In UK universities there is a daily erosion of integrity • Hacker News Board

Re: In UK universities there is a daily erosion of integrity

#181

Post by xboxnolifes » Tue, Apr 24, 2018, 2:14 PM UTC

gaius wrote: post #92

sergiosgc wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes no sense. It seems to me it is an elitist view that when you provide a service to the unwashed masses, it must be of lower quality. I believe it is false. Curricula don't have to be easier if you have a large student body, and graduation requirements don't have to be lower. Taking in more students does not inhibit service quality, up to the capacity of the school, which can be easily scaled by hiring more…

It seems to me it is an elitist view that when you provide a service to the unwashed masses, it must be of lower quality But it must be. An institution with AAA A-level students can teach more advanced material at a faster pace than one that admits EEEs. This is surely obvious, no? It doesn’t mean anyone is better or worse in a moral sense, it just means more or less academically able.

Just because they accept them doesn't mean they need to keep them. If the students can't keep up, that's on them.

Re: In UK universities there is a daily erosion of integrity

#182

Post by iguy » Tue, Apr 24, 2018, 2:15 PM UTC

skissane wrote: post #176

wastedhours wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of it is that, yes, the non-academic staff help with the mountain of non-academic work lecturers would otherwise have. I used to work in a support role at a university, and although many of the roles will inevitably be automated away, you'd be amazed at how much administration a student on a course requires (from room bookings for lectures, enrolment information, pastoral support, cleaning, cooking, supporting w…

> the non-academic staff help with the mountain of non-academic work lecturers would otherwise have Sometimes the academics create lots of extra work for the non-academic staff with their sub-optimal decisions. I used to work for a university in their IT services, and as a developer I was exposed to a lot of the business rules around enrolment, course prerequisites, degree/major requirements, which we recorded and en…

All of which complexity used to be handled by printing a course guide with a sentence about prerequisites. And perhaps the professor would remind you on day one. This seems like an example of IT not saving anyone time.

Re: In UK universities there is a daily erosion of integrity

#183

Post by tzahola » Tue, Apr 24, 2018, 2:16 PM UTC

mayniac wrote: post #106

tzahola wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your tone feels threatening. I hope you don't bring that attitude to the campus...

If you've got an actual argument to make then please make it, I really don't have the time or patience for no-effort bait comments like >Define "sexual", define "harassment".

My argument is the same as what's described in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16912248

Re: In UK universities there is a daily erosion of integrity

#184

Post by eesmith » Tue, Apr 24, 2018, 2:23 PM UTC

YellowCode wrote: post #162

pjc50 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does a 2002 article on faxes and children's books have to do with the present-day UK education sector?

If you read it, you'll know.

Yeah, I tried, it started with gushing over James Dobson - the man who believes that beating children is a good thing (this is personal; my parents used his books for parenting advice) - and C.S. Lewis.

Eg, it complains about Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone as being a "deeply incoherent work", and praises Lewis. But the Narnia series is also a deeply incoherent work.

It describes the book as a narcissistic fantasy, which is a literary description and an opinion. It then spends paragraphs describing the psychiatric condition known as narcissism. But the connection is still an opinion.

The author then gives this horrid homophobic nugget:

> One of the most blatant forms of magic through ingestion is, of course, homosexuality, and through its connection with narcissism we can get some inkling of the purpose behind the major cultural offensive in favor of homosexuality. The homosexual is the consumer culture’s version of the ideal citizen because he takes all of the strains of narcissism to their logical antiessentialist conclusion.

Yeah, I stopped there.

Re: In UK universities there is a daily erosion of integrity

#185

Post by keithpeter » Tue, Apr 24, 2018, 2:23 PM UTC

I finished an undergraduate degree in 1980, when there were around 25000 undergraduates [1] p13/14. Now there are at least 10 times that many. Inevitably, the system has had to change to reflect that increase in volume within the span of a single career - quite a lot of change.

Not sure where the answer lies, but an increasingly large proportion of my teenager students are opting not to go to university directly at 18, so there could be a 'correction' on the way over the next generation or so.

[1] http://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN042...

Re: In UK universities there is a daily erosion of integrity

#186

Post by Systemic33 » Tue, Apr 24, 2018, 2:29 PM UTC

patricius wrote: post #164

senorjazz wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you being facetious? You know very well what they mean and what is meant by "free education". If someone says to you "I am giving this to you for free" do you then then argue "it is not free, someone had to pay for it" :-\

Because when someone writes "the state pays your tuition", it hides the fact that people pay your tuition. Or, depending on your view, you yourself will pay for your tuition through taxes. A lot of people forget, when making a statement like that, what is called free is not in fact free. And when you give something away, we presume that it is not something you have stolen. But the money spent at the point of consumpt…

It's a cost on society, not on the individual pupil, just like how the education is a gain to the society at large, while the individual effort of the individual may seem negligble.

So of course it's free. You are not paying. And you don't pay it over taxes, society does. Think of it this way: If you didn't go to university, and just learned on your own, then you still pay the same taxes if you reach the same income level. So taking a university does not increase your taxes. Ergo free.

Re: In UK universities there is a daily erosion of integrity

#187

Post by sykh » Tue, Apr 24, 2018, 2:29 PM UTC

patricius wrote: post #139

sykh wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When someone says tuition is free or that healthcare is free what they mean is that using these services doesn’t cost out of pocket expenses and doesn’t lead to debt. In this sense those services are free.

Well, if we can redefine free to mean "I will let someone else pay for it" or "I will pay for it at some later date", then sure...

It’s not a redefining of terms. People abuse language and speak in ways that aren’t necessarily technically correct. For instance many times a person will say “fine” when asked how they are doing even if they really aren’t doing fine. Here fine is mostly used as an acknowledgement of the other person's greeting.

I gave an interpretation of what people really mean by “education is free”. If you wish to argue that people who say this phrase don’t mean what I say it means then do so. I might be wrong. But don’t get all pedantic on the dictionary definitions of words. We are talking about what people mean when they say something not what it logically ought to mean.

It appears surprising to you that not everyone is precise in what they say. Sometimes people say what they mean and sometimes they mean what they say. But lots of times they don’t. If this is a surprise to you then I implore you to reconsider your understanding of the nature of human communication.

Re: In UK universities there is a daily erosion of integrity

#188

Post by iguy » Tue, Apr 24, 2018, 2:30 PM UTC

wastedhours wrote: post #175

iguy wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the things you say certainly need doing, somehow they were all done in the past with vastly smaller non-academic staff. Say 50 years ago. What's changed? Obviously IT is one thing, but this doesn't seem huge. Or maybe, it's not obvious why it need be a lot bigger than everyone having gmail. "assisting with research proposals" is certainly new. But is it big? How much falls under "pastoral support"?

> What's changed? Student numbers. Massive, monumental growth in student numbers. And the red tape that comes with that kind of size (as ever). Labour's push for 50% of school leavers to go to university, large swathes of new courses approved that would otherwise have been taught through vocational routes, increase in student applications vs places (in the UK you can apply [or at least could] for up to 6 places, one…

Thanks!

> Student numbers

I still don't quite see why overall growth must change the proportion so much.

Maybe the extra complication of everyone applying to 20 places is a factor which doesn't scale. I don't know exactly how you fix that. Perhaps you should cap the number of applications an individual can make?

Re complicated IT, again somehow needing to collaborate on departmental memos somehow wasn't an issue when we had typewriters. I suspect a lot is weird make-work.

> grants procedure

OK, good. I would not have refused such help, but have never had any!

This however does seem orthogonal to students. It's part of the massive stuff-up that is research funding, where we've allowed the question of allocating these funds to eat up not only a majority of the time of the scientists being supported... but also apparently a huge number of other people. All ultimately paid out of the pot we're trying to distribute. Can't we change the rules of the game so that more of the pot goes to things which aren't obviously zero-sum?

> support staff specifically to help with wellbeing

It's nice to do these things, certainly. But lavishing them on the best and brightest young adults while all the other ones with jobs fend for themselves doesn't seem so easy to defend. Why isn't this part of the NHS budget?

Re: In UK universities there is a daily erosion of integrity

#189

Post by eesmith » Tue, Apr 24, 2018, 2:30 PM UTC

patricius wrote: post #45

remedan wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? I live in the west (continental Europe) and you can attend a good university for free here. The state pays your tuition.

I know this is a trite comment, but no, you still pay through taxes. The state has no money. I too live in a country with tax-financed universities.

If the state has no money, then what do you consider the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund?

Because that looks like an awful lot of money to me.

Re: In UK universities there is a daily erosion of integrity

#190

Post by isthatart » Tue, Apr 24, 2018, 2:30 PM UTC

jdietrich wrote: post #168

sergiosgc wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes no sense. It seems to me it is an elitist view that when you provide a service to the unwashed masses, it must be of lower quality. I believe it is false. Curricula don't have to be easier if you have a large student body, and graduation requirements don't have to be lower. Taking in more students does not inhibit service quality, up to the capacity of the school, which can be easily scaled by hiring more…

>It seems to me it is an elitist view that when you provide a service to the unwashed masses, it must be of lower quality. That's exactly what happened, and it pre-dates the Labour government's goal of 50% participation. The Further and Higher Education Act 1992 allowed polytechnics and colleges of further education to become universities. Many of these institutions had little or no research output and had previously…

Excellent comment, although some are older problems, see the novel series Wilt by Tom Sharpe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilt_(novel)

Anyway, for me Bologna is on the par with the more recent so called adoption of Open Access in the form of "Gold OA", i.e. one more way to turn universities into cash cows, presented as a virtuous move. In the case of Bologna it was about the precarisation of researchers, in the case of "BOAI" Gold OA it was about reselling to researchers their minimal units of publication, paid by themselves, written by them under the pressure of obtainment, eventually, of a senior position.