Tuition fees

[stoatsrevenge]

So we are to expect a massive increase in university tuition fees, as well as increasing interest ib student loans...

Here is the 6 year plan from the LibDem manifesto:

1
Scrap fees for final year full-time students

2
Begin regulating part-time fees

3
Part time fees become regulated and fee loans become available to part time students

4
Expand free tuition to all full-time students apart from first year undergraduates

5
Expand free tuition to all part-time students apart from first year undergraduates

6
Scrap tuition fees for all first degree students

How are they going to square this one?

Most of the students' parents where I work are pretty decent sorts, only getting in touch if we need to know about ill health or the death of a grandparent or whatever. But I had a great one this summer, where we got a handwritten letter from a parent on Basildon Bond (probably the uni equivalent of offering a Fruit Shoot) asking us to revisit a student's final degree result ... after said child had attended graduation!

Said child was lucky to get the classification they did, tbh.

BTW I read somewhere that Cambridge would only last something like 108 days without public money ...

Xenia, you raise the point about private and state schools, but as someone who went to both, I can honestly say that private schools are not necessarily better. They get better marks because they pre-select, so the raw material is there to start with. Otoh, the state school I also went to was full of some genuinely excellent teachers.

My point was not so much about how students are treated, but as others said is about the expectation that a student will get a first because they have paid for a place on the course. This could degrade the quality of academia. I think there is a fundamental difference with schools here too in that at schools, they can teach students but the assessment (GCSEs, A'levels) are still independent of the school. In a university environment as an academic, you are teaching the course, setting the exam papers, marking the exam papers and sitting on the exam board.

You only need to look at the case in Queens University Belfast, where a student was suing their university because he didn't agree with his degree classification to see things was already moving this way.

Wilfshelf, do not be disheartened. Can you move institutions for a fresh start, or something like that? Start an initiative of some kind, like getting UGs involved in research?

Lots complain but they don't get very far if they haven't done the work.

The standard of quality assurance in most places is pretty robust and I think superior to most independent schools I can think of.

Lots on grade inflation at US universities in the Times Higher. Over in the US (where presumably we are heading, funding is causing real problems in assessment according to many commentators).

Xenia - the schools analogy calls into question what universities are for. Are we an academy or are we are teaching institution?

The more I work in academia the more I realise that we are really, really good at what we do in terms of research. We undestand issues to such a high level. If we just concentrate on how to deliver it at a level understood by students that's an inevitble dumbing down in comparison with how we engage orally & in writing with our academic peers all over the world.

Understanding academia as no more than a place that students get educated to get a better paid job is such a feeble approach. It makes me want to weep (and move to the Continent where intellectual rigour, culture and debate still matter.) Non-stem subjects are facing obliteration. In my subject (law) there will be increasing pressure to gear education to the desires of the major commercial firms even though a tiny minority of students overall end up there.

[Willshelf, loved your description of academia. Agree that we should talk more & support each other ]

shame I understand the issues but can't spell today

It's increasingly looking like we will have to start a Mumsnet University, I think.

• Building to include a branch of Waitrose
• Childcare agency on tap with free childcare
• The best common room ever seen to humankind
• 20% teaching loads
• Do whatever blue skies research you like

nottired, they get their funds directly or indirectly from the taxpayer, either from parents and students being allowed to offset fees against tax, or from endowments being tax deductible.

The argument that "X is paying Y, therefore Y is corrupted" is the stuff of the "big pharma conspiracy" nutters, who claim that respected academics are in the pocket of pharmaceutical companies becuase they once worked at a university where a postdoc in another department had been bought lunch by someone who used to work for a company that after they left had been taken over, etc, etc.

Universities have all sorts of incentives to be corrupt, if that's the worry, and in the face of people with far deeper pockets, bigger teeth and the ability to get nastier. For example, HEFCE had targets for completion rates on degrees. One of the London post-92s got caught over that, with phantom students propping up the numbers. The post-grad funding councils have completion rates targets similarly, and successful supervision counts for staff personally, rather than corporately as it does for undergraduate completion. Overseas students are a profit centre, and their funders are often government and quasi-government entities who have the power to turn off a substantial money-tap. If academics were to be corruptible as a body, these are big threats and big temptations.

By contrast, a parent of a home undergraduate can do what, exactly? Shout a bit on the phone? The least of the worries for academic integrity is a few middle-class parents threatening write a letter.

"tokyonambu Cambridge course was a diploma, not a degree. Brighton was formed by the merger of 2 other institutions, both with a far longer history."

So let's have that history as it relates to an undergraduate computing degree, then. How did Brighton award degrees prior to its formation as a polytechnic with CNAA validation? If we're splitting hairs over diplomas, the Birmingham MSc had its first intake in 1969 and the BSc in Mathematics and Computer Science in 1972. The Manchester undergraduate course dates to 1965 (under Tom Kilburn, for God's sake: what a course that must have been). The Newcastle undergraduate course started in 1967, although that by transfer at the end of the first year from Mathematics so its first graduates emerged in 1969; their first year intake started in 1971. Loughborough started a course in 1969, which was impressive. Oxford's computer work remained under the aegis of the maths department for a long time, but the lab was formed in 1957 and taught undergraduate courses from the outset.

So Brighton, by your claim, had an undergraduate course prior to Cambridge (1971) and by implication older universities like Manchester (1965), and by this showed that they understood the coming of computers better than Oxford (computer lab formed 1957), Cambridge (1937) and Manchester (you're aware of what Manchester was doing with computers 1945--1980, yes?)

Let's see that history. Because it must be a fascinating and untold story of how a technology college with no degree granting powers, funded by a small local authority, managed to get there first. A new avenue in computer history.

tokyonambu - corruption is going a bit far. It is more about expectations of students and what they expect for their money than out and out corruption. I don't think people generally would be prepared to be paid off for giving students higher grades than they deserve, more the pressure from students for academics to deliver more than is reasonable. Anyone else had students contacting them at 10pm on a sunday evening before an exam on monday morning and then getting huffy if you refuse to deal with them at that exact moment?

Boffin Mum, you are aware of how low US income tax rates are, aren't you? For a married couple filing jointly, the 35% top rate doesn't kick in until they're earning $373K. And even if stuff is tax deductible, you still have to earn the money pre-tax: it's not that " they get their funds directly or indirectly from the taxpayer", it's that "for parents with a household income of over a quarter a million pounds per year, 35% of the money comes from the state".

", more the pressure from students for academics to deliver more than is reasonable"

If an academic cannot resist the blandishments of a 19 year old, it's a pretty bad sign of the governance. Hopefully the university would back the lecturer up when they say "fuck off".

As an anecdotal aside, I have noticed students asking for more and more feedback, most recently on their exams (can you imagine having to write a proper report on each script as well as marking them!). I think we give them good value for money at my institution and would probably stand up to most scrutiny, but that might not be the case elsewhere: I don't know. I do also get parents emailing, ringing, even sending a gift once. I politely tell them to back off. Their children are grown ups and I deal with them only (apart from very extreme cases of course).

Would love an academic support thread by the way. I love my job, hope the students get more from my teaching than from the articles I never get around to writing, especially the women students who might not be taught be another woman during their whole course. What I do resent is being told that we are lucky to have our jobs, flexibility etc... and shouldn't complain. There's lots wrong in the system, not least the sexism and the relatively poor pay, and this economic climate will, I think, not help. The proportion of union members aong academics is pretty low I think.

I think we'll still be accountable without the REF because promotions etc will still depend on publications.

We should revive that academia thread!

Actually, I don't think exam feedback is a bad idea, meself. We do it, but only verbally and students have to ask to make an appointment to discuss (but not see) their paper. VERY few take up the opportunity, but those who do really benefit from it.

We manually scribbly formative feedback on the scripts and let the students have them back on request. We encourage students to come to see us and talk about their work 1:1 or 1:2. I think they get fabulous value for money at the moment.

However there is a central core who moan and moan and give us terrible feedback - things like we don't care enough if they don't make friends with each other on the course, we timetable lectures at 9am or on Fridays, that kind of thing. This negative feedback feeds into certain league tables. The teaching team then gets pulled up on that feedback and has to produce action plans and the like, very time consuming. A lot of the stuff is totally beyond our control anyway.

The thing that bugs me is that when I worked in the media, the bottom line was based on how much advertising we sold, how many copies we sold, and the hand on rate of said copies. In academe even though we provide a quantifiably excellent service and our students perform well above what you would normally expect given their backgrounds and IQs, this is apparently not enough, and we have also to kow tow to the facile opinionated drivel of a hard core group of spoilt princessy types. It is wrong.

"we timetable lectures at 9am or on Fridays"

Diddums. I'm demonstrating for a lab that runs until 1800 Friday. An office-mate is demonstrating on a lab session that runs 1600-1900. That group has their tutorial at 9am Monday, too.

"we have also to kow tow to the facile opinionated drivel of a hard core group of spoilt princessy types."

Of course, when the real customer is HEFCE, because they hold the subsidy, facile aggregation of complaints will happen. Hopefully that won't be true when the money follows the student: just publish those complaints on your website, under the rubric "the sort of crap we ignore", and watch proper students roll in. It's the same with businesses: stupid complaints get an audience in large chains, because all complaints, no matter how stupid, count against the person you're dealing with. Make that same complaint to a sole trader and they'll tell you to fuck off.

I do think RateMyProfessor is a much better forum for drivel than the NSS. I don't know why they dignify this stuff by including it.

"Hopefully the university would back the lecturer up when they say "fuck off"."

rofl

ha ha ha ha ha.

Do you know any other good jokes?

In which case the problem is your university management, not the government/parents/etc. Employers that don't defend their staff are pretty scummy.

Having worked in universities and in industry, and having friends in both, I'd say that universities are the wild west as far as employment practice goes. I didn't realise that things had got to the stage where the employer wouldn't stand behind its employees. Tricky.

Perhaps the UCU could drag itself away from its main concern, Palestine, and actually try representing its members?