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Comment by inglor_cz | Hacker News Reader

No, but this is the kind of stuff that can keep students busy and not asking whether they get their money's worth. A very efficient distraction.

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Having studied both in Prague and the UK I can attest that British students are getting their money's worth of leisure and luxury. An interesting side effect is that the same facilities enjoyed by the largely native undergraduate students attract foreign nationals who made up 54% of the postgraduate and 49% of the doctoral student population in 2018/2019, and on whom Britain depends for staying competitive in this local optimum of an education system.

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...

Students wanting to get their money’s worth is exactly the root cause of this. Trust me, British Universities are bending over backwards to give students what they want. If you’ve been anywhere near a British University you’d know how ridiculous it is to suggest that the staff are somehow secretly organizing BLM protests (??) as part of a plan to stop students noticing how much money they’re spending (??)

The universities should cut their losses then, and tell students to go somewhere else. Part of the issue is placating every whim of students, focusing on the fluff and not on the teaching.

I fully agree. It turns out that there are long-term costs to giving 18 year olds everything they think that they want for your short-term financial gain.

I noticed the general bending over backwards and I think the various political activities are a part of that. But you do not have to secretly organize X to benefit from it. You can just let the river flow and float on it. It is safe, non-controversial and does not require much effort.

Universities have been centers of protest for a long time, and extracurricular stuff has always been a major component of what attracts students. I don’t really see much connection between this and the closing of the maths department at the University of Leicester. Students these days are very career focused, and research is funded based on “impact”. These are the driving forces. The image of the student who cares more about radical politics than learning anything or finding a job is from the 1960s, not the 2020s.

I’ve been in plenty of meetings where we tried to make students happier, and I can assure you that it’s all by boring means such as inflating grades and reducing workloads (and indeed by more worthy and less cynical means from time to time). Politics on campus gets a lot of press coverage, but it’s a marginal issue in terms of student satisfaction.

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