Rolling higher education into the shitbin thread

A lot of this article reminded me of my own experience as a humanities undergraduate at a "prestigious Russell Group university" 30 years ago. Very few people got firsts, but it was pretty easy to get a 2:1. I wasn't required to do many essays, attandance was not closely monitored, I didn't read many of the set texts, and the exams were similar every year, so if you got the past papers from the library you could predict the questions. And I left entirely unprepared for the world of work.

I'm a huge proponent of vocational education - both as a stand-alone thing and, where appropriate, as a non-traditional pathway into university. There are challenges, not least the negligible amount of industry we have in the UK, but it's a valuable resource. I'd argue if someone really wants to go into hospitality, it may be better for them to do a BTEC or HND in something very specific to their area of interest, rather than be pressured into three years of university studying something unconnected.

The move to shift learners on to vocational tracks at 14 hasn't been working particularly well as a lot of parents feel it's too early to decide. Vocational provision at FE colleges, etc, is pretty good though. The government should be doing a lot more to elevate the standing of vocational courses and encourage employers to drop degree requirements from job listings wherever they can, etc.

However, that has to be an organic process of persuasion, rather than further capping university numbers or de-funding courses. I think only around 30% of school leavers go to university at present, and that drops to 15% for people from disadvantaged backgrounds. The best predictor of whether you'll go to university remains whether your parents did. There's a vast number of people not served by any form of tertiary education. Looking at how to get some of that 30% out of university, rather than how to get more of the 70% in to some form of education (be it university, vocational colleges, apprenticeships, etc), seems like misplaced energy.

I think we can work on both : improving the education given to students admitted to universities, and finding a way to educate those not served by the current system. my job entails doing the former and I obviously write from that perspective, but not at the expense of the latter. I don't think lowering the level of university education is the answer, though, as the article suggests and my British academic friends confirm is being done. one of them pointed out that New Labour sought to game the system in exactly this way, and the Tories have tried to keep that up while privatizing in order to extract rents. I hope that Labour nowadays has a better plan. Corbyn's roots in trade unions give me hope that Labour today could revalorize trade education from high school up. I support the same here in France, as do many of my colleagues here.

The move to shift learners on to vocational tracks at 14 hasn't been working particularly well as a lot of parents feel it's too early to decide.

I agree with those parents. Age 14 brings many ancillary complications which can interfere with clarity about a young person's talents and interests. Seems better to create a larger age 'window' during which this opportunity was easily available. Possibly attach increments of rising incentives followed by receding incentives for making the decision at an earlier or later age within that window.

There’s also the pace of technological change. What seems to require a baccalaureate one year could become a vocational business a few years later, or vice versa. I’m thinking about coding, other network/IT jobs, multimedia work, etc.

Euler why did you say “unfortunately” regarding how nursing is now a vocational school thing in France?

he's saying it was vice versa; it moved from the trade track to the university track

Yes I think nursing should still be vocational.

in the USA nursing is kinda "all of the above", you don't need a bachelor's degree to become an RN but the Bachelor of Science in Nursing exists for both first-time undergraduates and as post-baccalaureate programs and there's graduate degrees in any number of practice specialties for nurses.

Vocational provision at FE colleges, etc, is pretty good though. The government should be doing a lot more to elevate the standing of vocational courses and encourage employers to drop degree requirements from job listings wherever they can, etc.

"[Now] a note that some of you might find crass, or even offensive ": https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/university-of-calgary-ian-holloway-law-sessional-uofc-1.5403576?fbclid=IwAR2xA5Os-EnobEN4UmVZNb9HCw2zVTwEIFef4GIpHH194Uk6D-OI6rkzNp4

(For context, this is happening at a public institution in the richest province in the country.)

eh it's a law school, whatever

Really? I'm not really in favour of asking employees to donate their pay to their employer, especially when their employment is precarious and especially in the context of also informing them about impending position cuts.

Regardless of the kind of school. Not like the students are attending for free.

As the article says, the temps in question are lawyers doing this on the side. This isn’t a general university issue, but an issue of the law school.

I'm standing by the previous post (esp bc I think "mostly" is doing a lot of work). They can start a podcast if they want to give away tips for free.

The 5% cut is the university-wide issue.

The dean's salary - which is surely over $6k; is he donating any of it? - is coming at least in part from tuition dollars the students are paying for the sessionals' instruction. Whether they have good day jobs is beside the point imo.

The 5% cut was a provincial choice, not a university choice. But I’m not trying to argue about this; obviously an employer asking employees for donations to pay for their workplace is terrible. My thought is that law schools are quite different than universities as a whole—in bad ways of course, they’re greedy and lazy places. I wouldn’t infer anything general from what they do.

I don't think I said at any point that the university as a whole, and only the uni, is responsible for this, but fair enough if your point is that this is a "law schools exist in an eternal shitbin" issue as opposed to a "higher education into the shitbin" issue.

Totally, just that

UCSC administration is attempting to frighten faculty, graduate students, and undergrads from standing in solidarity with teach other. I just sent this message to the over 300 students I'm teaching this term. https://t.co/RtI8Uwu4sP pic.twitter.com/df1pM6DUcP

— yung epistemologist #FreeLiyah (@touchfaith) February 8, 2020

A colleague who works at a small private university in socal, a European who kept his job here (in France you can go on leave for up to five years and the job stays yours, without pay obv), is asking those of us in Europe to let colleagues here know about the devastation coming to usa higher education, so that Europeans will finally drop whatever (ill-guided) dreams they may have had of relocating to the usa, and warn prospective grad students away from usa universities (since there will be no jobs for them upon completion, even more than there were no jobs before)(yes, you can get a lot less than zero, because a doctorate from the usa doesn't mean very much when you're trying to get a job in European academia).

i think this was a long time coming for many reasons - but maybe particularly bc of just the massive generational size difference btwn millennials (children of boomers iow echo-boom) + zoomers and below, even b4 dealing w/ economic/debt issues that will also be exacerbated by this crisis.

Euler, didn't you get a European job with a doctorate from the US?

that's right, Sund4r, and that's why I know that it's exceptional! also I know a lot of Euros with usa doctorates who get stuck in shitty small american towns but thought they'd end up in NYC, not understanding how shitty 99% of the usa is. and they're forever damaged goods in their home countries because there's a certain amount of patronage in getting a job and you only earn that patronage at home.

Mordy, right, it's the economic/debt issues that I'm thinking of. cohort sizes changing will have an effect especially on specialized places, like unis for religious denominations on the decline (thinking chiefly of mainline-ish protestant places, which litter the usa, but also catholic ones. don't think Jewish instituions are under this threat)

since there will be no jobs for them upon completion, even more than there were no jobs before

0 x 0 = 0

(My bitterness knows no bounds.)

Jewish institutions should be spared the worst demographic crunch but YU seems perpetually under threat bc MoDox in general is an endangered species and "higher education" in Ortho Jewish institutions means yeshivas. I don't know how JTS is weathering these storms but I wouldn't be surprised if they're struggling as well, as I understand Conservative and other liberal denominations are.

otoh iirc i think i saw that even liberal jews are growing in real numbers partic just smaller % bc of massive charedi growth so maybe they'll all do fine as long as jewish pop is growing

ignore 'partic' plz part of sentence i deleted*

my contact with yeshivas is mostly in Israel (I spent some time at Mir Yeshiva in December), but I reckon they're pretty similarly run elsewhere, and yeah, that's a completely different world than the degree-seeking aim of higher education that's dominant otherwise.

what did you do at Mir?? when i was in high school Mir was one of the feeder schools for bochurim who went to israel for bais medresh (a few students also went to ponevezh every year) most students stayed in the states at the yeshiva and eventually lakewood

one of my friends/hosts in Jerusalem took me there for part of a day, because his son has been a rosh yeshiva there, having married into the family (a Lithuanian family whose name I've forgotten).

and oh no no no, I just learned that that friend, who took me to Mir, died of the virus today in Jerusalem. He was a great philosopher of mathematics, trained at Princeton, then a longtime faculty member at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. RIP.

baruch dayan emes sorry such sad news

thanks Mordy. Here's a link.

My condolences, Euler. RIP.

Sorry to hear, Euler.

I know a lot of Euros with usa doctorates who get stuck in shitty small american towns but thought they'd end up in NYC, not understanding how shitty 99% of the usa is

tbh I know tons of US phds in this same boat - a lot of people don't realize when starting a phd program that you will end up living where you find a job, if you are lucky enough to do so. And the chances that you end up in a cool big city are close to zero, especially when a lot of schools in those places pay shit relative to local cost of living and have arduous tenure requirements because they know people really want to live there.

That said a lot of them get used to living somewhere small/shitty/cheap, can deal with it for 9 months if they can GTFO in the summer, or get some sort of stockholm syndrome where a bigger, less shitty place feels like a huge win in comparison (see: me, for example).

Not wanting to live in the middle of nowhere working for a shitty college is probably the main reason I gave up on the academic job search after school. My brilliant peers in grad school all managed to get good jobs in nice places but, uh, I was not my brilliant peers.

yeah that's a good point, I certainly didn't realize when I chose my doctoral institution in the midwest usa that that significantly increased my chances of having to take a job in the midwest usa, a region I wanted nothing to do with. once I ended up in kansass I mean of course I spent every summer out of town, usually in Europe, but it didn't help the sense of failure, of having trudged so hard only end up in a shithole where my students didn't give a fuck about the subject I taught & were ill-equipped to write a cogent sentence about anything. the teaching was the most depressing part, just that empty look in their eyes, with their neckbeards and beer tshirts. I guess that's why getting out of town never helped. and people who got used to living there only made it worse for me, because then we had nothing in common: they were trying to set up roots there, and I was just hustling to get out asap. & I did! but those were friendless years.

Ominous projections in the U.K., with some universities expecting to lose over £100m in revenue through the absence of foreign students:

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/apr/11/universities-brace-for-huge-losses-as-foreign-students-drop-out

Without a bailout, I can’t see them all surviving.

A friend, a prof at St Andrews, expects doom. International students, or at least Chinese students, pay 3x what home students pay! And St Andrews is a top UK uni! I gather UK universities at all levels are funded this way. Also St Andrews relies on fees from renting out its facilities to conferences and the like over summers, and at least this year that's gone.

Of course there will be a bailout. But still, that's a mad way to fund a university system. When I was on the faculty at a USA Big Ten institution, that institution also relied on international students, in particular Chinese and Brazilian students, who indeed paid more than in-state and even out-of-state students. In France the Macron government proposed last year upping the uni fees for non-EU students to about 3000 € per year for bachelors students and 4000 € per year for masters students. But this was strongly contested by universities, and most have committed to not apply those fees. Furthermore, one of the French "supreme courts" ruled late last year that fees, even for non-EU students, violate a constitutional commitment to free university access. It's thus unclear whether these fees will ever be widely charged to international students. (To be fair, since French university courses must be given in French, by law, our pool of international students is not as extensive as those of the US and the UK. Though I have (excellent, as usual) Chinese students here too.)

Does Ireland do it differently, as it's an EU country, or are they more on the US-UK model?

Ireland has negligible fees for EU students and higher ones for everyone else - not dissimilar to Scotland, iirc.

The U.K. model is driven by a commercial mindset focused on investment to fuel growth. Most universities will have ambitions to expand the number of students, spend heavily on recruitment, plan larger campuses, etc. A huge amount has been borrowed against anticipated earnings. That’s one of the main reasons his is so disastrous. You can’t just scale down operations.

only negligible in comparison to US and UK - by continental standards they are high iirc

first Google hit (from 2017) says Ireland has the second-highest fees in Europe: https://www.thejournal.ie/college-fees-ireland-3675177-Nov2017/

iirc Sharivari you said uk universities even borrowed off expected fees from the next term—ooof!

The government stopped giving any funding for most (all non-STEM?) students a while back, so that universities can stand on their own two feet, best education system in the world, etc.

In Ireland or the UK? The latter I imagine.

The whole thing is a nightmare. Universities, iirc, have taken on north of £12bn debt and the majority of that is to private lenders - only a handful are able to go down a public bond route and the banks are pretty restrictive. To compound things, there has been a dip in the number of domestic students and many universities, even those borrowing nine figure sums, are already running a deficit. There has been an underlying assumption that the government will bail out any universities that get into trouble, which just fuels irresponsible borrowing (and irresponsible lending).

The majority of the borrowing aiui is over a fairly long term but a £100m revenue hole at a university that has next to no surplus even under normal circumstances is going to make it impossible to meet payments.

What do you think the consequences of that will be for unis? And will it be different for Russell group unis? My sense is that even Bristol is vulnerable (I know several staff members there and in my area it’s quite good)