Yet another university pulling Modern Languages degrees

[tadjennyp]

Just seen on the news that Leicester is pulling its MFL degrees despite students having accepted offers. Are languages becoming the preserve of prestigious universities with very high tariffs? What hope do students in sixth forms in schools with low prior attainment have of going to university to study a language? I am feeling quite demoralised as an MFL teacher. What can we do to prevent the decline? And no, google translate does not do the same job as a person being able to converse with confidence.

@Ceramiq I can assure you that it is true. The might know which subject they are doing - but aren't always clear about which department before they show up.

International students are not so bothered about per subject global rankings when they are picking between going to the US, Australia or the UK - or lets be honest are bothered at a very exclusive level i.e. MIT, ETH Zurich or Imperial.

For MFL - such rankings exist but the point here is why MFL dept are being closed - my point is for a dept to do well i.e. have healthy finances - they need one or preferably two of these three things - 1. international students, 2. vast numbers of UK students, 3. postgrad students. 1&3 because they pay more than 9k per year tuition fees. MFL - regardless of academic rankings - dont have either of those - so get shut down. That is not connected to whether or not their researchers are world class or not.

@bluhkbf I'm not sure of your logic - is anyone suggesting those MFL departments in the top 40 of World Rankings are at risk of closure?

So, if we’re looking at that list, we’re essentially talking about Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, UCL, King’s, Manchester, and Durham. I can only speak directly for my own institution, but from what I’ve seen, our MFL department severely under recruited last year.

For the time being, this is being managed through cross-subsidisation, largely supported by income from international and postgraduate students on other degree programs. However, it does raise a broader question about long-term sustainability—particularly if international student numbers were to decline and that source of funding became less reliable.

At present, I think my university will continue to support MFL as part of its identity is as a comprehensive institution and for reputational reasons. That said, there are several departments operating under similar conditions, and it is difficult to see this model remaining unchanged indefinitely.

@bluhkbf Interesting about under recruitment in your department - I assume your institution is one of those in the above list.

Clearly we are seeing a shake up in MFL departments as a result of decline in MFL in schools and there will be a lag as reductions in GCSE take up leads to decline in degree applications. e..g my DC2 in her 3rd year at Uni (two languages) had to take a GCSE language at her comprehensive school. Looking now at her school's website they are still encouraged to do so but it is no longer required.

Oxford has certainly seen a decline in MFL applications but they do have a very large cohort of MFL students. Part of this decline at Oxford may be students wanting a more flexible and less literature heavy course but it is probably a systemic decline nationally as well.

I just don't think MFL research is terribly meaningful as a concept. I know French doctorate students of English from the Sorbonne and they are hopeless!

@Ceramiq I think there are many academics who would beg to differ.

Many of the academics at Oxford are native ie the Italian Fellow at my DC's college is Italian. Rather like saying English Literature research is not meaningful.

I’m not entirely convinced that “research” is the most appropriate measure for determining whether a department is sustainable. In practice, it tends to come down to whether a department generates sufficient income to remain viable.

Under the current model, the majority of income is derived from student enrolments, so factors such as student numbers and the composition of the student body often play a more decisive role than research performance alone.

@Sanddancing Bristol still has good MFL reputation but you seem to went northern universities. Most MFL students won’t be doing doctorates. No need! I’d concentrate fully on employable skills and career goals.

DD looked at Manchester and went to the offer holder day. Along with next to no one else. They would take dc onto MFL degree with low grades 15 years ago. They told dd to get in touch if she did ok in her MFLs. Not to worry about the other A level.

Most MFL courses are what you make of them: the skills you get and how you use them for your chosen career. DD would not have cared less about research at the Sorbonne. Her aim was to get a great career here on the back of a challenging MFL degree accessing that career. Which the degree did because it had literature and high standards and it was recognised as such.

I know plenty of native academics including at Oxford and I rest my case. The weirdness is really something.

Dh took dd to the offer holder day at Manchester as well. Dd said they told her they’ll probably go to clearing. Doesn’t bode well for the future of MFL courses there. I’m thinking it’ll probably go the way of Nottingham. Dd originally looked at a joint honours business and French but applied for French and German.

@MeetMeOnTheCorner My DC was impressed by Bristol's MFL department - an excellent range of modules and languages - that was three years ago so may have changed.

@Ceramiq can you unpack what you mean by weird?

To clarify - unis go into clearing for all sorts of reasons. In our case, not MFL, faculty will tell us to go into clearing if another dept under-recruited but they can guarantee rhat we can pull the students in. Very often it's because not enough international students have taken up their offers esp. at postgraduate and the only way to get more student last minute in august- is to go into clearing.

It used to be that dept went into clearing if rhey couldn't get enough students- nowadays it's also for all sorts of other reasons.

Just saying

@AdaptingtoChange It's partly about theory and the way it has invaded the humanities as researchers have run out of material to analyse for major authors. All humanities' training is overly siloed for want of time and money and "the visual turn" of history in the 1980s was all very well but historians were not properly trained to analyse pictures and other artworks. Literature academics have leached into History of Art as art has become conceptual and dependent on narrative in ways that sometimes bely belief, partly for want of something more interesting to do (though I have a lot of sympathy with the idea that art precedes writing as a means of human expression and that people who study languages and literature sometimes come to realize that they are missing something much bigger that is visual). Really "the humanities" need to be way more interdisciplinary than they are but finding individuals who are properly trained in all of languages, art, literature, history, theology etc is rare and so people take off in weird directions within their own field.

Not the case of wanting Northern unis, but wanting a particular language offered as well as the degree choices, lots of synergy with the QS rankings for MFL and history ( the other part of the joint honours wanted ) and the unis we’ve picked.

Slightly off topic, but French universities historically do poorly in rankings because the top students don't go there; they go to grandes écoles. There's new efforts to reorganise French higher education into more collegiate universities like Paris-Saclay and PSL so they can compete globally.

The US has a bit of an advantage in MFL because of how their courses work: students can take languages without doing their whole degree in them and at many they may be required to take one. But they're struggling as well. Worse, the current administration cut the programme that subsidised languages that were considered important for national security, like Arabic. The programme not only helped the universities but funded study abroad for students.

True but also because universities are focused more on teaching than on research that happens historically in specialist institutions the ranking mechanism hasn't worked for French universities. There is excellent research in France that doesn't really get communicated to students and the wider world as effectively as it should. French undergraduate degrees are still very focused on memorizing encyclopedic domain knowledge, often not very up to date, and regurgitating it in esoteric, obsolete formats. Research led teaching only properly kicks in at Masters level.

There is little point comparing different national university models around the global rankings. Global rankings essentially take the US model of what makes a great uni and extrapolates it to others. The Brits follow this model to smaller or greater degree....others less so. It doesnt mean much. It also doesn't mean that other unis are worse or better for students.

Your comments on this thread, as an insider, are v interesting, thank you.

Given the UK’s reliance on international students, QS rankings are very important and do have meaning - or at least consequences - for U.K. students because they determine whether or not their uni has sufficient funding. Given the current financial crisis, this must be an important factor for prospective students.

I think subject rankings can be more useful than overall university rankings as a starting point for shortlisting possible places to study. However, the reality is that credentialling, a core product of universities, is very far from globalized - a great degree from one country can be illegible and worthless in the labour market of another.

@Notanorthener There are many many low ranking universities here with international students who clearly don’t care a fig about international rankings! Look at Buckingham for example. It’s not alone in not being on any international league table but still attracting overseas students. It’s more the allure of a uk degree.

I think the way MFL are taught in school now is also very off putting. I studied German at school and at university (eons ago), so I was enthusiastic about my son doing it for GCSE. He hated it however, and when I saw the online homework he had to do, I could understand why. Endless, endless repetition of the same words, phrases and sentence constructions. If you made one tiny error, it would throw you back to the beginning to repeat the whole boring process again. It killed any joy or satisfaction kids might have in learning a language.

Sounds awful. Vocabulary lists are a very poor mode of language acquisition at the best of times.

Your DS’s school may teach German like that but I didn’t and don’t.

Thank goodness. It was very disappointing to see and so very different from the way I was taught myself.

Tbf (and apologies for my rather glib comment before, was posting in a hurry) that was HW and while it sounds poor, I cannot imagine the lesson following a pattern of that kind. At least I hope not.