Hi,
I have been following this thread on and off, and I
would just like to say that, "WHY RE-INVENT THE
WHEEL"??
Furthermore, to Damian Counsell (who's name appears
blurred in my Mutt MUA :-), I say (in response to this
e-mail: "ewwwwwwwwwww"
Bye,
Thomas Adam
--- Damian Counsell
It's very difficult to resist the temptation to launch a personal attack on Frank Shute---not least of all because he has no reservations about such behaviour himself. Amusingly, his name appears in quotes whenever it pops up in my mailbox and I am beginning to wonder if 'Frank Shute' is a sort of Alf Garnett of the SuSE-Linux-Schools list, created as a front to troll the mild and reasonable into a frenzy. Oh! for a Slashdot-style moderation system.
I am going to give 'Frank Shute' the benefit of the doubt, anyway, and try to concentrate on the points rather than the person. It's easier to separate arguments from an individual when the arguments have been so overused and are so divorced from reality that they already have lives of their own.
That's my point too! They're taking students they really shouldn't be taking because a decree has gone out that 50% of people should go to university. So irrespective of the individual merit of an applicant, university's are feeling compelled into dropping standards to fill what is by any stretch of the imagination a bogus quota dreamed up by some think-tank.
This presupposes a wondrous past age when universities admitted students solely on the basis of merit. University entry is a great deal more meritocratic than it has been for a long time. (It's a shame our state secondary education system has simultaneously adopted a system of selection on the basis of house price, thought this has happened by default and is another argument entirely.)
It was only relatively recently that UK higher education institutions were obliged to publish objective admission standards. When my dad attended university in the late fifties/early sixties only a small fraction of the population were admitted. Back then a degree was a prize for the elite, yet there were still a significant number of admissions made on arbitrary criteria---old school tie anyone? Unfortunately this class-based elite gave the idea of elitism a bad name.
It's an irritating feature of Cambridge life that the railway station has only one proper platform. This was ordered by the university when the station was built to ensure that the "young gentlemen" could be observed by the university authorities and prevented from avoiding lectures. Today you need 5 grade As at 'A' level, grade 8 piano and a gold Duke of Edinburgh award just to get a sniff of the place. (I exaggerate, but only slightly---I had lunch with an geography don at St Catharine's a couple of months ago who confessed in hushed tones she had let someone in with a 'B' once.) Back then most of the students probably had nice titles and wardrobes put precious little of substance to be proud of---though possession of a penis was, of course, an essential prerequisite for entry.
There's nothing wrong with saying that "all shall have prizes" (or even "50% shall have prizes") as long as the outside world has a clear sense of the relative "worth" of those prizes---I think we might agree that a degree from Cambridge is possibly more valued in the graduate jobs market than one from Anglia Polytechnic University---and the advertised admissions criteria for each institution vary accordingly.
Whatever, that is not the real point. The thing is that these students get
access to the courses otherwise quite a few university lecturers are out of a job.
As I indicated, I don't really care. Why give people jobs if they aren't worthwhile?
If people are happy to pay for their children to obtain "bogus" degrees, why not let them do so?
Our universities educate more people to a higher standard and more cheaply than most equivalent continental institutions and our "worthless" lecturers generate more and better publications from their research than most of their European counterparts at a fraction of the cost. Check out the results of the last Research Assessment Exercise for a level of productivity that would put most other British industries to shame.
I was always surprised at the number of Germans I met as an undergraduate student and researcher at Oxford. They came from a primary and secondary educational system that I had admired for years as an exchange student, yet, when I asked them, they all felt that British higher education was far superior. And the German universities (more disorganised, crowded and inefficient than some of our railways) were relatively better than, say the Italian ones.
If you don't believe this, read this
http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/soe/cihe/newsletter/News15/text14.html
review which refers to a survey in "Der Spiegel" (that famous British tabloid) putting British universities ahead of the rest of Europe's as of 1999.
Now we are beginning to suffer the consequences of the more choice/falling standards/lack of people doing intellectually rigorous subjects.
The few who do go and do maths/engineering at university get immediately cherry-picked by industry for well-paid jobs thus leaving education to pick up the crumbs for maths/sciences teaching. The result is declining teaching standards & even fewer students going on to do maths/science at uni.
This has nothing to do with increased choice/falling standards/lack of rigour and everything to do with paying teachers too little. Put up salaries and the problem would fix itself within two years.
Similarly, the "shortage" of well-qualified maths/engineering graduates is just like the shortage of I.T. staff in the late nineties---a result of people in senior management being unwilling to pay the going rate for people sneeringly referred to by the technologically illiterate as "techies".
This *does* trickle down, however. If big brother can earn as much with a degree in "meedja studies" as he would with a degree in physics then why should little sister bother with all that calculus and those dead hard sums? There are 71% of science engineering and technology (SET) graduates in full-time employment after graduation, compared with 68% of
=== message truncated === ===== Thomas Adam "The Linux Weekend Mechanic" -- www.linuxgazette.com __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Everything you'll ever need on one web page from News and Sport to Email and Music Charts http://uk.my.yahoo.com