Jay will sacrifice his kindergarteners if that means they get to go to kindergarten.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n16 … in-the-lab
interesting mid-august update from rupert beale at the francis crick institute.
interesting mid-august update from rupert beale at the francis crick institute.
Was reading a critique that colleges want a "back to normal" in-person experience because otherwise people would want to catch a break on the already exorbitant costs. I could see that.
At some point people are going to realise universities deliver terrible value for money and they'd be better off reading some books and not paying $50,000 for the piece of paper at the end.
When I did my degree the cost was barely more than having someone on the dole.
Here the universities are shit scared that if they move to online teaching delivered to people in their home countries it will just be recorded and replayed and that will be the end of that value stream.
When I did my degree the cost was barely more than having someone on the dole.
Here the universities are shit scared that if they move to online teaching delivered to people in their home countries it will just be recorded and replayed and that will be the end of that value stream.
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I wonder how many people got a degree-requirement job based on "I watched a college professor lecture on The Great Courses."
The education industry is overdue to be disrupted, probably employment also.
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colleges are super leveraged and have started to run themselves as mini-corporations or investment banks. it’s a consequence of the marketisation of higher education not greedy academics. the actual student-facing academics who are having to devise online courses of instruction and master ZOOM chat moderating at short notice are not exactly happy, either (relieved certainly). and the majority of academic staff are precarious and certainly don’t see much of those bumper tuition fees receipts. your average academic is an adjunct scraping 3-4 classes per academic year and invoicing them individually and eking out their existence.
the idea that education is reducible to a reading list is stupid. people could just ‘read the right books’ in the early 1900s, too. there were pelican mass-market paperbacks in the 1960s teaching university-level theory to a reading public. information has been free (or pirated) online since the 1990s. this is almost on par with the ‘screw formal education and just learn to code’ stuff. very silly (AI will soon he doing most lackey-level coding work, generating trivial code from ordinary language descriptions). if disruption is inevitable, getting rid of universities isn’t it.
we need to discuss models of public education again. running universities as businesses with a self-enriching administrative/managerial/vice chancellor class is not working. the government here uncapped student numbers. the degree market imploded as 3x as many ‘elite’ degrees were granted. obviously that was going to happen, and universities were going to cram as many students onto their ‘luxury product’ courses as possible (even better if you could get that international student tuition at 3x the fees). and why even stop with your current classrooms, libraries and university halls? the last 10 years have seen universities leverage significant property and development debts. huge new libraries. many more luxury halls (often marketed explicitly at cash-rich international students, with rents/term fees way above the domestic students’ loan packages). fast forward to +1 year after covid and the asian students have stopped coming and the entire over-leveraged sector needs ... a public bailout. wow the market really runs education !!!
the idea that education is reducible to a reading list is stupid. people could just ‘read the right books’ in the early 1900s, too. there were pelican mass-market paperbacks in the 1960s teaching university-level theory to a reading public. information has been free (or pirated) online since the 1990s. this is almost on par with the ‘screw formal education and just learn to code’ stuff. very silly (AI will soon he doing most lackey-level coding work, generating trivial code from ordinary language descriptions). if disruption is inevitable, getting rid of universities isn’t it.
we need to discuss models of public education again. running universities as businesses with a self-enriching administrative/managerial/vice chancellor class is not working. the government here uncapped student numbers. the degree market imploded as 3x as many ‘elite’ degrees were granted. obviously that was going to happen, and universities were going to cram as many students onto their ‘luxury product’ courses as possible (even better if you could get that international student tuition at 3x the fees). and why even stop with your current classrooms, libraries and university halls? the last 10 years have seen universities leverage significant property and development debts. huge new libraries. many more luxury halls (often marketed explicitly at cash-rich international students, with rents/term fees way above the domestic students’ loan packages). fast forward to +1 year after covid and the asian students have stopped coming and the entire over-leveraged sector needs ... a public bailout. wow the market really runs education !!!
I predict some massive disruption - here's the book, take the online exam, pay your $50 to the publishing company endorsed by a retired Oxbridge Professor and you're done for that unit.
Thats about all a lot of college courses really amount to.
Thats about all a lot of college courses really amount to.
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lol o k.
not sure what publishing companies have to do with credentials but good idea !!!
not sure what publishing companies have to do with credentials but good idea !!!
I don't think so. The concentration of expertise in a university, the classroom interaction, the experience of being at a uni and the degree structure (most of all electives) cannot be replaced. These basics of a learning environment, which a university provides, are not going anywhere. It's one thing to complain about having reading lists and such but my most important/insightful learning experiences came from interactive workshops & lectures. Besides, hard to give a course without a reading list.
What I would complain about are indeed some of the business aspects, which also incentivise creating products or 'expertise' centres which the uni doesn't really have or know how to provide only to lure in more students. On the flipside some parts of education are hideously expensive, so there is a need for a good income stream. While a humanities student will be relatively cheap, med school, vet school & some engineering degrees cost hundreds of thousands per student.
Bottom line though I believe education should be accessible to anyone. Society becomes better for it in every way. The UK/US models are pretty bad in that sense. I have a few colleagues who did their masters at LSE, Oxford & the like and apparently some 80-90%+ of the attending students were internationals. Seems to me indicative that UK education is not accessible to the people actually living in the UK.
What I would complain about are indeed some of the business aspects, which also incentivise creating products or 'expertise' centres which the uni doesn't really have or know how to provide only to lure in more students. On the flipside some parts of education are hideously expensive, so there is a need for a good income stream. While a humanities student will be relatively cheap, med school, vet school & some engineering degrees cost hundreds of thousands per student.
Bottom line though I believe education should be accessible to anyone. Society becomes better for it in every way. The UK/US models are pretty bad in that sense. I have a few colleagues who did their masters at LSE, Oxford & the like and apparently some 80-90%+ of the attending students were internationals. Seems to me indicative that UK education is not accessible to the people actually living in the UK.
online exams with zero instruction have been available for 10-15 years, also. private online universities (aka 'degree mills') have been on the market for a long time. let me know how it goes getting a graduate job at a consultancy with your 'credentials' from prager university. trump university was really good at disrupting the sector, wasn't it? and university of phoenix's online for-profit model has gained such plaudits!
publishers and textbook companies are not set up to give out credentials. and why would they be? they commission textbooks from tenured academics, who interact regularly with, you know, course syllabi and modules. lmao it's almost as if you need this thing called ... the university ... and classrooms ... and interaction with undergraduates and laboratories ... to know what to put in the textbooks and what to examine people on. but great idea! let's make publishers adopt all this for themselves. disruption, in any form, regardless of its sense == good!
where have we heard this thinking before?
most universities have 'free' online courses now, access courses, summer outreach programmes, etc. you can spend an afternoon with stanford's encyclopaedia or yale's youtube channel or any number of MIT online courses. they exist for the autodidacts. but it's not the same as an actual university education. you can't swap a 10-hour-per-week 1-2-1 tutorial system for a few flash animations and a tutorial applet. those work for workplace safety guidelines but not for degree-level learning.
publishers and textbook companies are not set up to give out credentials. and why would they be? they commission textbooks from tenured academics, who interact regularly with, you know, course syllabi and modules. lmao it's almost as if you need this thing called ... the university ... and classrooms ... and interaction with undergraduates and laboratories ... to know what to put in the textbooks and what to examine people on. but great idea! let's make publishers adopt all this for themselves. disruption, in any form, regardless of its sense == good!
where have we heard this thinking before?
most universities have 'free' online courses now, access courses, summer outreach programmes, etc. you can spend an afternoon with stanford's encyclopaedia or yale's youtube channel or any number of MIT online courses. they exist for the autodidacts. but it's not the same as an actual university education. you can't swap a 10-hour-per-week 1-2-1 tutorial system for a few flash animations and a tutorial applet. those work for workplace safety guidelines but not for degree-level learning.
Last edited by uziq (2020-08-24 02:20:55)
it's unaffordable without scholarships, yes, and 1-year scholarships for taught masters are the rarest of all.Bottom line though I believe education should be accessible to anyone. Society becomes better for it in every way. The UK/US models are pretty bad in that sense. I have a few colleagues who did their masters at LSE, Oxford & the like and apparently some 80-90%+ of the attending students were internationals. Seems to me indicative that UK education is not accessible to the people actually living in the UK.
doesn't help that living costs in london (and oxford/cambridge too) are about as hyper-inflated as living costs anywhere in the world. the universities require that you show the ability to pay in advance, because the fear of a student dropping out due to running out of living money is very high. i think university of london/LSE/oxbridge/golden triangle research requires you to produce a bank statement with £30k sitting in it, basically. not very easy for most 20-somethings (nevermind a sum like that is a significant portion of a first house deposit).
the UK's funding model is severely fucked up -- i was there at the mass demonstrations over it in 2009/2010 -- but it's undergraduate funding and fees that concern me far more. outside of a few small western european countries, it's rare to get a free ride for postgraduate education, period. have to be realistic with the reforms and fights we make at this stage. not charging working-class kids £9,000 a year would be a good start.
Well whatever, the education industry is(was) making excess profits for an increasingly shitty product.
Its ripe for disruption and it will happen, somehow.
From what we're seeing in the current uk and other governments the actual output is rubbish.
As an example I'm sure Johnson's parents tell all their friends that he thinks he can speak latin but he's still a useless and clueless fuckwit.
A university degree should cost barely any more than having someone on the dole, and its a means of keeping people off the dole and making them more useful. I can't really see it going back to that.
Its ripe for disruption and it will happen, somehow.
From what we're seeing in the current uk and other governments the actual output is rubbish.
As an example I'm sure Johnson's parents tell all their friends that he thinks he can speak latin but he's still a useless and clueless fuckwit.
A university degree should cost barely any more than having someone on the dole, and its a means of keeping people off the dole and making them more useful. I can't really see it going back to that.
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lol here we go again. the entire UK university sector is rotten because boris johnson and his buller boys from eton are entitled and dim. great reasoning!
and of course you advocate for that, considering you got a university education completely free, from an era when students could do that and then indeed spend 5 years on the dole living in a squat somewhere, listening to jimi hendrix. i agree, of course, but it sticks in the craw somewhat when you shit on students and university staff today who are working with a much much worse system.
and of course you advocate for that, considering you got a university education completely free, from an era when students could do that and then indeed spend 5 years on the dole living in a squat somewhere, listening to jimi hendrix. i agree, of course, but it sticks in the craw somewhat when you shit on students and university staff today who are working with a much much worse system.
Yeah a few of the people I know got in on scholarships. Most of them relied on family money though. I considered some of the postgrads in KCL and Cambridge when I was still an undergrad but the cost was prohibitive and going about finding a scholarship would have been difficult / probably too competitive. Based on anecdotes the quality of education would've been more or less the same as some affordable national options, so I chose that.
Bit of a tangent - it didn't affect my career path at all but I do notice among colleagues that there seems to be an overstated preference for applicants who studied at the golden triangle or Sciences Po/ENA in France (some did both). In hindsight it's unbelievable to me how those schools set you up for life, almost all the graduates ending up in the top jobs. If I look back on my own IR graduating class I'm still one of 3 who's really doing well and ended up working in my field of choice. Meanwhile those unis I mentioned - different story. There's a circle of elitism and exclusivity around those big names that's concerning to me.
But back on topic: yes it's sad how hard it is to pay your way over there. In the US it's terrible but the UK is not doing well. I dunno if it's true but I heard that you weren't allowed to have a side job either. For me I had to work ~20 hrs a week to cover my cost of living. I still accrued 30k in student debt, half of which during postgrad. If I had to show the money up front or rely on scholarships only I don't know if I would've ever gotten my degrees.
Bit of a tangent - it didn't affect my career path at all but I do notice among colleagues that there seems to be an overstated preference for applicants who studied at the golden triangle or Sciences Po/ENA in France (some did both). In hindsight it's unbelievable to me how those schools set you up for life, almost all the graduates ending up in the top jobs. If I look back on my own IR graduating class I'm still one of 3 who's really doing well and ended up working in my field of choice. Meanwhile those unis I mentioned - different story. There's a circle of elitism and exclusivity around those big names that's concerning to me.
But back on topic: yes it's sad how hard it is to pay your way over there. In the US it's terrible but the UK is not doing well. I dunno if it's true but I heard that you weren't allowed to have a side job either. For me I had to work ~20 hrs a week to cover my cost of living. I still accrued 30k in student debt, half of which during postgrad. If I had to show the money up front or rely on scholarships only I don't know if I would've ever gotten my degrees.
i have no problem with elitism in education to be honest, as long as entry is based on merit and not ability to pay or your family name. i wouldn't have a problem with culling off the bottom 50% of all universities in total and redirecting the students and money into polytechnic-type institutions, either. i don't think everyone should get a university education 'just because' it 'levels up' society. that's all very fine and well when you have people getting quality liberal arts or STEM educations, but not so much when they're getting a simulacrum of the same from some county-town university that was converted from a poly in the 1990s and graduates 30,000 people a year with worthless parchment rolls.
i got a scholarship. they kind of snowball once you get a few essay or department prizes. it's like a sponsorship system, almost. it seems to work okay, to me. if every university in the top quartile is producing prize-winning undergraduates each year, they tend to filter upwards into the 'elite' university cohorts, or to at least be granted the mobility necessary to glide between institutions and their tutors of choice.
i got a scholarship. they kind of snowball once you get a few essay or department prizes. it's like a sponsorship system, almost. it seems to work okay, to me. if every university in the top quartile is producing prize-winning undergraduates each year, they tend to filter upwards into the 'elite' university cohorts, or to at least be granted the mobility necessary to glide between institutions and their tutors of choice.
Ah OK, so you're keen to 'level up society' except when it impinges on you. Why not quadruple the size of Oxbridge then? And do away with some of the provincial also-rans?
Pretty well everyone who goes to Oxbridge these days got in because Daddy dropped GBP200,000 on a public school or their Baba dropped GBP200,000 on Oxbridge itself. It is largely elitist and once again looking at the quality of the output it is offensive that a small incestuous network can get each other into the top jobs without themselves having any actual merit.
I didn't say 'the entire UK university sector is rotten', reading comprehension FTW. There is something wrong if clueless vegetables can graduate with honours from Oxford.
Pretty well everyone who goes to Oxbridge these days got in because Daddy dropped GBP200,000 on a public school or their Baba dropped GBP200,000 on Oxbridge itself. It is largely elitist and once again looking at the quality of the output it is offensive that a small incestuous network can get each other into the top jobs without themselves having any actual merit.
I didn't say 'the entire UK university sector is rotten', reading comprehension FTW. There is something wrong if clueless vegetables can graduate with honours from Oxford.
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rather focus on the health of our good universities overall and do away with the sickly obsession with oxbridge. if you're against public school buller boys and entitlement, it seems wise to me to get away from the punting and quadrangles institutions. there are plenty of other options and styles of institution (imperial for e.g.)
my point is that there's a lower caste of institutions which are almost on-par with the online-only universities you vouch for. it's misplaced enthusiasm in my opinion. these graduates aren't being taken seriously by graduate employers or academe so what's the point in the pretense? it's blair-era quotas, and that's it. '50% of all people should go to university'. er, ok, a meaningless news headline.
my point is that there's a lower caste of institutions which are almost on-par with the online-only universities you vouch for. it's misplaced enthusiasm in my opinion. these graduates aren't being taken seriously by graduate employers or academe so what's the point in the pretense? it's blair-era quotas, and that's it. '50% of all people should go to university'. er, ok, a meaningless news headline.
i mean, you can google search and show that to be pure rubbish in about 20 seconds. 70% of oxford offers in 2019/2020 went to state school students.Pretty well everyone who goes to Oxbridge these days got in because Daddy dropped GBP200,000 on a public school or their Baba dropped GBP200,000 on Oxbridge itself.
Last edited by uziq (2020-08-24 03:54:03)
I see what you mean
https://www.royalholloway.ac.uk/about-u … us-alumni/
Not exactly a winner factory is it?
No but really, I did go to IC and there was really nothing special about the courses or the lecturers. Maybe the PhD students were doing some interesting stuff and it did foster a rigourous mind-set but thats about it.
It would be great to get the Eton-Oxbridge morons out of government, but the smarter people have many much more interesting and productive things to be doing so I think its unlikely.
https://www.royalholloway.ac.uk/about-u … us-alumni/
Not exactly a winner factory is it?
No but really, I did go to IC and there was really nothing special about the courses or the lecturers. Maybe the PhD students were doing some interesting stuff and it did foster a rigourous mind-set but thats about it.
It would be great to get the Eton-Oxbridge morons out of government, but the smarter people have many much more interesting and productive things to be doing so I think its unlikely.
Last edited by Dilbert_X (2020-08-24 03:55:11)
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i have no idea what's on the alumni page, it's not really the most important thing in my life. there's plenty of famous academics and writers associated with the institution and historically it has always been in the top 25%. russell group/1994 group are widely acknowledged as the good universities from which graduate employers and research institutions draw. so, yes, the redbricks and research-oriented institutions are what i'm talking about -- not necessarily royal holloway. i went to UCL for my master's and my comments apply just the same, there, too.
e: from looking at it, it seems they've cherrypicked a few 'profiles' for the alumni page to establish its history as some feminist/progressive institution. fair enough. university websites are pretty routinely cringe and full of corporate jargon. it's obviously not an exhaustive list, is it? there's 5 people on there.
e: from looking at it, it seems they've cherrypicked a few 'profiles' for the alumni page to establish its history as some feminist/progressive institution. fair enough. university websites are pretty routinely cringe and full of corporate jargon. it's obviously not an exhaustive list, is it? there's 5 people on there.
Last edited by uziq (2020-08-24 04:05:08)
I'd be happy for everyone to have access to a good degree course, technical training, or whatever works best for them, for free.
The future now is for most people to be underemployed for a lot of their life, might as well take them out of the workforce for a period.
Universities are now profit centres so maybe a few palaces need to be stormed and some heads lopped off to get them into line.
I'm sure I've said already, my two-horse town has three universities and they won't merge because they can't agree on who will be vice-chancellor and who will get the boot.
The future now is for most people to be underemployed for a lot of their life, might as well take them out of the workforce for a period.
Universities are now profit centres so maybe a few palaces need to be stormed and some heads lopped off to get them into line.
I'm sure I've said already, my two-horse town has three universities and they won't merge because they can't agree on who will be vice-chancellor and who will get the boot.
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What I like about our system is that we have a definition of 'good enough' rather than 'only the best'. In some sense it reduces the stressors applied to young people to perform, which seems to only be getting worse, and shifts the focus on learning for knowledge's sake - at people's own pace. Those who will excell will do so regardless, but also perhaps in better ways. Rather than treating their resumé's like checklists to get in the right school/job etc., more focus is redirected to their passion.
Of course it should be selective. There are and should be certain benchmarks one has to achieve or satisfy before progressing into uni education or a postgrad, and the quality of education should be preserved. The uni I graduated from was still #1 nationally (top 50 global on most lists) with a very long history, strong research output, plenty big names attached and so on. It's a great school. There is a downside to the 'good enough' mentality, which is that this is reflected in the average classroom. I would say the environment and peers are probably less stimulating than what you would find in the golden triangle and as such more of your motivation has to be intrinsic. The top 5 or 10% of students aren't the top 1%. Nonetheless it's a model I prefer. It's interesting to me that you would rather preserve educational elitism/merit chasing. Extreme and I would say unnecessary selectiveness seems to cause unhealthy individual behaviours and societal structures (cramming schools etc).
As for me I graduated with what I guess you would call a 2:1 for undergrad & postgrad. Most of the stuff that caught the eye I did outside the classroom - volunteering, very good internships, political activism with national results. My essays were always good but the process makes me depressed and I'm simply personally much better equipped to showcase my talents in a work or 'real life' environment than in a school. Which makes me wonder if I could've done the scholarship route. By now I have nothing left to prove but thinking about the hoops I had to jump through in the school system to get to where I am now still gives me some anxiety. If it were actually 'only the best', deduced from classroom results, I'm not sure I would've made it. What I'm also saying is, our system allowed me to succeed.
Of course it should be selective. There are and should be certain benchmarks one has to achieve or satisfy before progressing into uni education or a postgrad, and the quality of education should be preserved. The uni I graduated from was still #1 nationally (top 50 global on most lists) with a very long history, strong research output, plenty big names attached and so on. It's a great school. There is a downside to the 'good enough' mentality, which is that this is reflected in the average classroom. I would say the environment and peers are probably less stimulating than what you would find in the golden triangle and as such more of your motivation has to be intrinsic. The top 5 or 10% of students aren't the top 1%. Nonetheless it's a model I prefer. It's interesting to me that you would rather preserve educational elitism/merit chasing. Extreme and I would say unnecessary selectiveness seems to cause unhealthy individual behaviours and societal structures (cramming schools etc).
As for me I graduated with what I guess you would call a 2:1 for undergrad & postgrad. Most of the stuff that caught the eye I did outside the classroom - volunteering, very good internships, political activism with national results. My essays were always good but the process makes me depressed and I'm simply personally much better equipped to showcase my talents in a work or 'real life' environment than in a school. Which makes me wonder if I could've done the scholarship route. By now I have nothing left to prove but thinking about the hoops I had to jump through in the school system to get to where I am now still gives me some anxiety. If it were actually 'only the best', deduced from classroom results, I'm not sure I would've made it. What I'm also saying is, our system allowed me to succeed.
Yes but Lenny Henryuziq wrote:
it's obviously not an exhaustive list, is it? there's 5 people on there.
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lenny henry came from a working-class background and basically crawled his way up the societal ladder by being the black bloke that a bunch of semi-racist brummies laughed at in working men's clubs. he got a PhD in literature as a mature student and has done a lot to make 'stuffy' and 'elitist' stuff like shakespeare seem accessible to people from his background.
sure, he's not a fields medal or nobel prize winner, but i can see why that alumni page with its particular 'angle' lists him.
why are you always interested in hitting down and shitting on people who are trying to better themselves? an indian taxi driver who is making small talk, a prominent black british figure. they're not the people who draw my ire or invective, that's for sure; i say good for them. i think it says a lot about you.
sure, he's not a fields medal or nobel prize winner, but i can see why that alumni page with its particular 'angle' lists him.
why are you always interested in hitting down and shitting on people who are trying to better themselves? an indian taxi driver who is making small talk, a prominent black british figure. they're not the people who draw my ire or invective, that's for sure; i say good for them. i think it says a lot about you.
I wouldn't really call the average brummie 'semi-racist'.
I don't have a problem with Lenny Henry, I just thought it funny, and I'll deal with the taxi-driver in another thread.
I don't have a problem with Lenny Henry, I just thought it funny, and I'll deal with the taxi-driver in another thread.
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