Universities no longer to required to expect good written/spoken English as it is “elitist”

[jacks11]

I have just read this in The Times. I am appalled! I think this is a retrograde step. Apparently it is to close the attainment gap between higher and lower socio-economic groups and also between white and other ethnic groups. Is it not rather insulting to suggest we ought to expect lower standards from these groups?

Surely, if we have identified that there is an issue in terms of literacy/communication, then we should focus on improving those in schools. For those struggling at university, provision should be made to support the student to gain these skills. For those who have a genuine SEN (e.g. dyslexia) it is obviously appropriate to have particular arrangements for that student. What is ludicrous is suggesting literacy and accuracy in both oral and written work is no longer required. To suggest it is “elitist” is, in my view, a travesty.

At university level you must be able to communicate clearly and proficiently in both oral and written work. It is not a “nice to have”. It is essential for many reasons. I fear this country is becoming devoid of all sense and rigour, sacrificed on the supposed alter of “inclusiveness” and “fairness”- utterly wrongly. Inclusiveness can be achieved in far more sensible and effect ways.

I don’t understand why expecting literacy and a clear grasp of written and spoken English at university level is “elitist”.

I suppose cynically a population only gets as much education as is needed to socialise them, and for the jobs needed doing at that time.

There are only a certain amount of professional, high-skilled jobs needed. The rest of the population are only needed for low wage, low skill jobs right now. Why bother giving a great education when there's no need? This is why it doesn't matter to the Conservatives if libraries close and if state schools lose funding; they don't care, almost on an unconscious level, if poorer children are not well-educated.

But universities still need the money, and governments like the illusion that higher education is important to us as a nation.

What is happening to british universities? I'm British, currently going a PhD at a continental University, where I'm also required to teach and mark students from all over the world (not at PhD level) writing in English.

Undergraduates unable to write in their own native language just wouldn't cut it here. Its highly competitive. They wouldn't even get past the applications stage. For even the most basic Masters degree, the written English in the supporting and motivation statements has to be perfect.

As for the comment from the science graduate on the first page who thought it "bullshit" that they should be required to express themselves in writing in their own native language, how on earth would you ever write up lab reports, or contribute to an academic paper?

I deliberately chose not to do a PhD in the UK because I knew I'd reach a higher level elsewhere.

We can't let UK universities be hijacked with all the nonsense that appears to be going on in the US

Oh, and high IELTS score is required here for non-native English speakers - this is standard in every country. It's considered there's no point in admitting students without a competent grasp of the language they will be studying in.

God, I've heard it all now. This is dreadful.
YANBU.

@mustlovegin

We can't let UK universities be hijacked with all the nonsense that appears to be going on in the US

Too late.

I find the moralising from many posters on this thread really curious. I wonder if they are also the same people who write comments in the Guardian higher ed section complaining about how degrees should not be funded by the taxpayer and about how universities should produce people with skills needed for business as opposed to "sitting in their ivory towers".

What do you think removing public funding from universitites and turning them into businesses does? That how for-profit business works: you have to extract as much money from customers as possible while extracting as much labour from workers as possible and paying them as little as possible.

Why do you think various mental health services grow like mushrooms all over UK campuses? Because ultimately paying a few people to talk to students about feelings and time management is cheaper than running courses that would provide proper training that would allow these students to cope with academic work without breaking down.

You want better grammar - you get out there and vote for politicians who will turn universities back into public institutions, financed by the taxpayers.

Good grammar for the masses and marketized education for the masses are incompatible.

@mustlovegin

The article only mentions University of Hull and UAL.

Who is 'telling' universities to do this?

The UoH is in serious straights. Not too long ago it was uniquely placed as an institution with a reputation for friendliness, and among the cheapest living costs and least expensive student accommodation in the country. Its courses were also of a very high standard (plus it had a large intake in business studies degrees from China).

This university got its ethos and recruitment drives woefully, spectacularly wrong. For a start, successive vice chancellors oscillated between positioning the place as a teaching institution, then a research-intensive institution. As one left and another started that would change. None seemed willing to recognise that since fees were introduced in particular HEIs have two sides to the same coin: they have to be both. So their RAE ratings started to plummet, and those used to be a strong indication of research success in the place.

Then their recruitment drive focused almost solely on the widening participation agenda and trying to recruit local students. They were onto a loser from the beginning with this: the area has one of the lowest educational achievement thresholds in the country. They needed to have cast their net wider. Their reputation for excellence has since gone down the drain. It's very sad. It was once a good place to study.

Their only concern now is backsides on seats. It's a question of survival. Some universities might well not survive the move toward blended learning imposed by COVID. This might well be one.

@PissedOffProf

I find the moralising from many posters on this thread really curious. I wonder if they are also the same people who write comments in the Guardian higher ed section complaining about how degrees should not be funded by the taxpayer and about how universities should produce people with skills needed for business as opposed to "sitting in their ivory towers".

What do you think removing public funding from universitites and turning them into businesses does? That how for-profit business works: you have to extract as much money from customers as possible while extracting as much labour from workers as possible and paying them as little as possible.

Why do you think various mental health services grow like mushrooms all over UK campuses? Because ultimately paying a few people to talk to students about feelings and time management is cheaper than running courses that would provide proper training that would allow these students to cope with academic work without breaking down.

You want better grammar - you get out there and vote for politicians who will turn universities back into public institutions, financed by the taxpayers.

Good grammar for the masses and marketized education for the masses are incompatible.

I'm with you on most of this. Somewhere along the way, it seems people have forgotten what universities are actually for.

One of the problems has been snobbery: telling generations of young people that without a degree they are worthless in the labour market. You don't need a degree for many vocational areas: this was once the job of the polytechnics and training providers. IMO the clue is in the name: academia.

Universities now operate on about as cutthroat a business model as it's possible to get. It's depressing that since making the most spectacular mess imaginable of pre-16 education, since 1997 central governments have now steadily been doing the same thing with HE.

MarieIVanArkleStinks , agreed. UK HE is a shitshow. And, frankly, bad grammar is the least of our problems. It's just a pimple that is a symptom of the underlying rot.

I simply don't understand when it became the problem of HE to teach basic literacy (and probably numeracy) to students and not schools. The name is "higher" education, therefore one's education is, presumably, higher . But apparently not.

The school I work in has a mass of unacademic children. It is a terrible shame that manual work - decent manual work - no longer exists. My town was a proud and prosperous working town with several big-name companies. Was a working town. Those companies have gone - abroad. Kids used to be able to leave school with functional skills and get decent jobs.

A lack of manual work opportunities does not suddenly mean a great leap forward in academic prowess for many. Basically square pegs and round holes driven by economic changes.

But if you want higher numbers of people to go to university then you need to acknowledge that not everyone speaks or writes in perfect English.

Please correct me, but English seems one of the languages that is most open to assimilating anything put in front of it and then merrily treating it as part of the language going forward.

This includes the influence of American English that due to film, television and music is ever present. I've also noticed that on some websites they are set up for American English and for example you have to remember to add a "u" into words such as colour.

We still have massively different dialects and accents which will influence the way you interact with the language.

In fairness, my DSs are at primary and they are learning far more grammar than I ever remember doing and to be honest, I haven't got a clue what they are going on about half the time. Maybe this will filter through in years to come.

I agree @IrmaFayLear - and now even the students learning trades are forced from FS L1 to GCSE maths and English, rather than FS L2, setting them up for more failure, and sometimes meaning they can't progress onto L2 or 3 Construction or Beauty or whatever it is. The education system is a mess.

@GreenWillow

I think (hope) that *@newstart1337* is being sarcastic here.

I wondered if newstart was being sarcastic but I’m not sure.....

You want better grammar - you get out there and vote for politicians who will turn universities back into public institutions, financed by the taxpayers. Good grammar for the masses and marketized education for the masses are incompatible.

Hear, hear! Although I wish there were a party I actually felt happy to vote for at the moment.

@RobboCop

I also feel that we're slowly turning into a society where it's becoming taboo to acknowledge that some people are just more capable than others. Not that this makes them better, but really it's not a good path to go down IMO. Sometimes you need the best of the best in a particular role where much is at stake - not just in business but in military, healthcare, crisis response etc.

Well, and it's not like different kinds of work don't call for differernt capabilities.

What I find interesting about university degrees and the attitude that they are somehow better is that I rarely find it among academics or even people who have studied in more traditional areas like physics or philosophy. They generally see them as a specialised kind of role that isn't suitable for everyone, but isn't better than other kinds of work.

It's the people who do professional degrees, or technical and vocationally oriented degrees, business degrees - the ones that are not really university degrees in the proper sense - who seem to think that way.

Universities are shooting themselves in the foot.
The point of a degree is to ensure that students have basic competencies in general things such as expressing their ideas clearly and communicating. This is DOUBLY IMPORTANT in STEM subjects such as Physics where only a small number will go on to work in their chosen field (and even they have to write research papers etc).
Without a basic standard of literacy and ability to expirées ideas a degree is nothing more than a collection of problem sets which you can get off the internet and pay to have marked.

@SmokedDuck because the former is generally a waste of money. I didn’t learn anything in my accounting degree that justified 3 years of study. We’re competing with school leaves and people with no degree, so we keep having to be snobby about our degree to hide the truth.

On the other hand you cannot simply become a physicist without a degree - it’s by nature an academic subject.
I work in technology now and despite the furore about ‘self-taught coders’ it’s very clear that the ones who have a degree have been trained systematically and are a lot better than the ones who don’t. At higher levels those without the academic ability and grounding struggle with high level abstractions of concepts. This is the hallmark of an academic subject in my opinion. Or in the humanities ones that require high levels of reading and nuance in written expression.

Business and vocation require a different kind of intelligence , which isn’t any less than academic intelligence. In our obsession with ‘degrees’ we try to shove everything under this umbrella. A chef needs to know about a lot of things but he does not need to write essays about them unlike a history graduate. To say that a chef needs a degree is just stupid.

*the latter sorry!

@jacks11

OP dyslexia is a specific learning difficulty not SEN as a dyslexic person you post is wildly offensive. So please actually know what you are talking about before saying things.

To insinuate because I'm dyslexic I have poor written English, issues with literacy or would struggle at university is just not ok. Why not talk about the issue in hand without bringing dyslexia into it and making wild generalisations?

Teddyandsuzie Tue 13-Apr-21 09:41:46
So sad that the focus is on universities to lower standards, rather than putting pressure on schools to raise standards.

But secondary schools are under a lot of pressure to make sure 'disadvantaged' students make as much progress as higher achieving students. If they were to focus to much on raising standards in the higher achieving groups it would increase the disadvantage gap and Ofsted would penalise the school.

The system is designed to try and make everyone equal in the middle (bog standard). The knock on is that universities have to lower standards to make more money get more state school children in, otherwise they will be accused of favouring private schools.

Students are now the customers of universities. After paying a lot of money, the customer expects to be able to purchase their degree, it is no longer something earned on merit. That is equality, we have build the rod for our own back.

You want better grammar - you get out there and vote for politicians who will turn universities back into public institutions, financed by the taxpayers

Pissedoffprof surely complaints about ‘homogenous north European, white, male, elite’ are more likely to come from the left so would Labour want universities to improve grammar and spelling if they’re associated with such elite characteristics?

Andante57, I believe "standard dialect" (or whatever it may be called) has always been a double edged sword. On one hand, it is a tool of exclusion: if you don't speak/write it, you don't get into the clique of power. But on the other hand, if you do speak/write it - you do get in. Also, while we do need to appreciate, support and let flourish the great linguistic variety of dialects, having a standard language is actually handy as it allows people to communicate better and organise better. It would be hell of a lot easier for the proletariat of the world to organise if we all spoke the same language. So there are many reasons of why Labour and more lefty parties would support good grammar. Language is power. It could be the power for the elites, but it can be made to work for all of us. :)

TheLastLotus, if most UK universities suddenly started to enforce good grammar in the present circumstances, they would be shooting themselves in the head.