If we're so intent on shortening degrees, why bother with the lectures at all? Just put a price tag on the parchment and be done with it.

[User11010866]

https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/university-three-years-student-loans-opinion-5HjdWx2_2/

Having just read this article, it seems to highlight a worrying trend in UK Higher Education. Compared to other global leaders, the UK already has the shortest academic years and the lowest contact hours. One has to wonder how our new graduates are expected to remain competitive on the international stage.

@MeetMeOnTheCorner considering that tuition fees didn't increase for over a decade....unis certainly did need to do something just to keep up with inflation. No other business has kept their prices steady for ten years. Now am not best pleased with all the changes that unis have gone through but to say that things should have remained the same is just wrong.

Whilst it is easy to say that when the tax payer paid only 10 or 20% of 18 year olds when to uni, the reality is that looking at the lack of repayment on loans....that's still the case through the backdoor. Other European nations all do pay for their students and similar numbers go for further training post18.

I listen to my DH a lectuer who does his department open days.

If open days focus on research rather than course structure and student experience then we take as a red flag that focus in department may not be on teaching and students and then ask more questions. The whole idea of open days is to put best foot forward and sell course to the students. Ideally all departments would be good at teaching and research - but reality is many aren't and I've certainly had lecturers who treated students and inconviences.

As parents we and our kids are paying a huge amount and our focus is on what they need and want to get out of a degree course.

Research is important more widely and the ideal is it informs student teaching but that doesn't always happen. Research needs funding by goverments and research councils and industry - and not be at the expense of students. Research and teaching aren't incompatible and should ideally support each other however it's hardly shocking parents and students have different motiavtions to staff and governments.

DH went into HE becuase he wanted to do the research side - he likes teaching students - but the draw was research that fairly common with his peers. However as parents our focus isn't on departments research or nebulus cross pollination between research and teaching - it's on more mearsurable outcomes - employablity, student satisfiction, contact hours that what sells a course to us and kids - because the price tag a degree now comes with is so fucking huge so has to be worth it.

I don't think two year degree will work practically - as I see what goes on behind the scenes - but idea parents are going to put research demands above their and their kids priorties is naive.

As a lecturer - I appreciate that students care about employability but contact hours are not a good proxy for this. If the world is going through what is akin to an industrial revolution, the problem is far beyond contact hours.

Doubling our hours won't solve the problem - an entirely different offering for humanities and social sciences might do but that's not degree specific. We simply don't know how to train them for the jobs of tomorrow in a world of AI. Nor do we have any idea what that will look like.

We are using approaches developed in the 70s for a brand new technological revolution.

Also many countries do a four year degree.

Scotland being one

Oxbridge is very different from other universities with its tutorial system, for which it used to receive significant extra funding.

No other profession complains so inherently about their so called lack of time off than teachers/lecturers. Come and work in healthcare - you’d be lucky to get 3 weeks for the entire year!

We simply don't know how to train them for the jobs of tomorrow in a world of AI. Nor do we have any idea what that will look like.

If only there were institutions that could carry out research into this that could be used to inform teaching…

Full time healthcare staff start on 27 days plus 8 days bank holiday.

You might want to re-read the post; pp is pointing out the three weeks the students are off is not holiday for academic staff. When undergraduate students are on vacation academic staff do other aspects of their jobs (postgrads are also still around and in need of supervision). It is not like teaching.

Yes, where did that crystal ball go? 🤣 The academic world could say that the way AI, mainly LLM “AI,” is being developed is phenomenally reckless, unreasonable, exploitative, toxic and in nobody’s best interests, but that doesn’t stop big tech, does it? There is a long history of academics losing control of their ideas, inventions and discoveries, whether in the development of nuclear weapons or anything else. How about politicians and the business world taking a bit more responsibility for their own actions and inactions?

Why would a university just say that? Why do you think universities would not research how businesses are responding to AI? The impact of AI on jobs or the environment? How AI can be utilised in various industries? How to improve on current iterations of AI? Plus you ignore the fact that big business commissions a lot of research from universities.

Dundee University spun out a couple of large companies using AI for drug design and testing. They are not alone.

The Dundee example is not LLM. And it is being said that the way LLM AI is being developed is illegal and unethical. There is, I am sure, plenty of research being done, but nobody is actually listening to much of it, regardless. One might as well spend ones time pissing in the wind, rather than expect anything ethical in the massive gamble that is the AI arms race, which is as reckless as invading Iran, promising to commit war crimes and generally accelerating a global shitshow.

@Poppiesmocking obviously universities are doing that. However, when it comes to social science/humanities and office based/white collar jobs - it could very well be a revolution, in which case we are currently in the eye of the storm. I am not an AI expert - but as a social scientist, am well aware of both what major changes it could bring but also what a major shock it can pose.

Even in our our teaching practice - e.g. currently we plan things a year in advance (to give us time to advertise everything to our students in good time) - however, LLMs are changing what and how we do things with every upgrade. We are used to be able to develop modules across years - again, totally redundant with the speed of change. So even in the case of unis themselves- it makes our entire planning system obsolete. The speed of change is massive - and no even our own internal system are not quick enough to keep up.

Let alone if we start talking about what we teach and how - or how this relates to skills employers will need from our students. Or how to assess them.

Frankly, the way they are developing LLM AI is like deliberately letting a manmade virus out of a research lab and losing all control over it.

@Walkaround no it isnt like that at all. It is being developed for economic gain of the companies who are developing it. It's tech plus neoliberalism - most of this comes from the US - although also China. By saying it is all insane and like a mad flu - we are forgetting that this in fact an economic choice. However, that is not to say that the US companies will have any interest in what happens elsewhere - extractive capitalism doesnt tend to worry about things like that. Europe and especially the UK seeing as it's English speaking and outside the EU, may very well suffer and see more losses than gains in this new industrial arms race. Therefore, a lot of these questions when it comes to skills, young people, employment, capitalist economics - is closely tied to political decisions.

The UK is a stagnant economy and lack a national industrial and economic strategy - beyond jumping from one crisis to another and/or extracting/selling things off bit by bit - though by now there is less and less to sell. In the UK - unis became an instrument for training white collar workers once the UK decided to de-industrialise itself. We have absolutely no idea what comes next if we also get rid of our white collar workers and what comes next. We also have no idea what role unis and degrees will play in that if any.

@Dffhjpittr - I think it is more risky than that. There have been plenty of warnings from neoliberals themselves that AI is currently massively overhyped and overvalued. It feels very much like an arms race against Chinese AI, gung-ho arrogance, and over-inflated egos, not carefully thought out, guaranteed profit-making activity.

My impression is LLMs are overvalued in the short term and undervalued in the long term. We just don't know which ones will survive and grow. Critically they are also all in the US which dramatically impacts on capital flows which negatively impacts on potential job losses, reinvestment and state capacity to dictate terms.

When you say "This is just nonsense, it's just the excuses lecturers put out for really low contact hours" do you genuinely believe individual lecturers have any say in how many hours are assigned to each module??

1. They are not all in the US.
2. LLMs just look for the most likely response, based on all the data accessible to them, and they are learning from a lot of absolute crap - it’s built into the uncontrolled, rushed way they are being developed. Crap in inevitably means crap out. In the meantime, they encourage humans to be ever more lazy and stupid, so humans are less likely to pick up on the inanity being spewed out and deal with it.
3. They are massive guzzlers of resources required by humans, despite the fact LLMs are not required by humans. When humans find their water supplies cut off and lights going out, because LLMs’ massive energy and water needs trump theirs once human jobs are unnecessarily being done by massively faulty AI, this does not bode well for country or global stability, not to mention human survival.
4. The money being wasted on LLMs should go on development of AI that is actually beneficial to the human race and does help us solve problems we do actually have, not AI that is better at lying, cheating and corner cutting than the humans it is learning its language and behaviour from. There are plenty of AI projects that deserve money to be invested in them, but instead we have a bunch of megalomaniac arseholes fucking everything up on a global scale, with everyone else kow towing to them, because we are all too selfish and untrusting to be capable of anything other, apparently, than let it happen or start wars with each other.

There is nothing intelligent about current AI - it is glorified text prediction. I am waiting for it enter a doom spiral as more and more of the LLM it is trained on is AI generated slop. But in terms of university, it has been rapidly adopted by students to generate notes from lectures, summarise reading material without having to read it, create revision materials - and essays and exam answers.

@GoldenApricity Only at a recruiting university. This adds to the issue. Bums on seats is not what we should be doing or selling courses. Good research, and student learning make for employable students. Feeding them, as at school, doesn’t make for employable grads - except on some vocational courses. Too many courses don’t stretch students and don’t prepare them for work because they cannot think for themselves or problem solve. That’s why top employers do, irrespective of what they say, like certain students more than others.

In other words, current LLM “AI” is a great tool for teaching people how to be lazy and stupid.

As a parent I think one of the biggest gripes is paying for accomodation for full year when the academic year is so much shorter...(not making any assumption how/whether the course should be shorter) DD will finish mid May and go back mid September.
A pp on another thread said student houses used to be let on a 10 month lease to allow 2 months for any repairs/maintenance (which is still longer than needed) but just about all the houses weve seen are a full year.
And that wouldnt work for LL....so I dont know how you'd solve it...
And then get a holiday job....? they are pretty much like hens teeth.
As it is DD has a zero hours contract with very few hours which makes it not worth staying at her student house over the holidays but then commuting 1.5 hrs each way, for each shift....

Of course landlords want their properties let year round - if they had to cover the bills with a nine month let then they would have to charge even more. But it definitely irritates having to pay for months when they are not there. Some private halls do nine month leases but if you look at their pricing this is at a higher rate than ten or twelve month leases so barely any saving. The only places where I have seen nine month leases not at an inflated price is in tourist areas where they use the halls as short term holiday accommodation.

Both mine were 17 starting university but there are many who go to university at 18 straight from school depending on when their birthday is. ( those who are born between March and August will be 18 when they start uni).

Both mine have left school within the last 7 years and there was no big push to do advanced highers, ds didn’t do any. He did 5 highers in 5th year and 4 more in 6th year. Dd did 5 in 5th year, 3 highers and advanced higher art.

both mine could have got into university with 5 th year grades but were both still 16 when they left 5th year.

For heavens sake, I did my A levels in 1974, and my degree in 1977. My A levels were intensively taught, but my degree level study was not.