their brochure “are merely a guide”, in case they have to “upgrade the course” once the applications are in. Some universities deliberately print lower grades in the prospectus to attract more applicants, knowing full well that they will turn most away. That way they can point proudly to the competition for places. After, all when Warwick is claiming 23 applicants per place for Law, ten applicants per place at your own university might sound like there is something wrong with the course. The more competition for places, the more desirable the university will appear.
Statistics show that 12% of pupils get three As. But equally there are very bright pupils who just miss an A in one of their subjects, usually one they are not going on to study at university. This year legions of bright pupils missed out on extortionate AAA offers and had nowhere to go. Next year an A* will mean nothing if your third A Level is a B.
The pressure is not just on pupils, who know they cannot slacken off because even half way decent universities are asking for impossible grades, but schools as well. Timetable hours for each A level subject has increased. Some years ago it averaged at 6 periods per subject per week, then it was 7, and this year it has risen to 8 periods a week in many schools.
Not surprisingly, heads are wondering where it will all end. But there are some enlightened people out there in the wilderness.
One of the more open-minded universities, University College London blocks out student grade predictions before it hands the forms to admissions officers interviewing candidates. That way they hope talent will mean more than grades.
UCL’s provost Malcolm Grant has gone on the record to say A level grades are “reaching the margins of utility”.
UCL isn’t just a top ten university in Britain. It is among the top ten in the world. It turns away hundred of students with straight As and is asking for A*AA in a number of subjects including history for entry in 2010. But demanding higher and higher grades may not be the answer. “The worst thing you can do is fill your institution with geeks…you want people to have a hinterland so that when they come under stress, they have other lines, other strengths upon which they can draw,” Grant told the UCL union newspaper.
There is something to be said for that. A well-known private girls’ school on the outskirts of London began its rise and rise in the school league tables when the then headmistress made sure she did not just pick girls who came top in the ferociously competitive entrance examinations but also those with a specific talent.
If, say, they had been a champion gymnast or ice skater, then she would give less consideration to their exam scores. She took on talented linguists, scrabble players, and chess prodigies. They could be champions at tiddly winks but what mattered was that they knew how to stand out and win at something. More importantly they knew how to concentrate and spend time perfecting their hobby. That headmistress has now left and the school is dropping in the league tables even though the current head selects from among the best of the best in terms of exam results.
I recently interviewed the Headmaster of one of the elite grammar schools in Berlin. Germany still has a selective secondary school system and the school creams off the top scorers from primary schools around and has a high percentage of academically gifted children. The school teaches them well and sends them to the best universities. “They would all get decent jobs”, the head said. He should be happy with his intake, but he is not. The world outside is changing, he said. Globalisation has increased the competition. “We have to think for the first time how do we make these kids compete in the world,” he told me. “What should we be teaching them? Is it enough to have a high IQ? Should we be looking for more creativity in selecting our pupils, not just high exam scores?”
Perhaps, he said, they should look for lower exam scores but seek out qualities not necessarily revealed by primary school exams.
Malcolm Gladwell in his popular book “Outliers, the story of Success” says that the relationship between success and IQ works only up to a point. An IQ above 120 does not translate into any meaningful real world advantage according to studies. Harvard researchers have also found that creativity rises with IQ but tapers off and even falls after an IQ of 120.
Other studies have found that a scientist with an adult IQ of 130 is just as likely to win the Nobel Prize as one with an IQ of 180.
The universities might get some top performers and those who are good at exams, but they might be missing out on a whole lot more.
The problem with hyperinflation is that it soon reaches a level where everyone suffers. Then a new currency is required. That point might soon be approaching for A Levels.
Tuesday, 8 September 2009
We are all (average) Graduates now
Or Why the law of averages means you end up paying more
A banker, a doctor and a headmaster are in a room discussing their average earnings. The headmaster was pleased to see it was higher than he thought. The banker was rather miffed that it was lower than his professional aspirations had led him to believe. When the banker walked out of the room in a huff, something odd happened. The average fell. If Bill Gates, Li Ka Shing or Laxmi Mittal were to inadvertently walk in, the “average” would soar.
This variation on an old joke illustrates neatly the pitfalls of talking about average graduate earnings. Yet the OECD in Paris has this week been trumpeting the “graduate premium” in its flagship Education At a Glance report, a fat book of statistics from rich countries that comes out once a year.
The graduate premium is the average salary an average graduate earns over an average working life in an average country in the OECD (richer countries so that statistics from Africa don’t mess up the averages) compared to the average non-graduate. The OECD computes this as £113,000 for men. For women it averages out at £81,000.
Some of that goes in taxes so its not like having £81,000 to spend on Jimmy Choos. But spending power apart, it is worrisome the way governments use this to predict average earnings of future graduates.
Using future averages based on a past that is rapidly disappearing (known in the jargon as extrapolating), the government justified its last vast increase in university fees. You’ll pay, they insisted “because its worth it”.
Asian parents want their offspring to be doctors and bankers for good reason, but the overall graduate premium is a lie that is growing like Pinnochio’s nose. Many graduates find themselves in “non-graduate jobs” because there are simply too many graduates. Graduates in non-graduate employment were around 15% of UK graduates a few years ago. Now it is almost 25% and rising. It may not all be due to recession.
The government has already had to downsize its “graduate premium” figure in recent years. Simple maths tells me the graduate premium will drop as fees rise so they won’t be able to use this argument forever.
Recent stats suggest that men with humanities degrees may not even be better off than (average) non-graduates. That is no reason not to study history or literature. But it is a good reason to fight fee rises that are based on bankers still being in the room.
What I want to know is that if my daughter currently embarking on a 7-year degree in Architecture does not earn £81,000 more than a gardener over a life time, will we get our fee money back?
A banker, a doctor and a headmaster are in a room discussing their average earnings. The headmaster was pleased to see it was higher than he thought. The banker was rather miffed that it was lower than his professional aspirations had led him to believe. When the banker walked out of the room in a huff, something odd happened. The average fell. If Bill Gates, Li Ka Shing or Laxmi Mittal were to inadvertently walk in, the “average” would soar.
This variation on an old joke illustrates neatly the pitfalls of talking about average graduate earnings. Yet the OECD in Paris has this week been trumpeting the “graduate premium” in its flagship Education At a Glance report, a fat book of statistics from rich countries that comes out once a year.
The graduate premium is the average salary an average graduate earns over an average working life in an average country in the OECD (richer countries so that statistics from Africa don’t mess up the averages) compared to the average non-graduate. The OECD computes this as £113,000 for men. For women it averages out at £81,000.
Some of that goes in taxes so its not like having £81,000 to spend on Jimmy Choos. But spending power apart, it is worrisome the way governments use this to predict average earnings of future graduates.
Using future averages based on a past that is rapidly disappearing (known in the jargon as extrapolating), the government justified its last vast increase in university fees. You’ll pay, they insisted “because its worth it”.
Asian parents want their offspring to be doctors and bankers for good reason, but the overall graduate premium is a lie that is growing like Pinnochio’s nose. Many graduates find themselves in “non-graduate jobs” because there are simply too many graduates. Graduates in non-graduate employment were around 15% of UK graduates a few years ago. Now it is almost 25% and rising. It may not all be due to recession.
The government has already had to downsize its “graduate premium” figure in recent years. Simple maths tells me the graduate premium will drop as fees rise so they won’t be able to use this argument forever.
Recent stats suggest that men with humanities degrees may not even be better off than (average) non-graduates. That is no reason not to study history or literature. But it is a good reason to fight fee rises that are based on bankers still being in the room.
What I want to know is that if my daughter currently embarking on a 7-year degree in Architecture does not earn £81,000 more than a gardener over a life time, will we get our fee money back?
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