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Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

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Re: Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

#291

Post by foldr »

varispeed wrote: post #239
skippyboxedhero wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because universities borrowed staggering amounts of money and hired massive numbers of people. The assumption was that international student numbers would be allowed to grow as fast or faster than in the past, ignoring the fact that the UK is not able to provide infrastructure for the people who live here let alone temporary inhabitants. There is no way to keep the bubble going (as with every bubble, for government a…

Don't forget that the Universities focused on getting foreign students and cashing in instead of providing valuable education. The quality of teaching is non-existent. It's about giving foreign parents ability to tell their peers look my brilliant child is studying in England! But really they are not studying. Attendance is not checked and lectures are a sham.

> Attendance is not checked and lectures are a sham.

Formal tracking of attendance at lectures is a fairly new thing in British universities (introduced around 2015 when I was teaching at one).

Re: Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

#292

Post by calf »

jltsiren wrote: post #276
calf wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I studied at Berkeley and Princeton (big classes vs small classes), I find your view to be fundamentally flawed. You presuppose that meritocracy is an inherently fair value system implementation, while many critics and philosophers reject this assumption; in the next breath you delegitimize social justice issues subtly framed as "identity politics", needless to say many other critics and philosophers do not share thi…

There is no such thing as "the European PhD". A PhD in the UK nominally takes 3 or 4 years, depending on the program. In Finland, it's nominally 4 years (but typically longer), and that assumes that you already have a Master's. It used to be longer, but Finnish universities moved to shorter "American-style" PhDs, because politicians wanted people to graduate faster.

There is such a thing conceptually as distinct from how American PhDs are selected and developed. I've alluded to this already without elaborating in full on it.

Re: Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

#293

Post by ninalanyon »

madaxe_again wrote: post #134
rm445 wrote: post #124

I am a Durham graduate, still somewhat involved with the university via some voluntary roles, and a bit of a 'booster' in the sense that I'll sing its praises to anyone. I also have a postgrad degree from Cambridge and did a little teaching while there. So, I'm quite familiar, and while I'm happy to see Durham get some love, this is bunk. There is a gulf in undergraduate teaching between Oxbridge and the pack. The su…

I don’t know what college you were in or what you read, but in castle, we had weekly tutorials in physics. Grand total of four of us in the group.

Same at Exeter Uni. in the 1970s when I studied Applied Physics there and my wife studied Law and also had a similar tutorial arrangement. I don't know what they do now though.

Re: Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

#294

Post by Earw0rm »

geremiiah wrote: post #57
afavour wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Middle class students, knowing they'll be discriminated against, are now applying to US schools I can't take that seriously. Middle class students in the UK would not take on the level of student debt required to study in the US, the sums of money required are vastly, vastly different between the two countries. Sounds like PG has a hobby horse he very much wants to ride no matter what the facts show.

In British English, "middle class" refers to the well off professional classes or merchant traders. In American English, if I understand correctly, everyone who works is considered middle class.

Who still can't afford US universities, as UK professionals are (excepting the very top executives, public servants, finance and legal professionals, of whom there are relatively few) paid a lot less than the US equivalent.

UK middle class also includes university lecturers, teachers, various health professionals, graphic designers and so on, most of whom make less than 100k USD/year and some not much more than 50k.

Re: Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

#295

Post by pbhjpbhj »

tialaramex wrote: post #139
afavour wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know anyone at Oxford but do have friends who work in higher education. From what I hear from them Brexit has turned UK higher education upside down when it comes to funding and research. I wouldn't be at all surprised if this is a consequence of some universities navigating that better than others. But you don't get anywhere near as much online outrage with that theory so "leftists are ruining western civili…

Government decided it doesn't want to pay for tertiary education. But, it does want UK students to get tertiary education, and they can't afford it. So, OK that circle can be kinda squared by "student loans" except of course the cost on these loans would sky-rocket. So, then government says ah, you can't charge more than this small fixed amount, and we'll never increase it because that's unpopular. For-profit lenders…

Just on a point of fact, fees went up by RPI-based inflation this year.

I find the rates high for what some (most?) students are getting.

Re: Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

#296

Post by ninalanyon »

exe34 wrote: post #217
quietbritishjim wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like a similar idea but I doubt it's to the same extent. When I was at Cambridge in the early noughties, supervisions for maths and computer science (and physics I believe but I didn't go to any of those) were 2 students in 4 1-hour sessions per week (1 per 24 hour lecture course). [Edit: hmm, actually maybe it was just 2 per week.] In maths, if there were an odd number of students then one would get 1 to…

cue the Harvard graduates tell us they had 5 teachers for 1 student in their tutorials. A large part of uni is about learning to learn on your own and learning in groups - if everything is spoonfed, it might not be the best training.

We certainly didn't get spoon fed in tutorials at Exeter Uni. in the 1970s!

Re: Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

#297

Post by eli_gottlieb »

calf wrote: post #270
_hark wrote: post #174

I'm a researcher at Oxford, and I've both taught and studied here and in the US. The undergraduate teaching here is phenomenal. It's incredibly labor intensive for the staff, but the depth and breadth students are exposed to in their subject is astonishing. It's difficult to imagine how it can be improved. My favorite study of university rankings comes from faculty hiring markets, which compute implicit rankings by m…

I studied at Berkeley and Princeton (big classes vs small classes), I find your view to be fundamentally flawed. You presuppose that meritocracy is an inherently fair value system implementation, while many critics and philosophers reject this assumption; in the next breath you delegitimize social justice issues subtly framed as "identity politics", needless to say many other critics and philosophers do not share thi…

You're either blithely (in fact, stupidly given electoral results this past decade) assuming everyone shares your normative goals and values, or you just asked ChatGPT to write you a "kritik" like some kid in a school debate league.

Re: Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

#298

Post by calf »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #297
calf wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I studied at Berkeley and Princeton (big classes vs small classes), I find your view to be fundamentally flawed. You presuppose that meritocracy is an inherently fair value system implementation, while many critics and philosophers reject this assumption; in the next breath you delegitimize social justice issues subtly framed as "identity politics", needless to say many other critics and philosophers do not share thi…

You're either blithely (in fact, stupidly given electoral results this past decade) assuming everyone shares your normative goals and values, or you just asked ChatGPT to write you a "kritik" like some kid in a school debate league.

Edited: I think what's really going on is that you've internalized oppression so as to be so cynical and toxically jealous that someone else online can actually blithely/stupidly say what they think on a Sunday afternoon. Because you're professional working at a university, and you can't just do that and speak out. Noam Chomsky famously described this behavior amongst his peers.

I'm Asian American and LGBT+, and I was privileged by an advanced formal education. So, yes, I literally have a different set of values and goals than you. So you should just try to read it in good faith, I have made no such assumption rather my comment laid out those issues for you to think about. Unless you are doing the old "rules of rational discussion are for me, not for thee"? Surely you're not that sort of antiintellectual reactionary.

And to the other possibility, you're just writing an insult, so the problem there is you and your emotional regulation, and you are responsible for that.

Going back, it's quite the opposite, when the other commenter framed "identity politics" and "meritocracy", they were committing the very error you have ignorantly accused me of. Thus you are just engaging in projection. Not to mention the ("kritik" conservative's dogwshistle).

Thus, the fact that you are lacking in critical thinking skills today does not excuse you from such intellectually prejudiced remarks.

And finally, your reference to "electoral results" tells me you didn't read through my comment, and are pigeonholing me as one type of left-American Democrat or another, of which I have provided enough commentary in the original comment that I could not be one.

So as much as you were trying to suggest the problem is on my end, the problem is with you and your narrowminded (and frankly, one with a racist tenor because surely you would not have said that comment to my face) reply, eli_gottlieb. It's too bad you're actually a postdoc, if I were an evil SJW or Democrat (or whatever politics it was you were insinuating) I'd be cancelling you through your own institution or something.

If you are a conservative, further discussion is going to be pointless. If you are Bernie/AOC/other leftist then I'll chalk it up to you basically misreading what I wrote.

Re: Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

#299

Post by notahacker »

KaiserPro wrote: post #164
abxyz wrote: post #2

pg thinks this is because of letting in poor people: https://xcancel.com/paulg/status/1969334665375813679

I love how logic escapes PG. If it was because of the poor people, then Oxbridge would still be winning, as they are the only ones that have entrance exams & weird interviews still.

Yep. The beneficiary of this ranking update, for those who take it seriously, is a place where the same comprehensively educated kid that disgustingly and outrageously get a place at Oxford with three As after also passing additional selection hurdles in the form of an entrance exam, a special application form that certain schools are very good at teaching their kids how to pass, and an interview with a probably privately-educated Oxford don gets an offer of 3 Bs based on the vanilla UCAS application, and might well get in if they miss out if the course isn't oversubscribed, especially if they have a good story about going to a bad school.

Also, nobody thinks gaming a teaching quality survey ranking (something traditionally focused on more by much less academically selective universities) to jump up the Times list means that Durham is on average outputting more elite students

Re: Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

#300

Post by growse »

patanegra wrote: post #288
growse wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Parents in state schools don't put in even half of the effort on average. I wondered how long it'd be before we'd see "parents who can't afford private education just aren't putting the effort in".

As if it isn't true. And I say it as someone who went to a state school, just like my parents, grandparents...

Poor people just need to try harder, right?

Or do they need to just be luckier?

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