← U.S. Higher Education as a Global Force

Britain Threatens Its Economic Future by Cutting University Support

November 17, 2011, 3:37 pm

The following is a guest post by David M.A. Green, professor of economics and vice chancellor at the University of Worcester, in England.
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The briefing to the news media, before the U.K. prime minister’s big speech at last month’s Conservative party conference, was that David Cameron would call on people to pay off their credit card debts. An eleventh hour re-write was ordered, however, when it was realized that the message could prove economically as well as politically disastrous.

Economists rapidly calculated that if everyone did simultaneously clear their credit card bills, the economy would shrink by 15 percent. Clearly, one person’s spending is another person’s income. The prime minister changed his lines.

A similar muddle over investment versus debt is currently afflicting political rhetoric over higher-education reforms in Britain. On the one hand, government ministers say investing in a more skilled, more college-educated is vital for economic recovery, yet on the other we are told that higher education is an expense which must be drastically cut to help reduce the nation’s debt.

With the withdrawal of well over three quarters of all U.K. government money for under-graduate teaching and its replacement by a loan system to students for university fees, higher education is fast becoming seen as a service to be bought and consumed rather than an investment in the country’s future.

As an economist and vice chancellor who sees people grappling with these ideas on a daily basis, I find it completely obvious that any country that wants to do better should invest in higher education.

Yet in the United Kingdom, there seems to be a common view that we have too many students, and too many university graduates. This ignores the fact that graduates are unemployed much less than those without a degree, they are generally significantly more productive, and they go on both to create new businesses and perform professional jobs that create more employment opportunities generating more tax revenue. Society depends on them, and all major knowledge economies you can conceive of in future will need their skills.

The Confederation of British Industry is predicting a big increase in the number of jobs requiring a university education by 2017 and a significant shortage of skilled graduates in some important areas. By 2017, the organization predicts jobs for those with university qualifications will rise by 56 percent while jobs requiring no qualifications will fall by 12 percent. Meanwhile, figures out in September showed that youth unemployment in the country rose by 78,000 to 973,000 young people without jobs. Against this backdrop, it makes no sense at all that U.K. universities are actually “fined” if they overshoot student intake limits set by the government. To make matters worse, this year 2,000 places were cut from English universities. Next year there will be a further cut by 10,000 – despite the fact that more than 200,000 people were unsuccessful in securing a university place last year and this.

For prospective students and their parents, it must be hard to follow the economic logic of these policies when they are being told that higher education is such a good investment that they should be prepared to take on future debt to cover tuition fees that are nearly tripling to up to £9,000 starting in September 2012 for most universities

Parents and prospective students alike are increasingly wondering why higher education is a worthwhile investment for them, yet apparently for the country it is merely a consumer good. In the present economic environment, even more than in easier times, it is a serious mistake to lump all public spending together as simply “consumption.” Spending on education is an investment. To get out of the current stagnation we need investment in productive capacity. This means investing in both physical infrastructure and “human capital.” Britain has no worthwhile economic future without a well-educated, highly productive labor force. No government or society has ever cut its productive investment and then achieved prosperity.

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manoflamancha

With respect,Katisumas (what the blazes does that handle mean?), you are making logical leaps everywhere! How can you possibly know the detailed make-up of foreign students at UCLA? We court Japanese students for the money? Desperately need foreign students for their high tuition? You sir or madam are one seriously sick puppy. Yes, I am indeed one of the LATTER…try English spelling 101. Or better still, pack up your bags for Bagdhad!

South Park is parody, of folks like you:)
manoflamancha

Oh, stop it!
5768

“Mandating teaching loads is very, very difficult to do.” While this may be the case with regard to potential actions by presidents such as referred to in the article, many Boards have indeed already done this. “Faculty unit members whose primary responsibilities are instructional will be expected to undertake an effort equivalent to that needed to deliver thirty credit hours of undergraduate instruction per academic year” is the current language in our contract, with allowances made for those whose primary responsibilities are not instructional.
lewandowski

Universities in general will have to review what is their main mission. Is it to educate fertile minds or is it to research fertilizer? Parents, who pay these lifetime loans for their sons and daughters expect and are told in the university brochure to expect the best education. But in today’s large universities, students are in larger classes being taught for the large part by low cost TAs with limited communication skills, while the full time faculty are writing beautiful prose papers to be read by few. So yes, the Governor’s program will succeed and more Colleges and Universities in the U.S.A. will be force to balance fruitful research with fruitful young minds. Welcome to the 21st century!
sand6432

And there is a good reason that many professors prefer research to teaching: they were trained how to do the former, but not the latter! Somehow, along the way in graduate school, they are supposed to learn how to become good teachers, but they are never tested on these skills in any formal way, nor are they ever really presented with any instruction in pedagogical methods. It’s not surprising, therefore, that many professors might feel less than fully comfortable up in front of a class and wangle their way into less teaching time as best they can.—Sandy Thatcher
cwinton

One factor often overlooked is the increased amount of faculty time taken up for things like accountability, assessment, web-based courses, you name it, which has led to load adjustments in the form of release time to accommodate what are in effect administrative activities, many of which have been mandated without a thought as to the time they inevitably take away from actually teaching students. I’m not convinced faculty research is taking any more time away from classes than it ever did, but administrative activities? Without a doubt.
stinkcat

One of the problems is that we really don’t know much about the costs and benefits of increasing teaching loads. If we increase teaching loads, research productivity will likely go down and teaching productivity probably go up. The real question is by how much and is the tradeoff worthwhile.
theblondeassassin

This would make more sense if you considered teaching loads as more than just the number of courses (i.e., student contact hours). What about trends in class sizes (students taught per contact hour), assessment loads (hours marking per contact hour), quality assurance meetings, etc.?

If class sizes increase by 10% more students per contact hour, this would have the same effect as the proposed increase in contact hours.

If so, and I’m sure that this has happened at most universities, and will only increase in the future, then this would place a double burden on the professoriate without any decrease in other areas to compensate.
jffoster

Mr Boyles,
A couple of questions se we can better get a sense of this:
1. Are these semester hours or quarter hours?
2. What kind of institution , e.g. public/private, Research 1, regional comprehensive, small liberal arts, ….&c.?
11206495

Not only is the one size fits all, a highly suspect means of attempting to manage a University enterprise, the very fact that there is a clear disparity among various institutions. A full undergraduate teaching load for many faculty is four sections (courses) per semester. Workload can also include non-credit instruction, laboratory, tutorial, advising, mentoring, . . . types of assignments. I have to question the narrow interpretation of workload to focus upon teaching as the focus measure of faculty workload. To add an additional course as an arbitrary fix for the budget would merely move the University teaching load to an community college level where the expectation for scholarship, external grant and contract procurement is typically not that expected of University faculty. Thus, we would have a governmental intervention with far reaching consequences beyond the apparent intent. As mentioned in the article, the wise move would be to slice and dice as necessary but leave the actual implementation and budget management up to institutional leadership who are charged with the responsibility. I can think of few other venues other than education where policy makers outside the profession believe it is wise and appropriate to micromanage those charged with the administration of an institution or agency.

In fact, the majority of our college and university faculty do not only prefer but do in practice, focus more on teaching than scholarship. Of course, this focus depends on the mission and type of institution. One size does not fit all.
sanjoaquin

The irony here is tasty. Many of us who graduated with a real mission to teach found it difficult to get jobs that valued it enough for us to live on as our primary source of income. It’s a bit better now – the community colleges are hiring. A plea for balance….some colleges have a teaching mission, others do not.
softshellcrab

I found this to be a typically cogent and well-reasoned piece by Prof. Vedder. He observes, “My suspicion is that we went too far in reducing teaching loads, that much of the incremental research resulting is of trivial importance. It was done because faculty members preferred research or leisure to teaching, and believed the path to vocational success was through publication, not teaching and counseling young students.” This is a particularly well-put observation on his part. My observation is that teaching loads are too low as it stands now.
leah_shopkow

Teaching loads in and of themselves mean little. What means something is what is being done in the name of “teaching.” I could have a class of four hundred students with graders, parachute in, lecture, do some moderate supervision of my graders and it wouldn’t be a whole lot of work for me. Or I could have a class of four hundred students with no graders, give them all multiple choice spit-back-the-facts tests, also little work for me. Or I could do as I do, work in a large class with a grader or TA, plan tutorials with that person or people, grade some of the student’s work to see how they are doing, change what I do in class to reflect the needs I see in the work, assign weekly writing assignments, have projects requiring inquiry and evaluation. That’s a lot of work for me. So simply to talk about teaching loads as though that represents a unit of work is not helpful. Asking teachers to teach more classes won’t do anything about the quality issue (except force those already concerned with quality to do less than they do).
ancient

As a veteran of 43 years in the University classroom, I ask that you please excuse what you don’t like in some observations. 1. There are far too many non-teaching positions called faculty at most of our institutions, and it has become worse with accrediting groups, assessment groups, distance education groups, research groups, etc. 2. Most research should actually be done by organizations needing the results outside of the campuses, and should be paid for outside of university budgets. Much academic research involves limited samples forwarded by people needing another annotation on their vita, and has very limited use in the real world of an educated person. 3. Real teaching involves face to face encounters with students in and out of the classroom including setting good examples of the using of our fields of specialization. Thoughtfulness is hard to produce in large lecture sessions with a sea of unknown faces. 4. Faculty loads are presently too low in most cases. When I came into collegiate teaching, a twenty hour per quarter load was not at all uncommon (albeit that WAS often a bit much) and I think we often were better teachers because of the pressures of being “ON” everytime we walked into the classroom. I wouldn’t suggest a 20 quarter hour teaching load, but would suggest that some of the younger faculty that I meet see teaching more as a job, and less as a personal mission than was the case. 5. Publication should be limited to a smaller percentage of influence in promotion and tenure decisions. (The changing face of technology in the delivery of information, may force adaptation in this realm all by itself. ) Teaching effectiveness should be uppermost in such decisions at all schools.
6. Real education should not always be driven by financial pressures. Very small classes with interested students often turn out far better results in terms of their lives after the university.
7. Student Life department budgets should often be cut long before cutting academic budgets. We have become more of a leisure and entertainment stopover before hitting “real life” by the number of social activities that we put in the way of our students.
Again, please excuse the hobby horses. I shall soon ride into the sunset of retirement reluctantly because I shall genuinely miss my classroom time with these wonderful kids with so much potential.
rrowlett

Two points:

(1) Mandating individual teaching loads is pure micromanagement, and doesn’t really help solve the ultimate problem, which is how to serve X number of students in a responsible way with Y amount of budget dollars. The state government is not in the best position to decide how universities should fulfill their mission with the available funding, and one-size-fits-all solutions are not ever likely to be efficient.

(2) Everyone should realize that research has a large teaching component. In fact, for graduate study, research is the primary teaching and learning component. It’s how we train new scholars.

Additionally, the thought that all research should be related to commercial concerns, and perhaps funded outside the university is both naive and counterproductive. This idea assumes that research has no pedagogical value–it may be more valuable a learning experience for both graduate and undergraduate students than any number of additional traditional classes–and that all research is applied. If we decided today that all research should be related to commercialization, we may never have discovered recombinant DNA technology, high-throughput structural genomics, high-temperature superconductors, graphene, or any number of curiosity-driven scientific discoveries or technologies that have or will have enormous future economic impact.

Cheers.
5768

15 credits (about 5 courses) per semester; applies to each public institution in state system
http://www.facebook.com/betsy.mceneaney Betsy McEneaney

I don’t see how raising teaching loads will fix any of the problems outlined in _Academically Adrift_, as Vedder argues.

According to the study, the way we teach is clearly not leading to more astute critical thinking on the part of our students (although lack of studying on their part is also an important factor). We need to restructure our teaching altogether to address this, and so we will need a) time to rethink what we do in the classroom, b) better ways to evaluate teaching, and c) weighting teaching more heavily in tenure and promotion decisions, as a previous comment mentions. Increasing teaching load — particularly as measured by courses taught — accomplishes none of this. I find Vedder oddly sanguine about the potential for Ohio’s proposed shift to degrade the quality of undergraduate instruction even further.
flaprof

baloney. Assessment is only demonstrating that you are doing what you claim you are doing in the classroom. Get over it. Assessment of student learning (hello??? this IS university) is a vital part of what EVERY faculty member must do. Otherwise, you are just blowing smoke.
Web=based courses??? are you even IN the 21st Century? our students want their courses on their Ipads, Iphones,….web-based education is THE way of the future. Students in our residence halls are taking web-based classes…it’s just how/who they are.

BTW, When you are in your office at 8 am and work every day, every evening (at home or in the classroom) and every weekend, then we can talk about how overworked you are.

with love.
flaprof

absolutely. And the Delaware Study of Institutional Costs and Productivity takes this approach. The Credit hour model is far more valid, IMHO as a CAO, than the course load model. For example:
Faculty member 1 teaches three courses with 30 students each (at 3 SCH per student). That’s a total of 90 SCH
Faculty member 2 teaches two courses with 80 students each (at 3 SCH per student) for a total of 240 SCH.
Who is working harder??? I submit it’s Faculty Member 2….even though in some evaluation systems, Faculty member 1 would be advantaged because he/she is teaching one more course.
rddennison

My assignment this quarter was 6 courses and, because I am nontenure track, that was within the limit set by our current workload policy. These are master’s and doctoral level courses AND online courses. Our college faculty has developed a new workload policy which is being held by the provost’s office because they cannot provide the number courses with the number of students and the number of faculty that we have (empty positions that they will not release for hire) with a humane workload. The result in teaching mediocrity and faculty members frantically looking for new jobs. This is at an Ohio university.
softshellcrab

Excellent observations in this post, and well put.
schwerdt

You can get around some of this by doing what administration at my school has done: number of classes is the same, but they now put 50% more students in them
blue_state_academic

Here’s an example of how the author uses “empirical data,” from his book Going Broke by Degree (p. 64), regarding how faculty are better off today than in the past:

“When I see how college professors live today compared with forty or fifty years ago (I grew up in a university town), not only do I sense that their economic status has improved enormously in an absolute sense, but probably a bit in a relative sense as well. A larger proportion of senior professors live in what are considered the really nice homes (which are nicer than the upscale houses of a generation or two ago), and assistant professors, who foughgt to live on the fringes of the middle class in a sort of shappy respectability in, say, 1960, are far more likely to have perfectly nice middle-class housing and two cars of fairly recent vintage, instead of the one rather old car, as in times past.”

He of course cites no “data” for these conclusions, only his own observations. Professor Vedder is the master of using anecdotes to draw conclusions.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Seth-Davi/1502610352 Seth Davi

Those are some rosy-colored glasses you’re wearing . . .
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_33X3EGNMDWKWI3R6R3VQYS2AEQ Stephen

Excellent! I have ordered the book tonight.
juliewhite

Yes, just downloaded it on my Kindle as well! Should be great summer reading! ;-)
frankmhowell

While I have posted this on CHE articles before, it bears repeating. As sorry as I am to say this—from my vantage point of being an avid college sports fan—the Presidents cannot solve these problems. President Gee’s feigned attempt at humor when he said he was just hoping that the OSU football coach would not “dismiss” him underscores the dictum that much truth is said in jest (the OSU coach is now fired).

The ONLY way that I see a change to control the problems of college sports, pay-for-play being a key one, is to treat the college sports enterprise for how it operates: as an entertainment business! Thus, the IRS needs to remove the tax-exempt status from the NCAA, the various conference organizations, and the institution’s booster clubs. Then the NCAA IS a big business—which is the justification for Mark Emmert getting paid as he does, for conference Commissioners, Coaches, and so forth. I don’t appreciate my tax dollars helping to offset what these organizations get a government-sanction “pass” on by being tax-exempt organizations. THEN, pay athletes like we pay other student workers. We pay students to run computer systems well above minimum wage in almost every college institution in the U.S. We pay them to work elsewhere on campus based upon the demand factor of their skills. So if a halfback can run like a bat out of hell and folks pay big bucks to see him do it and the TV networks pay the conference or school big bucks to televise so they can sell advertising, then why shouldn’t they get paid as a part-time student worker?

Removing the allowance of a Federal tax exemption on all of this largess is the only way to get the attention of the 800 pound gorilla in the room. Then there are no charades by the NCAA and others being played. Yea, Mr. Emmert then justly deserves the executive salary he is paid because it is a business!
mackjohnson

Mark Emmert should consider terminating “his watch” now given his avowed inflexibility and apparent love for parasitic exploitation of the performers. How did the University of Washington ever tap this guy for its President?
Brian Abel Ragen

I agree, except for the part about “student workers.”

There is no reason to pretend that all people who could contribute to the money-making “college” sports are suited to be college students. Spin the big money programs off into independent enterprises owned by the colleges. Those enterprises will pay their employees what they can negotiate. The employees can mix work with education as their talents and time allows, just as other working students do. The colleges can collect any profits, just as they collect the profits on other investments.

Such a system would end the exploitation of athletes and end the lowering of academic standards results from admitting unqualified students and providing them with the records to remain eligible to pose as STUDENT-athletes.
cwinton

Rationally, student athletes should not be paid to play … that is professional sports and collegiate athletics are supposed to be amateur. Hence, Mr. Emmert’s stand is completely justifiable if, and that’s a big if, collegiate sports were conducted as an amateur enterprise. Unfortunately, collegiate sports, particularly the big money makers football and basketball, have evolved into cash cows, with multimillion dollar coaches, extraordinarily posh facilities, and pseudo students who are basically hired to play on the teams. When collegiate football players are put through the same kind of expectations as their NFL counterparts in order to play, it is hard to argue they are in fact amateurs. You can’t have it both ways. The BCS teams should cut out the fiction and pay their players, or drastically scale back on the resources allocated to these pseudo-student activities (hardly likely to happen when the white elephant of a football stadium has yet to be paid off). Who knows, if the players were paid we might get lucky enough to have a player strike over wages and so have an opportunity to get rid of the whole sorry mess.
mnprivate

This is a foolish debate. The real question is “should public universities be serving as minor league programs for professional sports?” High level athletics detract from the serious purpose of education systems and provide opportunities for corruption, inequity, and wasteful resource utilization. Personally, I wouldn’t waste my money, as a student, at any university that supports a Division 1 athletic program.
redlion

While LSU’s violations are serious, they hardly seem like the egregious allegations against Cam Newton last year and the 4 year investigation of USC from the crack slueths at the NCAA. NCAA enforcement is inept. Rome is burning!
dale1

Rome is burning, and it seems to me there are two options many faculty consider:

1. Reform
2. Dismantle

Since we cannot trust foxes to guard henhouses, I suggest the latter. Of course, it’s never going to happen. Why? Politics and money, and not necessarily in that order.

The aims of intercollegiate athletics could just as easily be obtained through intramural athletics.
jffoster

Tilting at windmills again?
http://www.facebook.com/moinultm Moin Rs

While LSU’s violations are serious, they hardly seem like the egregious allegations against Cam Newton last year and the 4 year investigation of USC from the crack slueths at the NCAA. NCAA enforcement is inept. Rome is burning!
http://www.facebook.com/moinultm Moin Rs

While LSU’s violations are serious, they hardly seem like the egregious allegations against Cam Newton last year and the 4 year investigation of USC from the crack slueths at the NCAA. NCAA enforcement is inept. Rome is burning!
vinyl flooring
jim68243

You know I would typically say it is unwise to increase teaching loads. However, with the wind blowing in the direction of increased workloads with less manpower, it is really inevitable. Everyone I know, including outside the educational arena is stressed by the cutbacks at their workplace. This means that they are required to produce more because less people being hired to fill vacant positions or positions going away all together. mechanical engineering internships
katisumas

Thanks David Green for putting it so well. The situation is just as dire or worse in the US.
http://twitter.com/DanConnell Dan Connell

No, I don’t think it is. The government has taken away the foundations of higher education in the UK, and no-one really knows what this will mean but the omens aren’t good. A key example being PhD development.
In the US, a PhD candidate can expect close guidance, pertinent seminars and classes to make them better academicsteachersresearchers, and plenty of career development and advice.
My UK experience: having to fight for any teaching whatsoever, finally receiving some in the third year of study (this, by the way, constitutes the final year of a UK PhD); being offered no guidance on publication or research strategies; nothing on future careers; and finally, a short chat with one of my supervisors every three or four months (my second supervisor didn’t want anything to do with me). Oh, and some scribbled notes every six months or so.
This was my experience BEFORE the government withdraws funding. Many PhD students self-fund, and that may be nigh-on impossible at £9,000 a year. The area of most extreme damage, in my opinion, will be to the development and scope of doctorate programs. And hence, the continuation and progress of academia & advanced research in the UK will be seriously stunted. The US, although not without its own problems, is suffering a contracting academe rather than a disintegrating one.
bscmath78

Dan Connell, how does the following match with your UK Ph.D. experiences?

In the UK, the odds of a UK Science Ph.D. becoming a professor are worse than 200 to 1 according to the 2010 Royal Society report “The Scientific Century: securing our future prosperity” at:

http://royalsociety.org/uploadedFiles/Royal_Society_Content/policy/publications/2010/4294970126.pdf

Figure 1.6 on page 14 shows 0.45% of Sciences Ph.D.s become professors (in the UK there is no tenure for university professors). 53% of Science Ph.D.s go for NON-science work right off the bat, maybe because they realize they should finally cut their losses.

The chart with its arrows is somewhat unclear but it appears that the 30% arrow is postdocs, 3.5% is “Permanent Research Staff” (in academia) and then 0.45% become professors. Note other arrows going to non-academic research. And just a reminder that “permanent” just means no guaranteed end date like a postdoc. Also, the chart is based on 2005, 2008 and 2009 documents which, of course, are based on earlier, happier times.

On the same page 14, the Royal Society states in the context of complaining about failures to recruit sufficient science and math school teachers:

“The Royal Society’s own research suggests that without excellent teachers there is little hope of inspiring children to stick with science”

No connection seems to be made between poor prospects, poor rewards and a search for better non-STEM alternatives.

The Royal Society report makes no mention of the stats for Cambridge and Oxford Ph.D.s. The story might well be different for Oxbridge Ph.Ds, which might mean the odds for the rest of Ph.Ds might be worse than 1,000 to 1.
bscmath78

Dan Connell, your description of a UK Ph.D. sounds like what they have been doing in the UK since WW II, if not earlier. My impression was that the UK Oxbridge system traditionally did the undergraduate degree in 3 years. From that 3 year degree you were now expected to do research. There were no prelims/quals exams like the US because you were already supposed to know all that, so no need for classes or seminars to prepare you for that. You were supposed to be finished in 3 years, but you could apply for an extension if you needed a 4th year.

You had passed the Tripos at Cambridge, so now you did your research with no time “wasted” on other stuff. Since your research was supposed to be original and yours, and you were supposed to be self-sufficient. That’s the impression I get from reading about UK scientists (this may be why Robert Oppenheimer attempted to murder his supervisor with a poisoned apple).

Oxbridge undergrads not going into research, in the olden days, typically became high Civil Servants, joined the family firm, waited to inherit the family title or otherwise joined the British ruling class. Though, the scholarship girl Margaret Thatcher took an undergraduate Chemistry degree at Oxford before becoming an industrial research chemist. Apparently, she developed a technique to increase the amount of air that could whipped into ice cream. The Wikipedia entry says 4 years, so maybe they took longer at Oxford what with their individualized tutorial system than at Cambridge.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2048960/Margaret-Thatcher-invented-soft-scoop-ice-cream-.html

I wonder if this due to the UK not having vast amounts of funding for STEM Ph.D. students that allows the US to use them (and postdocs) as cheap labor teaching undergraduates and working in labs, but not to provide that many tenured positions.

Does any of this match your observations?
bscmath78

Dan Connell, do you think it odd that the article makes no mention of the 2010 Royal Society report “The Scientific Century: securing our future prosperity” which on the surface would seem directly related to the author’s concerns?

I noticed you didn’t mention it either, is that because no one paid any attention?
Well, except for some publications with a vested interest. ;-)

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=410690
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=410732
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/41938

Though the poor prospects of postdocs in the Royal Society study got some notice:

“UK postdocs appear to have even more reason for pessimism: according to the Royal Society’s 2010 report The Scientific Century: Securing our Future Prosperity, 30 per cent of science PhD graduates go on to postdoctoral positions, but only about 12 per cent of those attain permanent research jobs.”

Along with interesting reader comments:
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=416341

Another article notes:
“. . . in the UK, only 30 per cent will go on to postdoctoral posts and just 12 per cent will get permanent jobs, according to the Royal Society. Educating so many people so expensively for so few possible positions is not only depressing for the people involved, it is also an incredibly inefficient use of taxpayer cash.”

Along with interesting reader comments:
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=416358

I didn’t notice mention of the UK Ph.D. issues that you mentioned, instead people seem to focus on too many Ph.D.s, too many postdocs and too few permanent positions for them. So is it possible that what you observed in the UK is exactly what UK students expect in a UK Ph.D.?
bscmath78

Dan Connell, in response to a previous mention of the Royal Society report’s report of poor prospects for a Sciences Ph.D., ellenhunt wrote in part:

“Curious, don’t you think, how many STEM PhDs the UK hires from outside the UK? This is curious indeed given the supposed oversupply.

What I have heard through the grapevine in the UK is that the quality of the vast majority of those obtaining STEM PhDs there is outlandishly awful. I have been told that this is due to a university system which makes it virtually impossible for a professor to fail or otherwise get rid of a grad student. Consequently, professors move trouble out the door the only way that they can. To do otherwise is just too much trouble and could likely result in being fired.

I have heard stories of PhDs in science unable to handle exponents and similar deficits that should get them a failing grade as a freshman undergrad.”

http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/just-dont-go-the-sequel/30693#comment-353978906

I replied at: http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/just-dont-go-the-sequel/30693#comment-354019805

What do you think of ellenhunt’s comments?
bscmath78

The UK historian of science David Edgerton has written a series of books that suggest that government science and technology “investment” has repeatedly been a massive waste of money in Britain.

In “Science, technology, and the British industrial ‘decline’, 1870-1970″, he argues there was no decline, but instead lots of continuing investment, he notes:

“These are important conclusions: Britain would have been richer had its government not
subsidised civil aerospace and its nuclear programme. Grave as these losses were, they were almost certainly small by comparison to the losses incurred in defence R&D and procurement programmes.”

http://books.google.ca/books?id=dIpPPshxj0sC&pg=PA46&dq=%22Britain+would+have+been+richer+had+its+government+not%22&hl=en&ei=VabGTo7rAqTf0QHz95wb&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CC8Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22Britain%20would%20have%20been%20richer%20had%20its%20government%20not%22&f=false

Most recently, in his 2011 “Britain’s War Machine: Weapons, Resources and Experts in the Second World War” we learn how by almost every science and technology measurement, Britain far out classed Germany, let alone Japan, during the lead up to war and the first part of the war. It has been relatively well known that in May 1940 Rommel was outnumbered and outgunned by all measures, facing British and French tanks with armor that his tank shells bounced off of. Yet, the British were repeatedly defeated by the Nazi and the Japanese. The British did sink the Bismarck, but it took much of the British fleet to do so. Edgerton’s book provides much detailed explanation of the British technological and numerical advantage.

So you might ask, how did Rommel do it? One tactic was to improvise by firing his 88 mm anti-aircraft guns at the Allied tanks. It cut through their armor like butter even when fired out of the range of enemy tanks. The better known answer was the superior strategy, of Von Manstein and Guderian (using some concepts of Fuller, a Brit), of massing most of the force of the Blitzkrieg at one point in the line, a point in the line that the Allies felt was impenetrable, the Ardennes.

“By nearly every standard the British army was much better equipped than the German army from the beginning to the end of the war.”

http://books.google.ca/books?id=e6Vjp8qmYNIC&pg=PA219&dq=%22By+nearly+every+standard+the+British+Army%22&hl=en&ei=s67GTsLtLsHq0gGAy_38Dw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CDwQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=%22By%20nearly%20every%20standard%20the%20British%20Army%22&f=false
bscmath78

The author writes, “A similar muddle over investment versus debt . . .” in the context of paying off credit card bills. Let see, paying off credit cards with an average UK APR of 18.8% (Feb 2010)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2010/feb/16/credit-card-interest-high
sounds like something good for consumers, but bad for the profits of credit card companies. It’s probably bad for all the importers of foreign consumer products. An 18.8% tax free return seems like a lot better return than I can get from a non-Ponzi investment these days.

There is a confused idea of “investment” when someone wants to produce something that is in massive oversupply, especially since if there was any shortage among Brits, it would be easily solved by the vast army of Eurozone college-educated unemployed young people, an army that looks like it will gain lots of recruits. And let’s see, all those holding Greek sovereign debt get a 50% haircut, if they are lucky. PIIGS sovereign debt what an investment that was. Too bad MF Global went bankrupt they might have some to sell you.

It is fascinating when the media say 7% for sovereign debt is “unsustainable”, but this article thinks it is good for consumers to keep paying credit card interest through the nose.

Face it, the most likely reason to herd them into school is to reduce the increase in the official unemployment rate, keep them off the dole and keep them off the streets.
bscmath78

As a side note, typically people who run credit card balances are the ones who live “paycheck to paycheck” so it is likely that only those who have chosen to live above their means due to high self-esteem are likely to be in a position to cut back and reduce their balances. But given their high self-esteem they are unlikely to respond to such appeals.

And looking at Greece and the rest, some may think that going out with a bang and going bankrupt is the way to go. Especially if you owe a fortune.

“He was once the richest man in Ireland. Now he’s bankrupt and owes £2.5bn”
Read more at : http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2060323/Sean-Quinn-Irelands-richest-man-declared-bankrupt.html#ixzz1e5aewVqr

As the article state, “Bankruptcy laws in the UK, which apply in Belfast, are more lenient than those in the Republic of Ireland, where it can take 12 years to run a business again after being declared legally bankrupt. In the UK it is just one year.”
What a deal!
bscmath78

“Pupils were subjected once again to a more rote/mechanical means of teaching which drilled them in the techniques of test-taking”

“This meant that grants could be allocated to schools taught largely by untrained teachers because they would be cheaper than trained teachers and therefore might seem a better business proposition for the managers.”

“‘If it is not cheap, it shall be efficient; if it is not efficient it shall be cheap.’” – Robert Lowe

This was the promise of the Revised Code of 1862 (“payment by results”) as stated to the British House of Commons. It was a system that resulted in the elimination of all subjects that weren’t subject to testing and the elimination of anything above the standard of the testing, the lowest common denominator. With no escape for the clever, since fast advancement would reduce the income of the school.

http://books.google.ca/books?id=2FiCvLK4ox0C&pg=PR20&dq=%22drilled+them+in+the+techniques+of+test-taking%22&hl=en&ei=f8rGTq-WMuXm0QGPtvj4Dw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CDgQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22drilled%20them%20in%20the%20techniques%20of%20test-taking%22&f=false

This was just one part of a long British tradition of expending much time and effort (and sometimes money) on counter-productive educational activities. Rote memorization having a long and hallowed tradition in UK education, exams and perceptions of merit. Helping to produce that lack of imagination that sent junior officers kicking soccer-balls towards the German machine guns, leading thousands to their deaths, on the first day of the Battle of the Somme.
bscmath78

The following is attributed (disputed) to two German officers during WW I:

Field Marshall Erich Ludendorff: The English soldiers fight like lions.
General Max Hoffmann: True. But don’t we know that they are lions led by donkeys.”

Another version is, “The English Generals are wanting in strategy. We should have no chance if they possessed as much science as their officers and men had of courage and bravery. They are lions led by donkeys.”

http://www.archive.org/stream/englishwifeinber00bluoft#page/211/mode/1up
http://whytheology.wordpress.com/ Trey Medley

@chronicle-15bf71a93d53f3fa044dd3b5f99a7a58:disqus , quit spamming the comment section. Please try to keep comments and replies to a respectable minimum, putting in so many comments merely discourages conversation
maxbini

I think it may be worthwhile to add a consideration of what happened in Australia back in 1988 when the Government there decided to move from a completely Government funded higher education system and introduced student fees.
Although Australia had free university education before this, it was not well respected and few took the opportunity – the preference seems to have been for either employment or unemployment benefits. The introduction of student fees was done with a system that allowed the majority of students to pay the debt in future years out of tax increases (this was then called The Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS) but is now called FeeHelp). Surprisingly, this lead to a large take-up of university places, which has been maintained ever since.
Also the fees charged for courses have exponentially risen over the years but this has not lessened the demand for places.
It would not surprise me if politicians in Britain have not looked at the Australian situation and not tried to take similar advantage of the moving of the funding burden. This also fits in with the current British Governments “small Government, big community” push.
The shame is (to my knowledge) that few seem to have looked closely at the detrimental impacts of such moves – falling standards, loss of academic freedom, a focus upon full-fee paying students (whether International students or the wealthy being able to by-pass merit standards and purchase a place in a course), generalist staff outnumbering academics, untenured staff outnumbering tenured staff, etc…
Whilst academics may grieve such losses, a politician will more likely glory in the cost savings.
pgteach

Higher education is an expensive undertaking for which we hope our effort, time, and money invested will yield positive outcome. If Britain is selecting to boycott support for higher education because they have too many students and too many university graduates, the may find they have too little offer to a globally competitive market. Unemployment is not going to be fixed or solved by reducing the number of university graduates, but by creating jobs, resourcing internally rather than outsourcing externally, and providing tax incentive for businesses and employers to name a few ideas. Let us hope that Great Britain sees the light and realize an educated nation is a competitive one, or they may not lose the “Great” and be the “Less” Britian.
lenard

Just as in the US, a college education is a large investment and it seems as though that investment will not be paid off. Just like the article states, it must be difficult for prospective students and parents to follow the economic logic for investing in an education. It is the same case as in the US and along with this comes the topic of motivation towards education. If getting an education is so expensive, what can motivate students to get an education in the US or abroad?