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Comment by sergiosgc | Hacker News Reader

That makes no sense. It seems to me it is an elitist view that when you provide a service to the unwashed masses, it must be of lower quality. I believe it is false. Curricula don't have to be easier if you have a large student body, and graduation requirements don't have to be lower. Taking in more students does not inhibit service quality, up to the capacity of the school, which can be easily scaled by hiring more teachers and more teaching space.

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.

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It seems to me it is an elitist view that when you provide a service to the unwashed masses, it must be of lower quality

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.

Not at all.

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.

> The ability to learn at university is not correlated with A-level results.

I’m very confident that this is false. Citation needed.

ability to learn at university is not correlated with A-level results

This is incorrect. They are obviously not 100% correlated (even re-sitting the same exam isn't!) but the correlation is extremely strong.

> I've worked with fantastic E/D/C students and terrible AAA students

The existence of outliers doesn't disprove a correlation.

But that's easily solved by having institutions for multiple A* students, and other institutions for EEE students. Which is the way it actually is.

Well yes, but it’s not a reasonable system if non-Russell degrees cost as much but are actually irrelevant. Shouldn’t those students be funnelled towards qualifications and vocations for which there is real demand?

There was nothing wrong with Polys when they were Polys.

They don't, in practice, because what you repay is linked to what you earn.

Just because they accept them doesn't mean they need to keep them. If the students can't keep up, that's on them.

It's pretty repugnant to accept students that have no capability to perform, take their money, and boot them when they fail out because they aren't prepared or equipped.

They don't have to admit the EEE-level students, they don't have to water down.

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.

At the university I studied at it was well known that their policy was opening up campuses in Africa and China so to entice international students to the campus in England.

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.

This is rampant in the US as well. Many of the students cheated to get in, sometimes with the umiversity's knowledge, and weren't fluent enough in English to participate in class.

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've read many anecdotal stories like this of students complaining that the quality of their education is suffering due to a large portion of the class being utterly not qualified to be there, dragging everyone else down.

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.

> complaining that the quality of their education is suffering due to a large portion of the class being utterly not qualified to be there, dragging everyone else down

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.

The quality of instruction suffers when half the class can barely speak English, and don't contribute to group projects. Getting a degree for half the cost but with half the learning doesn't seem like a good deal to me.

> Curricula don't have to be easier if you have a large student body, and graduation requirements don't have to be lower.

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 presumes

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.

Those points are why I said academic grades aren’t a perfect measure, and also “Only if everyone became a lot more skilled than their grades imply.”

It is not even the “top” 50%, because what of those who are perfectly capable but just don’t want to go to university? It is just 50% of the general population.

If it’s not the top 50% academically, the problem just gets bigger.

> Academic staff has a harder time reaching tenure.

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.

Yes, but, the whole of the UK permanent workforce gets tenure in the US sense after, I think, the first year of employment. As do most EU countries. Long may it remain so.

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".

In 2012, under George Osborne, it was changed so that it is permissible for an employee to be unfairly dismissed in your first two years of employment.

>It seems to me it is an elitist view that when you provide a service to the unwashed masses, it must be of lower quality.

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...

Excellent comment, although some are older problems, see the novel series Wilt by Tom Sharpe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilt_(novel)

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.

Is it possible to just 'hire more teachers' though? The teachers that I had in university didn't seem to be the type of people you could just hire more of.

Yes, it is. The fight for jobs in the academic market is fierce; there are far more people looking for academic jobs than there are positions.

> which can be easily scaled by hiring more teachers and more teaching space

Neither of which scale easily.

Universities used to be elitist in that only the smartest got in.

I believe historically universities were elitist in that only the richest were meant to ever attend them, not the smartest...

Quite probably, I am just thinking back to my lifetime.

Well, a bit of both. For centuries they've been some mixture of upper-class finishing school, and a place for the very brightest of the next generation to concentrated. Using the rich kids to fund the scholars (and using some of the scholar's prestige to attract the rich) was on average quite a productive symbiosis.

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