Rolling higher education into the shitbin thread

Also, autocorrect really hates that site’s domain name. Good job, autocorrect, first compliment ever.

oh no an article from quillette a magazine you've literally never heard of before 5 minutes i'm obv some idiot or troll gmafb dude you're a total cartoon

I don’t need to have heard of something to decide that an outlet that uses the word “transgenderism” in a headline is probably not worth my time

and silby another guy who i consider an omnivorous reader who never give kneejerk judgements to things based on other articles they share space with. i mean look i get it the whole valorous wokelord thing and it's appeal to you but can't you assume the shtick is ingrained enough that you don't need to keep rehearsing? i'll just assume you'll never read anything i ever post since i mean how much reading do you really do anyway i've gotta wonder.

I mean I read the thing you linked but I have to, you know, make time in the day for baking muffins

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6b/Joan_of_Arc_on_horseback.png/236px-Joan_of_Arc_on_horseback.png

l-r tombot, silby

I do less reading than I’d like but more than I did a few years ago, if you really are wondering xps

I mean yes groupthink dynamics and shunning have likely ruined academic lives ever since some Bolognese decided they didn’t like the cut of the new guy’s jib in 1440 or something like that, I don’t know what the linked article, which centers on an incident 24 years past, is supposed to tell us about our times let alone “the shitbin” of the thread’s title. Since I can’t precisely perceive its point I have to resort to its context, which seems to be the sort of self-satisfied supposed contrarianism of right-wing pseuds that future clerks for Clarence Thomas jerk off to in the Yale Law toilets.

Mordy is trying to elevate his victim status to the level of an anthropology Ph.D. who was denied tenure by a pile of sexist assholes at UT Knoxville

For whatever reasons, Mordy has been in a sour mood lately on ilx. whether this mood is general or just confined to ilx is not answerable.

Neither of the women in that piece were mobbed for their work or their beliefs or their controversial research btw - it would appear they both fell victim to being the most qualified female in their departments, and then the old guard found a way to get rid of them because women aren’t supposed to talk at meetings.

That’s not “rolling higher education into the shitbin” to me - that’s “why we need to roll a lot of higher education into the shitbin”

And the prize for Quisling of the Year goes to:
http://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columnists/chambers-part-time-professors-should-be-paid-based-on-merit

at least they didn't publish it today (May 1)

If some part-time professors neglect to publish

https://www.salon.com/2018/09/08/a-witch-hunt-or-a-quest-for-justice-an-insiders-perspective-on-disgraced-academic-avital-ronell/

alas despite taking a class w/ ronell i did not have the pleasure of seeing this side of her however it was my experience more broadly that the academy at least in NY was comprised of cults of personalities + toadies, that more political machination took place than scholarship, and that generally people were cruel (to each other, to themselves) and dispirited. anyway i'm extremely happy i left, tho i still mourn the fantasy of the academy that had originally motivated me.

I'm happy to never have heard of this person, except in regard to this scandal. NYU seems like such a shitty place.

The stat I like to cite about NYU is it meets 70% of demonstrated financial aid need for undergrads compared to 90% for basically all its peer institutions and 100% for the wealthiest Ivys. It’s a real estate developer financed by student loans.

It was several years ago that I last dug into that though; maybe things have improved in that regard

These Ronell stories are funny to me because I think I went 6 months at at time without talking to my phd adviser at all.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/12/06/new-research-graduate-student-mental-well-being-says-departments-have-important

https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/gb-2010-11-10-138

this is old (still awesome) but i just wanted to say

Disrespectfully yours,

Gregory A Petsko

lol

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/education/2019/08/great-university-con-how-british-degree-lost-its-value

British academic friends sharing this article say it's the real deal. I saw similar things when teaching uni in the USA, though not as overt as admins raising faculty-assigned marks to satisfy student demands. I know things aren't like this in France & I don't think they're like this in Japan, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, or the Netherlands, whose systems I know best.

Robbins advocated a near tripling of the number of school leavers going to university by 1980, from one in 20 to one in eight. The government would have to commit to decades of investment in higher education. With enough funding, universities would, in turn, uphold their standards – continuing to bring elite education to a wider, less selective pool of students.

“The essential aim of a first degree,” Robbins explained, “should be to teach the student how to think.” What was needed was “regular personal contact” and “the regular and systematic setting and returning of written work”. Academics could only offer so much if they were free to teach. Though a pre-eminent scholar, Robbins was categorical: a lecturer’s research should “naturally grow out of teaching”. He went on: “We should deplore any artificial stimulus to research.” Published work, he added, “counts for too much”. Erudite teachers who never published were nevertheless “priceless assets” to any university.

correct

All the academics I’ve seen discussing this have been raging. It’s very hyperbolic.

Standard setting is an issue but the fundamental change over the last thirty years has been a shift in the emphasis from independent-reading-led degrees to ones that follow a very clearly delineated taught model aiui.

There is much less of an onus on students to do their own research and much more focus on set resources / exams, making them more similar to the A-Level model. I’m agnostic on whether that is good or bad but it’s much easier to know what’s required to get good grades. The support model for students is completely different as well. The question isn’t ‘is this a worse model than 1990’ or w/e, it’s ‘does this model achieve what it sets out to do?’.

the studies cited are likely problematic in lots of ways, but they indicate that British (or just English?) degree holders are less well trained than they were in the past, compared to their international cohorts.

teaching can follow a "read these texts / answer these questions" model without being bullshit. obviously a lot rests on the format of those questions & how they're being marked.

but maybe even "read these texts" can be construed as "independent-reading-led" or "taught"? my courses, like most French philo courses at least, have robust reading lists & then I talk about some part of that list each week. the best trained students will be those who actually read the texts, since I only have a couple of hours with those students per week to talk about the texts. that right there is a mix of "independent reading" and "taught". I'm not sure if "independent-reading-led" is supposed to mean the Oxbridge tutorial model?

(my friends who've been on Oxbridge faculties have begrudged the amount of time they have to spend on teaching and seem to leave for lighter teaching places (outside of the UK, since otherwise you're losing a lot of relative prestige))

The OECD report focuses on basic literacy and numeracy skills iirc, which are an issue throughout the British education system and not something that universities are particularly meant to be fixing. There’s are valid concerns about the impact of marketisation and internationalisation but, as far as I can tell, they’re concerns shared by the vast majority of university systems in the Anglosphere.

The piece is weaves together a lot of anecdotal, highly-slanted commentary to make out that British degrees are variously ‘a con’, ‘a fraud’, ‘sub-prime’, etc to feed a very well-worn trope about too many people going to university - as though a system designed to allow the best-positioned 5-10% of the population to be “taught how to think” is the optimal model we should be aiming for. By and large, UK university degrees are still good and the obsession with ‘grade inflation’ largely pointless.

The fundamental questions for me are ‘does university do what it is supposed to do?’ and ‘can we agree on what it’s supposed to do?’. The fact that the university experience is different to that of previous generations doesn’t answer either, in itself.

‘Independent-reading-led’ probably isn’t the best way of phrasing it but I think the focus on students being trained to do their own research has largely fallen away at UG level.

grades are dum

In a U.K. higher ed context, absolutely. My American boss asked me to explain the grading categories to him when filtering CVs and my advice was ‘ignore them, they’re meaningless’. They could quite easily be scrapped. That’s fine, imo. There is little point having standardised grading when you don’t have standardised assessment. You have either met the requirements to earn a degree or you haven’t.

sv, as ever, otm

My British academic friends seem to think that the article is spot on in its hyperbole. It may matter that these friends are staff at Russell Group unis?

I don't see see why grades, or "the obsession with ‘grade inflation’", is "largely pointless". I suppose in a world where British graduates have no freedom of movement in Europe, jobs in Europe will be unusual, but grades are an important way to decide between job candidates (I am not talking about academic jobs).

When I hear the term "assessment" I know that someone's trying to scam. The QAA is bullshit.

What do u think grades tell u about someone Euler

They tell me about relative control of the material

^ That is one finely considered sentence.

That only really works with consistency of material and within a particular cohort. Grades might arguably allow you to judge the ranking of students on a course at a specific university but without uniformity of standards, they can’t tell you a great deal about relative achievement cross different universities and different courses. They never have.

Humanities courses have traditionally returned fewer first class degrees than STEM ones. The middle third of students on an exceptionally demanding, and in-demand, course might be more capable than the top five percent on a course with relaxed entry standards. Some universities are much better than others. This has broadly always been true and employers factor that in when screening applicants.

There are some specific careers where there is a stigma associated with getting less than a 2:1 but ime, the first thing employers generally look at is which degree you studied, followed by which university you went to - with degree class probably fourth after A-Level results. A 2:1 from a prestigious university in a traditional subject is typically going to be worth more than a first from a less prestigious one, whether it should or not.

Grade inflation may exist at some universities but the market has vast experience in factoring stuff like that in. It’s a national obsession, though, and most of the claims made about it below university level don’t stack up. The root, aside from antipathy to young people in general, is a belief that most people are fundamentally not worth educating, most humanities are pointless and political correctness demands prizes for all. It’s politics, not pedagogy, and the NS complaining about ‘taxpayers’ money being wasted’ and universities not grading on normal distribution curves echoes some of the worst commentary from the right-wing press.

The opening up of access means that huge numbers of very talented people who would have been excluded from higher ed by circumstance, finance or limited expectations have an opportunity to go. The kneejerk, reactionary approach that determines their degrees to be worthless, or a scam on the taxpayer, is enormously damaging.

There was a comment under one of the author’s tweets from someone quoted in the piece - agreeing that some of the issues raised are valid and important but disagreeing with the conclusion that the system is broken / worthless. U.K. universities are under constant commercial stress that puts standards at risk but they also, generally, stand up well vs the international average thanks to a high quality of teaching and good syllabus design. I work with internationally mobile students and, to some extent, with employers and the cachet associated with the U.K. Education brand is still very high.

The moan about league tables seems a bit of a tangent:

These league tables are given credibility by the newspapers that publish them, without those papers having either the desire or ability to affirm their legitimacy. They are not overseen by universities or government. There is limited academic research to verify the accuracy or relevance of any of the data in them. And yet, they direct the decisions of hundreds of thousands of students year after year.

I mean, there are objective stats people can look at to compare courses (Unistats, for example, which is overseen by a public body) which isn't mentioned. All league tables surely come with a healthy warning to actually understand what they measure, so you can decide if that's important to you, as one of the 'hundreds of thousands' of students who apparently really really care about them?

The root [of the national obsession with grade inflation], aside from antipathy to young people in general, is a belief that most people are fundamentally not worth educating, most humanities are pointless and political correctness demands prizes for all. It’s politics, not pedagogy, and the NS complaining about ‘taxpayers’ money being wasted’ and universities not grading on normal distribution curves echoes some of the worst commentary from the right-wing press.

I don't believe that most people should enter, under economic duress of course, what is to me a university education. I gather you & I do not agree about ‘does university do what it is supposed to do?’ and ‘can we agree on what it’s supposed to do?’. In France we have a wide variety of post-secondary institutions that would be called 'trade schools' in English. I think that universities in the English-speaking world as we have known them handle too many students, and should be shrunken considerably, replaced with trade schools.

Is there a deficiency of tradesmen such that an expansion of trade schools could supply them? Who are you going to route into a trade school? On what criteria? What if someone wants to be an underwater welder but get a liberal education first?

xp do you mean the equivalent of Further Education colleges (age 16-19)?

Is there a deficiency of tradesmen such that an expansion of trade schools could supply them

Isn't there?:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cbc.ca/amp/1.5054456

https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/04/25/605092520/high-paying-trade-jobs-sit-empty-while-high-school-grads-line-up-for-university

in France middle school students are given the choice between trade high schools and "general" high schools. Then at the end of high school, students in both types of high schools can choose between trade schools and "general" universities. School councilors advise students on their choices but it's the choice of the student and her family. The advise is given on the basis of the student's interests during their four years of middle school (high school is three years), and her grades during that time. The thinking is that if a student has not adapted well to general subjects like mathematics, history and French during middle school, then it is best that they not continue with those courses in high school. They can learn a trade like a mechanical art (car repair, plumbing, electrical work), a medical or laboratory technician, or to be a chef or baker, for instance. Nursing used to be a trade but since 2009, unfortunately, it has become part of the university system.

To the question of whether there's a deficiency of trade jobs: these are often rather physically demanding jobs but at least in our economy here, they are good jobs.

In my twenty+ years of teaching university students I have met many students who wanted to get a liberal education after doing something else first (like serving in the military, being a stay-at-home mother, or doing construction work). The few cases I've known of students doing trade work after university are those who experienced problems in university: e.g. they didn't dream of being janitors, though they did eventually embrace that as a job during which they would have a lot of time to think.

I don't know what Further Education colleges are, exactly, but I don't think so. Those sound like our (French) trade high schools (les lycées professionnel et les lycées technologiques). I am talking more about trade universities (for examples, les instituts universitaires de technologie, IUT).

Anyway, I'm actually on board with welders taking a few years to read Joyce. xp

(But is that what is happening most of the time?)

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?