May as well have a thread about the A. C. Grayling New College of the Humanities thing

I mean, they are actually privatising arts degrees by stealth at the moment which is of far greater concern as far as I can see.

you dont think shiny new graduates from this place will walk into boardrooms?

have they talked about their admissions criteria?

i was expecting it to be mostly international students, like LSE gadaffi's slightly dim younger brother, whose parents refuse to send them to columbia/ucla to do film.

like somewhere for an oil sheikh who draws the line at an MFA to send a kid who doesn't want to think about international development

or guardian columns or publishing their witterings out of bloomsbury or whatever wellheeled arts grads currently do anyway?

This seems to be just a handy way to keep them seperated from the oiks for that troublesome 17-21 bracket

it makes no sense for them to look internationally for intake at 18k/year domestic fees, surely

nah i get the impression that this place is going for the a bit thick hardman LSE/reads the economist & monocle market rather than the truly dim sloan market

is there a 'posts impenetrable to our american cousins' thread because i feel like that belongs on one

So everyone who goes there will get a job as a Tory policy wonk and that's that?

lol caek

i'm not sure there's a big enough market within the UK, and international students (or at least the kind of international students with the initiative + family/financial support to apply to university in another country) generally have much stronger academic records.

obviously past performance no guide to future ... especially when you're dealing with public school kids, but for an institution that is looking to build a rep comparable to US universities and compete in the same market, the thing they need urgently is a first year with world-leading secondary school scores and ideally a high rejection rate of applicants, both of which are big selling points in the US higher ed market.

that was an xp to

it makes no sense for them to look internationally for intake at 18k/year domestic fees, surely

― thomp, Wednesday, June 8, 2011 12:48 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

a first year with world-leading secondary school scores

maximum possible score in UK a levels not considered world-leading btw

I mean, they are actually privatising arts degrees by stealth at the moment which is of far greater concern as far as I can see

Could you expand on this? sorry if this has been a big story, I have had my head in the sand for a while, and now feel the need to top up my outrage levels for the day

caek you are probably right! i don't know; a lot of the rhetoric around it is mentioning this supposed brain drain of smart (and incidentally rich) English students who end up going abroad. but that may be nine-tenths smokescreen, and I suspect you know more about the actualities of higher ed. in this country than I do.

i think the current brain-drain at 18 to the U.S. is tiny. it's basically that one girl that didn't get into magdalen and hermione grainger. but when fees go up to £9k it becomes a very different proposition.

the brain drain post undergrad and esp. post phd is cheaper to fix and potentially a much bigger problem imo.

oh lol euan blair got a scholarship to do international relations MA at yale with a 2:1 from bristol

It'll be interesting to see who takes up the offer of paying eighteen grand a year for a degree that'll tell future employers that they weren't accepted into Oxford / Cambridge / LSE / UCL but weren't prepared to 'slum it' at a redbrick.

the way i understood it from the website, the idea is that they'll get a University of London degree - they'll be under no obligation to identify that the teaching took place at NCHum. It is not a university, or a university college: it isn't registered as one.

basically it's easy to understand it as a crammer for people taking U of L international programme, which is usually offered as distance learning. NCHum enrols the students on the U of L external degree, provides teaching in tutorial style and a few lectures from big names - the actual exams/marking/name-on-certificate remains the U of L's.

http://www.londoninternational.ac.uk/media/press_releases/new_college_humanities.shtml

More than 70% of undergraduate students of the University of London International Programmes purchase tuition from Independent Teaching Institutions. These Independent Teaching Instuitions vary considerably in their scale and fees, this partly reflecting the level of local costs. The University of London International Programmes has a process for providing and re-confirming recognition to selected Independent Teaching Institutions around the world, the purposes being to indicate where good-quality support may be obtained and to facilitate co-operation to continuously improve the student experience. This does not preclude any institution from deciding to teach University of London International Programmes curricula and examinations without seeking recognition.

About the New College of the Humanities
The University is aware of the intention of the New College of the Humanities (NCH) to provide tuition to students of the University of London International Programmes. There is no formal agreement between the University of London and the NCH concerning academic matters. As with any other Independent Teaching Institution, a dialogue will be maintained about when to apply for recognition under the Institutions Policy Framework, but normally a track record is required. To avoid any confusion, it should be made clear that NCH is not, and will not be, a part of the University of London. Meanwhile it is legitimate for NCH, as an entirely independent institution, to provide tuition to students of University of London International Programmes as other institutions in London and around the world do. These students’ applications for registration for degrees would be made individually with the University of London International Programmes.

so this is basically one of those easter holiday a level revision classes on banbury road, but for degrees?

yup!

what it has above other crammers would be

- stringent entry requirements (sth ridiculous like AAA iirc)
- university-level teaching apparently, whoever the regular teachers are going to be.
- regular one-on-one tutorials

which should be expected to result in good marks. the celebrity lecturers are kind of a sideshow on the whole thing tbh.

lol that is a terrible idea for a business

from that press release:

"These students receive a service which includes a curriculum, printed and electronic learning materials, an on-line library and examinations. For most undergraduate awards this costs less than £1,500 per annum, on a full time basis"

so they've £16,500 per student to do whatever it is they're going to do.

i mean, theoretically.

the whole thing is still mind-boggling.

I don't really understand the fuss about this, surely it'll just be a fairly unremarkable university filled with braying Sloanes who can't get into Exeter or Bristol let alone Oxbridge and are stupid enough/have parents stupid enough to pay £18k a year to be educated by middle-ranking academics and have Richard Dawkins turn up once a year.

― Matt DC, Wednesday, June 8, 2011 12:38 PM (44 minutes ago) Bookmark

basically how i break it down

can't believe they won't have tariq ali teaching politics though

so if entrylev reqs are so high then what's the problem?

Two of the star academics signed up to AC Grayling's new £18,000-a-year private undergraduate college will only teach for an hour each in the first year, the Guardian has learned.

(drudge siren dot gif)

the fact that with just over a year until they open the u of london is making it so clear that they have no formal connection and they don't want to be associated with it, is interesting

ac grayling seems like one of those oxford academics who is very clever for a very narrow definition of "clever"

st anne's represent.

lol the actual course requirements are basically a GCSE in english and two A-level passes. they're clearly not that confident they're going to get too many straight-A applicants.

http://www.nchum.org/courses/minimum-entrance-requirements

i remember a.c. grayling showing up on some random blog in like '04 and having a hissyfit at the idea that someone with a BLOG who wasn't a PROFESSOR OF THE HUMANITIES at some AUGUST INSTITUTION LIKE OXFORD would dare to disagree with him, and then completely refused to engage with the guy's argument, and just repeated the line that they couldn't possibly have read his work, because they were some PEON with a BLOG and not a P. of the H. at an A.I. like O., etc., etc.

xp things like those are the "minimum requirements" in the constitution of at a lot of universities tbh, the actual minimum requirements tend to be a lot higher.

although if they expect to have higher requirements in practice then surely they would advertise that. maybe they really are going to be a dumping ground. lol.

What worries me: the college succeeds, other people/orgs/businesses set up private universities and gradually start attracting away the best talent in terms of both student and staff. End result: no improvement in educational standards or choice, but university becomes financially out of the reach of millions while lining the pockets of the corporations.

that's a concern, but i think the fraction of the population that can afford to pay direct fees that actually cover the cost of an "elite" higher education is so tiny that in practice there wouldn't be much of a drain (unless a culture of endowment develops, but that's something that would take decades/centuries)

i couldn't find the example of grayling being an asshole that i wanted to, but i did find this at the new humanist, which is headlined 'AC Grayling politely rebukes an attempt to reconcile religion and science'. the word 'politely' is being used in some newfangled sense that i don't actually understand, in that headline, i think.

http://blog.newhumanist.org.uk/2009/03/ac-grayling-politely-rebukes-attempt-to.html

if the end results are no greater choice nor standard, mark, what's the posited motivation for people to pay extra to attend these new institutions?

in the short term, if there are more institutions like this, then there is a worry that international students will leave the UK public system, which is already charging them new-college-type fees, and get their british degrees elsewhere, e.g. new college. i'm not sure of the amount those students contribute, but when 116% or whatever of the budget is already spoken for it all helps.

It's a potentially interesting business model, tbh. It's unlikely that the number of overseas students willing to pay 15-18k for a degree is going to dry up in the immediate future. There's a potential overspill from LSE / UCL for students who want the London 'experience' as much as they want a British degree and aren't willing to go to Birmingham or Warwick. If 95% of the students, a couple of years down the line aren't foreign, i'd be surprised. The more you charge, the higher the external prestige.

They're unlikely to attract the best students, they're not going to be active in research or the wider academic arena - will the 'best' staff want to work for them?

nrq, would you take a job there?

There's one thing I hope we can all agree on: Grayling's a wanker

oh indeed

nice choice of Hull as scum synecdoche up there thomp.

now I've got that chip off my shoulder, this bit of challops: I'm doing an OU degree at the moment. Materials and support are pretty good; it does make me wonder how much of the tuition fees are going towards all those red buildings, cheap booze, subsidised halls and all the other things that are about being "at uni" but nothing to do with the actual learning. If a lot of that was stripped away, would it matter? ( not actually advocating wholesale dismantlement in case anyone thinks I've gone raving neo-con but I'd have thought there is room with modern tech to be more... efficient? )

if your goal as a student (or the public's goal in subsidising them) is to cover syllabi and pass tests then yes, universities are spectacularly inefficient.

fuck yes, my goals as a student are to learn (handy if there is a syllabus to guide the learning) and to pass tests.

I think any other social/economic/artistic/intellectual ambitions are "goals as a person", not "goals as a student"

When I was at university my "goals as a person" were about 10 times as important TO ME as my "goals as a student".

Only 10?

other tom, i am sorry! i have no personal animus against the east riding i assure you

xxxp, institutions that serve that have a place, but that's not the only goal of most 18 year olds for themselves or most academics for their students. obviously while the public foot the majority of the bill they get a say too, but academia has been pretty successful in persuading the public of the economic and social merit of the "experience" and more abstract intellectual development (although probably more so in the US).

"only 10?"

I guess I cared a bit about learning stuff and getting good marks, and it did take up quite a lot of my time. So yeah, I reckon about 10.

i mean most people would agree that u.s. universities are (1) not very efficient knowledge transfer institutions (in terms of money and time spent), just like other universities, but (2) responsible for a pretty big share of the US's competitive advantage during the 20th C. so there must be more to it than just acquiring knowledge.

xp lol I know I was only kidding... we're proud of the fact that the rest of the country has the misapprehension that Hull's a shithole, it keeps the wankers out.

As a current student at UCL I am hoping this is a success. Opening a Jack Wills shop next door will also increase the number of twits it attracts, away from where I am.

Young draws on his own experience and offers Grayling the following advice: “Don’t give an inch. No compromise, no surrender.”

I'm sure he could fit in an hour a year to teach English Lit.

When it comes to "public intellectuals", Freddie Ayer stomps A.C. Grayling into a thousand million billon zillion particles

The real concern for state universities will be whether companies like the one i work for want to muscle in on the game - offering standardised, high-quality, brand-name education in London / Shanghai / Mumbai / wherever, undercutting fees and hoovering up staff with no requirement to provide unprofitable / niche courses.

― модный хипстер (ShariVari), Wednesday, 8 June 2011 15:56 (4 weeks ago) Bookmark

Four weeks ahead of the game!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-14011448

This is just the start. Much more significant a story than Grayling's finishing school.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2012/sep/18/ac-graylings-university-open-60-students

lol

yuk yuk yuk