Some universities will go bust thread 2

[GinForBreakfast]

Continuing as thread 1 has filled up.

@Runemum NSS doesn't ask students if they went to some banging parties 🙄

@Runemum have you seen the questions students are asked on the NSS, ISB or the Graduate Outcomes Survey, which incidentally surveys students 15 months post graduation and does ask them to comment on the value of their degree in relation to their career?

@Runemum Exactly. Surveys of students has limited value. Plus 12 hours contact would be amazing. Some are 6 hours. Plenty are not in person. Employers are spending more and more sifting unsuitable grads. They cannot rely on the degrees.

Make your mind up tizer!

Yesterday you said:
'All are saying students are not finding teaching as they thought and parents likewise. They are really worried about value for money'

Today students' views in surveys can't be relied on.

Which is it? Do you believe and disbelieve students at the same time? Are these Shroedinger students - their purported views (according to journalists) that uni is crap existing simultaneously with their view that uni is good? Impressive....

I had 4 contact hours a week btw back in the 80s. A lot of reading to do outside of that. Subject determines contact hours. Group readalongs of Much Ado would be contact hours but pointless - read in the comfort of your own room. The value is the seminar that follows.

And no undergrad has zero contact hours - again not allowed. This sector that should run itself as a business - another shackle from Gov.

Sorry I'll clarify - mainstream unis aimed at 18 year olds needing maintenance loans can't run distance learning. Obvs OU can and does DL very well, and one or two others (not so well...).

Plenty are not in person.

Not true.

Only courses that have been specifically validated as a distance learning course can be delivered as such. There are very few (outside of the OU) UG distance learning courses as most are PG. Students know when they apply/enrol if they have signed up for a DL course. Nobody is being blindsided with no in person contact - whether they bother turning up is another matter.

The narrative that students are getting no teaching and everything is online is absolute bullshit and is just contributing to the lazy stereotype that academics are all working from home refusing to teach in person. It's just not true.

Tizer and Rune are really just spouting any old shit to throw mud at universities, hoping some will stick. I will be ignoring them from now on.

@GinForBreakfast Stick your head in the sand if you wish. Businesses need to listen to ALL customers. I don’t feel any regret now if you lose your jobs.

The thing is @TizerorFizz a number of us have repeatedly said that the sector needs a shake up. We know things need to change, many of us are probably driving change in our own institutions.

What we're objecting to is people who know very little about how the sector actually works, telling us how to do our jobs. What makes you an expert? When we point out the flaws in your arguments you tell us we're wrong and tell it's our own fault when we lose our jobs 🙄

I've asked you this before, but how would you feel if people did the same to you about your job? I wouldn't dream of telling NHS staff how to do their jobs just because I use their services occasionally. Why do people think it's open season on HE?

Because we see a generation being lumbered with unnecessary debt with little to show for it.

No one is saying that higher education is unnecessary as a whole, just that it is obviously bloated.

They may be happy to only have to 12 hours of lectures a week because who isn't happy doing less work

University isn't school. In my discipline, each face to face hour is generally calculated to need 2-3 hours of independent study. So 12 hours of face-to face teaching could require up to 36 hours of independent study. That's more than a 40 hour working week.

For a seminar I taught yesterday, students needed to have read 2 full-length texts in our topic - at least a half a day's reading for each text. We have a 3 hour seminar, and they need at least a day to do the preparation.

When it gets to essay time, they'll need to do even more independent study outside the seminar hours in research & writing, because they'll have to read around the topic to read other expert scholars' arguments and engage with them.

Now, I suppose I could book a room, and timetable a full day for my seminar students to turn up and we could all sit and read the texts (silently) in the same place at the same time. I'm there so it would be contact hours.

But not very sensible.

And why does holding that opinion suddenly mean that you're an expert in the HE sector? Or mean you can spout untruths and inaccuracies as though they were fact?

Because that's what some people on this and the previous thread have been doing.

As I posted upthread @ElaineMBenes : opinions held are in inverse proportion to knowledge held.

University isn't school

This needs pinning to the top of every single higher education thread.

Citizens are allowed to critique the services they pay for, no?

Citizens are allowed to critique the services they pay for, no?

I wasn't saying they couldn't criticise.

The point I was making was that it doesn't make you an expert or knowledgeable about higher education.

What do you do for a living? How about we all pile on and tell you that you don't know what you're doing and that you deserve to lose your job?

Citizens are allowed to critique the services they pay for, no?

Are you a student then?

https://ifs.org.uk/sites/default/files/2024-09/WP202440-education-and-inequality-an-international-perspective.pdf

Very interesting article. I think it is democratically significant. Spending on higher education could actually increase inequality!

Anyone in higher education care to comment?
It makes sense to me and I think it is also democratically significant ie disinfranchised angry working class men is not what we want. It is a problem and we have to acknowledge it. Spending needs to be on secondary schools and training there. That would be my priority as a Labour Government. I know many on this thread will disagree, but please do say why.

I'm not sure this article is really giving us a significant amount of new information tbh.

Increasing participation in HE isn't a silver bullet. While we have much larger numbers of 18 year olds going to university we still have significant inequality in the type of university attended and subject studied.

Those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and/or first generation students are more likely to attend a lower ranking, local university and to study subjects that are less likely to attract high salary graduate jobs. It doesn't mean their university experience is worthless though.
We know that white working class boys/men are less likely to attend to university and perform the worst in GCSEs.

Parental education, employment and attitude to education is key in understanding inequality.

We also know that the investment in raising aspirations and attainment needs to start when children are young, it's too late by the time they get to university.

Education across the board is poorly funded in the UK and the lack of structured careers education and guidance is abysmal.

You are taking things much too personally, Elaine. Many of us work in industries open to market forces. We aren’t used to the concept of special pleading because the market doesn’t care. It’s judgement is final.

I don’t think higher education should be completely market driven. There are benefits that don’t get captured in the immediate transaction, and there are positive externalities beyond the people directly involved. But there is a practical limit.

You've not actually answered my question.
I'm not talking about market forces or the state of the higher education sector. It's a shit show. Things need to change. I think we can all agree on that's

I was talking about people deciding they are experts in higher education when it's clear they know very little. Why bother posting on threads like this if you aren't interested in hearing from people who actually work in the sector and can offer insights into why things happen a particular way and explain the restrictions and regulations universities are operating within?

And nobody has bothered to respond when asked how they would feel if their particular sector was attacked by armchair experts insisting they were right and you were wrong.

And yes, we do take it personally. Most of us working in HE do it because we love our subject, we care deeply about our students and we want them to have a positive experience and a successful career. We work ridiculous hours and we aren't paid nearly as much as people think.
Surely, the fact we take this so personally is a good thing! That's what you want from an academic 🤷🏼‍♀️

@ElaineMBenes
I wouldn't want anyone to lose their job. However, I am concerned about young people's future finances by going to university and whether it is worth it. This thread suggests that there are no savings to be made in buildings, careers services, sports facilities, admin, vice chancellors salaries, rationing courses etc. If nothing can be cut back, the question is which calamity the lesser evil. Young people's finances or university employment. It is not a great option but I think reducing employment in the university sector is better than getting students into more debt.

It is not a great option but I think reducing employment in the university sector is better than getting students into more debt.

Your wish has been granted.
The sector has made significant redundancies this year and this on the back of redundancies in previous years.

We're now at the stage where student experience will be impacted. We have so few staff left at my institution I don't know how we will continue to function.

And for those of you that think we should just close universities which are in financial difficulty need to remember that being financial difficulty doesn't necessarily mean it's because you're an inferior institution.

It's not necessarily the case that people are simply not buying poor quality degrees. It's that universities are being forced to 'sell' their product at a loss, regardless of quality.

You're trying to apply simple business principles to organisations that are not allowed to apply those principles to themselves in order to achieve financial security.

The sector has made significant redundancies this year and this on the back of redundancies in previous years

Just posting this again as a reminder:

https://qmucu.org/qmul-transformation/uk-he-shrinking/

That's over half the sector.