Rolling higher education into the shitbin thread

Otm

what's wrong with luxury goods?

and "cost" is relative.

nothing's wrong with them, but unlike buying a sportscar a lot of people only find that their degrees were luxury goods after they made the purchase

yeah, it's as if they told everyone that a sports car was the ticket to a well paying job and a comfortable lifestyle and then when you got home they were just lol now you can pay this off for the next 20 years except w/ the sports car you resell it but no one will buy yr diploma even from a fancy college

anything that's not a traditional academic subject is to be axed, banished to the vocational schools

Coming back to this for a moment, i do think it's at least plausible that a substantial cohort of students might, in the future, decide that a traditional academic university environment isn't the best place to learn business skills. Given the option of studying a degree-level course at a mid-to-low level college / university with little to no 'brand recognition' or studying a vocationally-orientated degree course with a theoretical path to direct employment at IBM College or the Chevron School of Management, i think a lot of people would probably lean towards the latter.

Sumsung does this reasonably successfully in Germany, Canada and the UK, typically at a lower level and in partnership with traditional colleges, but it has the potential to take a much larger segment of the market. One FTSE 100 company in the UK has launched its own stand-alone degrees rubber stamped by a trad university and aims, in the future, to have degree-awarding powers of its own.

This inevitably means the "corporatisation of higher education" and has been resisted on those grounds, and also poses a potential revenue threat to traditional universities, but it could lead to refocusing of attention.

*Samsung

at regional public schools in the u.s. there is a LOT of talk about partnerships between business—often quite local—and universities/colleges, at i know not what levels of remove in terms of money and influence. naturally businesses prefer to offload their training costs onto the taxpayers as much as possible, and lawmakers love to service business interests in politically and ideologically mutually-beneficial ways, but given how savagely lawmakers have been imposing austerity conditions on public schools i wonder just how long this can carry on before they turn things around and start letting business credential its own people to meet its needs directly, rather than using business needs serve as the standard against which supposed failures to (efficiently) educate are occurring.

London Met, one of the most commercially-focused of the new UK universities, is cutting 400 jobs, getting rid of two campus sites and aiming to reduce student numbers to 10,000.

They currently have a student to staff ratio of about 4 to 1, which seems pretty low.

http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2016/may/31/london-university-scraps-400-jobs-and-two-campuses

Also looking to move some of their courses to blended learning.

“What we’re doing is being on the front foot responding to the policy context,” Raftery said. “We’ve got to be way more digital, have way more blended learning... that is built around complex lives, whether students are working or raising kids. This is the reality of our demographic, they’re working their way through university.”

On a similar theme:

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/futurelearn-launches-first-moocs-offering-academic-credits

The courses will be free to take, but to collect the credits students will have to purchase a new form of accreditation called a certificate of achievement for each module, costing between £39 and £59 each. They would then have to complete a final assessment, costing several hundred pounds.

Sir Alan Langlands, Leeds’ vice-chancellor, argued that offering credit online could prove to be a valuable recruitment tool for campus-based courses.

“We are very conscious of the fact that, when we start recruiting next for students for 2018, many of them will have been born after the year 2000,” said Sir Alan. “I think young people are going to take a different attitude: they will want high quality, but they will also want flexibility as learners, and maybe some of them won’t want all this to be restricted by geography.

“Developing this longer-term position on digital learning seems very timely from our point of view.”

"digital learning" can significantly lower operation and commuting costs but it's beneath the dignity of many of the privileged who've succeeded as faculty and their younger cohort at prestigious schools *there, in person* to network, make career connections, "have fun", and evaluate lifetime mating and investment opportunities, so implementation could lag. ultimately though perhaps the underclasses can happily be kept out of the "good" schools altogether, by dangling the convenience of online learning?

something that bugs me about this "there are too many graduates in X" arguments is like... ok, there aren't professorships waiting for everyone, but, its nonetheless actually possible to not treat people that are just instructors and not on tenure track like actual professionals and not just disposable faces, even if there are a fair supply of people potentially willing to adjunct.

and if you pay people properly to do professional development you'll probably get much better instructors over the long haul -- so partly i feel like somehow academia has actually devalued the teaching aspect very drastically even as you have a huge influx of students, and thats weird to me.

teaching is for suckers. successful academics are researchers, first, last, and always

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/want-to-know-why-professors-dont-teach/article1202892/

One FTSE 100 company in the UK has launched its own stand-alone degrees rubber stamped by a trad university and aims, in the future, to have degree-awarding powers of its own.

no link yet to the study on how for-profit universities apparently actually damage the earning potential of people who attend them?

Margaret Wente = the worst

xps, Pearson, validated by Royal Holloway.

I kind of want to become a stockbroker.

xp to tomboto

these two links give a (somewhat conflicting) overview of the data about private/for-profite ed and earnings

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2014/04/11/the-obama-administrations-claim-that-72-percent-of-for-profits-programs-have-graduates-making-less-than-high-school-dropouts/

http://blog.ed.gov/2014/04/fact-too-many-career-training-programs-lead-to-low-wages-high-debt/

xp - plenty of stockbrokers went to my college and got essentially "sports car" degrees, in that what they majored in had nothing to do with the nuts and bolts of being a stockbroker

that's what i am thinking.... i have no love for finance, but i have other (more pro-social) small business ideas that i wouldn't want to pursue until i built up some savings and (lol) knew about business.

so like, not necessarily being a stock broker, but i am increasingly considering trying to find a place in the private sector workforce that is not related to writing or teaching, the things i always thought of as "my things." still researching this stuff -- maybe not so fruitful to discuss on ilx.

you don't learn how to run a small business by becoming a stockbroker. you do so by working for one, though it definitely varies by business type, but a lot of stuff is the same, ... or you just start one and learn by trial and error.

yeah that's a good point. i think i mostly want to just be financially solvent so i can think about taking risks.

i definitely get the sense that us small business ppl are definitely a minority on ilx

but let me tell you, my college education was very valuable in that it taught me how to fill out forms. Like, I'm pretty damn good at filling out forms. Finding the instructions for the forms. Determining which instructions and boxes are relevant and irrelevant ... being good at filling out forms is a really valuable professional skill.

so much of adulthood seems to be filling out forms.

no link yet to the study on how for-profit universities apparently actually damage the earning potential of people who attend them?

Again, it comes back to a massive failure of regulation and i don't think tightening the rules around funding and applying a 'gainful employment' metric that just looks at elevated earning potential comes close to solving it.

For-profit colleges probably do increase earnings potential, simply by virtue of people being able to apply to jobs that require college degrees, but if billions in federal funding is going to be ploughed into for-profit colleges, there has to be a much stronger regulatory framework for checking whether they're actually providing educational value as well. A lot of them are very good but clearly many that could meet the new criteria are still basically a waste of time and money. Stopping the GI bill funding courses with a 13% graduation rate is the easy part, tackling 'quality' in the for-profit and not-for-profit sector is much harder but absolutely essential in the long term if a degree is going to maintain any inherent value.

pro-tip - don't steal code :(

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/06/report-at-least-two-shot-on-ucla-campus.html

i read that the professor didn't steal code and the shooter was delusional

any murderer is delusional imho

so much of adulthood seems to be filling out forms.

Even when you aren't filling out forms, most of professional communication is an indirect form filling activity. You write justifications that become decision memoranda which are realized as a signature on a form. You give people directions that become the population of a form and the receipt of the form by some other processing entity, which turns completed forms into travel visas, work orders, bills of materials, etc. Information and communication tailored to make it possible for complete strangers to efficiently work "together."

I forget how I found it but we have a copy of this and it's neat: http://www.thamesandhudson.com/The_Form_Book/9780500515082

graduation rate is a shitty metric! all that does is penalize schools that let in the people with high school degrees who aren't prepared for college work. there's this enormous gap between "having a high school degree" and "being prepared for college".

but let me tell you, my college education was very valuable in that it taught me how to fill out forms. Like, I'm pretty damn good at filling out forms. Finding the instructions for the forms. Determining which instructions and boxes are relevant and irrelevant ... being good at filling out forms is a really valuable professional skill.

― sarahell, Thursday, June 2, 2016 6:10 AM (12 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

is this very david foster wallace esque

this is*

http://prospect.org/article/meanwhile-back-most-campuses

$$$$

less privileged undergraduates / graduates are gauche

good article, in sync with my ten-ish years teaching at public unis in the American Midwest.

Margaret Wente = the worst

Since I should back this up, I'll start by listing assertions that Wente does not back up in the article that reggie linked:
"student engagement is at an all-time low, according to numerous surveys.": none of which are listed
"Educating undergraduates is just about the last thing most professors want to do.": supported by one anecdotal quotation
" as enrolment soared, teaching loads - with the help of strong faculty unions - went down": no figures provided
"Of course there's prep time and marking and so on. But it's still not much.": no figures provided re hours. A 2/3 load doesn't sound unreasonable to me at all, even if I am not sure most seasoned profs are spending as much time as this guy says he is.
" Professors are rewarded not for turning out high-quality graduates, but for turning out books and papers - even if they are unread. "

and then just note how closely she followed this template in this piece. Maybe her professors should have taught her research and argumentative writing skills instead of getting high with undergrads?

She got caught plagiarizing again last month.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/community/inside-the-globe/public-editor-prose-must-be-attributed/article29749706/

Ugh.

http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-university-business-20160602-snap-story.html

and

https://www.aaup.org/article/does-academic-freedom-have-future#.V1SpPZMrKRt

(interesting mainly because of the source)

probably don't agree with 90% of this article, but its of interest as well:

https://chroniclevitae.com/news/1430-why-faculty-searches-fail

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/06/for-profit-companies-nonprofit-colleges/485930/

A fairly slanted piece on 'online programme management'. Doesn't mention Laureate, for some reason, though i would have thought they'd be one of the market leaders in the US.

re. failed searches: once you have a your short list, things can get very personal, and the logic of those decisions would be inexplicable outside of that context (sometimes inexplicable in that context). It's never about just that search, but the next one, and the next one after that.

xp what do you mean by "slanted"?

It presents OPM in an unremittingly negative light when the reality is more nuanced. If universities are going to diversity into online delivery, it's ludicrous to expect each one to reinvent the wheel, with all the variable quality / expertise that would come with that.

OPM can vary from assisting with marketing to providing every element of curriculum design, courseware, platform and teaching (effectively running a distinct degree programme with the university just providing the badging) - and the pricing model reflects that variety. Metrics around pricing would almost always include retention and progression. If students don't stick with it (which is fairly unusual on some university-only online degrees) the company doesn't get paid.

Lots of very good universities in the US, UK and Canada have these kinds of relationships and, though there is scope for "predatory" behaviour, every university that does engage with the idea is putting their reputation on the line so has the ultimate incentive to make sure that what's being offered is of an appropriate standard.

http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-university-business-20160602-snap-story.html

The decline of the best public university systems in the country is fucking terrible for this country and to a certain extent the world.

The best part of this article? He correctly argues that the system is well fucked and he doesn't even have to bring up the NCAA!

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/06/for-profit-companies-nonprofit-colleges/485930/

A fairly slanted piece on 'online programme management'. Doesn't mention Laureate, for some reason, though i would have thought they'd be one of the market leaders in the US.

Gawker on the Laureate / Clinton connections:

http://gawker.com/the-clintons-have-a-for-profit-college-problem-of-their-1781631216

Amazing:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/mar/26/experience-i-tracked-down-my-impostor

that's great, but the headline is a bit misleading! surely this guy will pop up in the news again somewhere in a couple of years?

i want to know who the imposter is!

Look for the flowers on the backs of his hands, with the words ‘know more’ and ‘artefact’ written across the fingers.

geeta wrote this article about the mills college closing vis a vis the music department

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/30/arts/music/mills-college-music.html

interesting article about the student athletes recruited to attend New College in Florida:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/31/magazine/new-college-desantis-florida.html