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Comment by zkmon | Hacker News Reader

Outrageous at the least. These universities already became so commercial that they show photos of some Victorian era buildings as their campus, but most students never set foot in those buildings, as all classrooms are held in rented building outside of campus, and the main buildings are kept only as ornamental pieces.

Also, there are hardly any good teachers left. Most are hired on sharing basis, who shuttle between multiple colleges.

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If you live in a city with multiple colleges/universities check out the cars in the staff parking lot. Many will have parking passes/stickers for multiple colleges on there. These are adjuncts that have to drive all over town to cobble together a full time job as an instructor.

My experience with adjunct professors is they're much better at teaching than old tenured professors who just want to do their research and couldn't care less about the students.

> Also, there are hardly any good teachers left. Most are hired on sharing basis, who shuttle between multiple colleges.

Check out the "Who Wants to be a Teacher?" episodes of the Educate Podcast. I remember listening to these and shaking my head. Worse, if you go back further in the same groups older podcast, you'll hear the tragedy of students being taught to read using provenly bad methodology and teachers defending it saying they don't care that studies show that it's the wrong path. It made me genuinely very angry on behalf of kids. They're being robbed of their future.

https://www.apmreports.org/collection/educate-podcast

Which universities aren't commercial and about cashflow?

All universities outside of the US

Edit: Apparently not. Thanks for the insight, I stand corrected. I really should think twice before posting!

Your post is very naive. In the UK, some universities are so dependent now on foreign students paying high fees to break even, that it has been widely reported in the media. And in a few EU countries, polytechnics have been upgraded to university status (at least in their English-language names) in order to attract fee-paying students from the developing world. Finnish polytechnics, for example, run whole marketing campaigns in the Indian Subcontinent in order to get people to come and pay those sweet, sweet foreign-student fees.

Are Polytechnics not considered universities in Europe? RPI (Rensalear Polytechnic Institute) or CalPoly (California Polytechnic Institute) for example in the US are just normal universities, usually with more of a technical, engineering focused. But they are essentially the same "level" as a university.

In Finland, the institutions that now call themselves “Universities of Applied Science” in English for marketing reasons, are still known in Finnish as ammatikorkeakoulu “tertiary professional-training institutions” and this is a rung below actual universities (yliopisto) in terms of both quality of education and social prestige.

The UK collapsed the poly/uni distinction thirty or so years ago, as it was seen as a source of class discrimination.

> The Further and Higher Education Act 1992 (c. 13) made changes in the funding and administration of further education and higher education [0]

It was more about reducing budgets. That Conservative government was not filled with class warriors. Oh, how times have changed.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Further_and_Higher_Education_A...

Really? That was the motive?

It actually made it a lot worse if anything.

British universities do the same marketing. Seen it there.

The problem in the UK has been ridiculous the expansion of universities. if we shut at least half of them down, reduced some of the others in size, there would be a lot more money for the rest.

AI teaching is the opposite of what the best universities do, which is things like small group tutorials on top of face to face lectures.

Too many universities and colleges seem to love opening buildings to name them.

AI might be a threat because it can't take up as many buildings as students?

They often get donations in return for naming buildings after people. They can name other things after people instead - organisations with the university.

It's surprising because so many countries have taken billions from international students, mostly from one country, and is now blaming the the students for having parted with their money.

The University mentioned in this article is in England.

The original article is about a UK university. Cashflow and revenue generation is a very important topic for UK universities. They have copied the approaches of US universities, and in many cases have created overseas campuses when they have some name recognition. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_branch_campus for examples.

Interesting link, thanks for sharing!

Plenty of US colleges and universities are primarily about education and/or research, even today. Far from all, to be sure—and some are primarily about connections and the school name (primarily Ivies), rather than any of the above.

None of which exist without making sure the organization isa bout sufficient cashflow from government, students, and industry.

I shouldn't say it so simply, it might result in attempts to convolute it to distract from the fact that bureaucracies serve to maintain revenue/income and grow it.

There's a big difference between "the organization needs to maintain a sufficient cashflow" and "the organization is primarily concerned with its financial status, at the expense of its putative mission".

That sounds about right.

The only thing I’d add is there are too many institutions obsessed with growth (new buildings to name and dedicate) which means growing cashflow.

Many post secondaries are dependant on international student revenue and income to build all those new buildings to dedicate to the current president.

Allegedly most of them, since they have non-profit mandates and are often tax-exempt.

The University of Staffordshire is a public university and is funded by the government to provide education to British people. Its mandate isn't "about cashflow".

In reality, that particular school created a private commercial subsidiary called "Staffordshire University Services". All new employees are hired by that subsidiary, which does have a mandate to generate cashflow.

Cash flow and profit do not have to be the same thing.

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