There’s no “seems” about it, 50% of school leavers going to university was an explicit policy goal. There’s no way to reconcile an institution of higher learning with one that has to accept anyone that applies
Anyhow, the volume of students as a change driver for university quality explanation does not fit with the observations that:
a) Universities employ disproportionately more non-teaching staff than they used to; and
b) Academic staff has a harder time reaching tenure.
The explanation lies elsewhere.
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.
Yes, politically, it turns out, that universities were chopped up into research institutions (or research institutions were spun off from universities) and diploma mills, because even that shit level 2-3 years that people take to earn a Bachelor's degree means a lot on the job market.
There was nothing wrong with Polys when they were Polys.
The ability to learn at university is not correlated with A-level results.
Mastery of the material can help give a good starting point, but I've worked with fantastic E/D/C students and terrible AAA students.
This is incorrect. They are obviously not 100% correlated (even re-sitting the same exam isn't!) but the correlation is extremely strong.
The existence of outliers doesn't disprove a correlation.
I’m very confident that this is false. Citation needed.
This was for the sole reason of increasing cash flow and I know several of the Chinese students that I did my Masters with were paying more than ten times what I was for the same course which both myself and our lecturers were ashamed of.
It may not be all Universities but even ten years ago it felt that they had become less about excellence in teaching and more about printing money.
There are lots of companies writing essays and otherwise facilitating the admissions cheating, and several major universities were caught a few years ago (I believe Duke was one).
I think it also has interesting potential long term implications for relative national competitiveness if you think about it regardless of whether that is a goal or not.
I'm not sure why those students are complaining...
The wealthy foreign students aren't participating in class much, which effectively makes the class size smaller. They're also subsidizing the degrees of all the Americans. And a lot of them end up going back home after graduating, so they're not even competing in the same labor pool.
Only if everyone became a lot more skilled than their grades imply.
Academic achievement is not be a perfect measure, but if you go from the top 3.4% of the population to the top 50%, the only possible situations are:
1) everyone is doing a lot better at school now
2) graduation rate goes down
3) standards go down
Or some combination of those.
That doesn’t mean there is no benefit in getting half the country to spend three more years in education, just that nobody should expect 18.7 times * as many of whatever made you want to get half the population into university in the first place.
* population growth too.
That the top 3.4% really were just the smartest - not the also the wealthiest and best connected. There is probably both some dilution of talent and also more competition from all levels of society.
And as to point 1. In the UK at least there is no doubt many many more are doing a lot better at school nowadays. Schools have evened up and pupils work far harder as most jobs require qualifications.
Tenure in the US sense doesn't exist in the UK academic system. Lecturers/researchers with permanent contracts have the same employment rights as those in the private sector.
The Tories abolished tenure in the UK sense which roughly removed the right not to be made redundant but didn't affect the standard employment right not to be fired "just because".
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 been dedicated to vocational instruction.
There was an immediate and lasting change in how universities operated. Many of these post-1992 universities had extremely lax entrance criteria, in some cases tantamount to an open-door policy. There was a proliferation of degree courses that were obviously vocational and obviously far less demanding than a traditional degree - Sports Science, Hospitality Management, Fashion and Textiles etc.
There was another drop in standards with the introduction of tuition fees. Before 1998, university teaching was funded primarily through government grants, with students paying nothing. The Labour government introduced fees of £1,000 per year, which were increased to £3,000 in 2004 and to £9,000 by the Conservative government in 2010.
These higher fees were ostensibly a maximum, with the intention that universities could compete on price. The structure of the student loan system meant that there was little practical difference for students if they were paying lower fees, so all universities charged the £9,000 maximum. This fundamentally changed the character of British universities, shifting them away from the European social model and towards the American market model.
Less selective universities started to aggressively advertise to lower-performing school leavers, because there was no cap on student numbers and their income was directly tied to putting bums on seats. Universities had a strong incentive to promote humanities subjects over science subjects, because the former are much cheaper to teach. International students have become a hot commodity, because they pay higher fees than domestic students; many universities now offer fast-track schemes for international students, with lower entry requirements than for domestic students.
This move towards a market-led university system has driven a huge increase in pay for senior management and a huge increase in the use of casual and part-time lecturers. As in the US, we're now seeing managers earning salaries in the high six figures, while peripatetic lecturers are struggling to earn a living wage. There was a huge wave of strikes at the start of this year over cuts to university staff pensions, followed by collective legal action from students demanding compensation for missed lectures.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_universities_(United_Kingd...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_tuition_fees_in_th...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/2017/08/06/universitie...
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.
Neither of which scale easily.