"Bums on seats" - no, darling, not theatre - university!

I confess that reading Richard North first thing every morning is a bit like taking a cold shower.  His acerbic style is certainly invigorating but what I can only call his galloping distemper is sometimes  a tad tiring.  Even so, it is difficult to disagree with many of the points he raises and his single-minded pursuit of various bees in his bonnet is wholly admirable.  Today he has a post on the commercialisation of universities.

I hesitate to write on the subject of universities not least because I never went to one, although regular readers will know that ignorance of a subject is not always - alright,then, never - a bar to my commentary!  Without quite knowing why, I always thought is was a mistake to do away with the old Polytechnics which, by and large, taught technology and trades and by so doing met the requirements of a large market place of young people who were practical rather than academic.  However, a combination of silly socialism combined with inverted snobbery from Polytechnic staffs who aspired to the chimera of University status put an end to what had been an excellent system.  As always, the truth of that old saying, 'more means less', was proven yet again.  Now, it seems, every piddling market town has its own 'University' and as sure as eggs is eggs their produce is pathetic.  So-called degrees in Flower Arranging and Plasticine Modeling do not seem far-fetched, but what is worse is that degrees in traditionally 'hard' subjects are becoming easier and easier to achieve.

According to Richard North:

Some years ago, I experienced this personally when I helped out my PhD supervisor, doing the preliminary marking for first year honours degree dissertations. Applying basic rules of literacy and logic as my measure, I "failed" more than 60 percent of the papers.

Very much in accordance with the above, my supervisor reinstated all of them. The motivation was entirely economic. Keeping a course running is entirely about "bums on seats" and failures make the courses economically unsustainable.

Nowadays, the emphasis is not on academic excellence but in keeping up the numbers of fee-paying students in order to meet the overheads of actually running a working University.  My guess is that these overheads have been needlessly inflated by all those former Polytechnic lecturers gradually promoting themselves to professors with pay and perks to match!  Happily, the new system of hugely increased fees will concentrate parental minds enormously and dear little Fergus and Harriet  might have to go out and earn a crust instead of shagging for Britain at Cleethorpe's University!

Where all this will leave the country in its efforts to produce and encourage truly first-rate minds I have no idea.  I would be happy to see my taxes used to provide scholorships to poorer students provided they can pass a truly testing examination in one of the traditionally rigorous scientific subjects.  We need our best brains to be tested and trained for the benefit of all of us.  In the meantime, I look forward to more and more 'Polyversities'  going broke.

 

Comments

[Whyaxye]

Ah, yes, a subject I know something about, at last!

You are right about the old Polytechnics, but the rot set in long before they became "New Universities". Many of them offered humanities subjects which were useless compared to the technical stuff.

Nowhere in the UK is there an emphasis on academic excellence. It is undermined either by direct commercial pressures, or indirectly in the form of being required to hit "targets" for enrolments, retention, and passing exams. And if you don't hit the targets, guess what happens to the next cheque from the funding authority! Where excellence exists, it is as an historic hangover, rather than because of how the system works.

There is one of those new little universities in our town. Truly piss-awful. Yet the idea of the government actually letting it go under is greeted by its employees as totally outrageous. I have never known a group of people with such an unrealistic sense of entitlement and privilege. They make me long for a deeper and harsher recession. If the economy were really in trouble, they would have gone long ago...

[David Duff]

Quite so, 'W', the introduction of high fees, which some of these 'polyversities' think they can charge, will give them all a lesson in market forces.

[Obnoxious Student]

This problem isn't just in the UK, or just with universities converted from polytechnics.

Here in New Zealand, all the polytechnics are panicking over a new emphasis on end-results. They were accustomed to just shovelling in masses of low-competence students, to collect tuition plus large amounts of tapayor subsidies (per-head, no limit). With zero concern for the quality of education offered, or whether those students could even pass the lowest level courses. High dropout rates were cool, because they got to keep the money without the work of actually providing any education to those dropouts. They got away with that scam since at least the 1980s.

New Zealand polytechnics also enjoy offering bogus courses like, "Certificate Of Retail And Cosmetics," with zero interest in actually improving students' employability or life prospects.

But now, the Tertiery Education Commission has been cracking down, and demanding accountability by cutting down those taxpayor subsidies. While telling the polytechnics that there won't be any more bailouts, and that they may be allowed to fail.

Frontline teaching staff have been told by the polytechnic management that their pay rates, and even job security, now depend on performance.

Unfortunately, the performance accountability is largely about pass and retention rates. This means that the polytechnics now have a perverse incentive to pass, or at least retain, students at all costs. That means dumbing down courses even worse than previously. That means making tests much easier than the material being presented. That means making a test even easier for an individual who still couldn't pass it. That means looking the other way to incredibly bad student behaviour and nonexistant classroom discipline (including open sexual harassment). That means failing to enforce rules. All the way to refusing to care even if the students cheat.

An excellent example is Whitireia Community Polytechnic in Porirua, New Zealand. Their sense of entitlement is stunning, and they are having great difficulty adjusting. They feel deeply victimised, and think that the solution is to go back to the good ol' days of bums-on-seats, zero standards, and pass rates lower than 50%. And let's not forget their open racial bias. Too bad they refuse to openly, honestly communicate with the students about any of that.

Whitireia Community Polytechnic is so low that they respond quite negatively to any student who is actually intelligent enough to notice what is going on. I will be laughing as the NZ Tertiery Education Commission continues to tighten the purse-strings, until Whitireia Community Polytechnic shrivels up, convulsing in the afore-mentioned sense of entitlement.

I am so glad I got out of that cesspit.

[David Duff]

Oh dear, and there was me thinking that New Zealand was an oasis of good sense! By coincidence, 'OS', I just heard 'out the corner of my ear' in the last day or two that our Min of Ed, Mr. Gove, hs decided to cull several hundred courses from our 'Polyversities' on the grounds that the subject matter is utterly spurious and of no use to the so-called students. So there is hope!

Anyway, welcome to D&N.