OK, so the time has come to finally close this blog forever. It’s official that I’m no good at keeping to any kind of regular deadline anyway, so it’ll be a relief not to have to! All the posts will stay here for posterity, though. See you on the other side!
OK, so the students’ union elections that most of this blog has been devoted to for the past few months ended a few weeks ago, but you wouldn’t have known by reading here, because I somehow overlooked that entire episode when updating it!
Not to worry though, because I can say this now: I didn’t win the elections, and that means that this blog will be winding down gradually. It was always intended to be a running log of the whole elections process, and depending on how you look at it, it either went quite well or fell a little short.
In any case, I remember also mentioning my final project. Since I didn’t blog about it here, you can find more info over at the DSMS Project Log.
With that, I’m going to say a provisional goodbye. There will probably be a few more posts but I’ll do a final one before closing overall. The blog and posts will stay here, though, if only for reference.
Funny how they can award themselves all this while cutting budgets for teaching departments…
For a number of years, the present UK government has had the target of getting 50% of people under the age of 30 into university by 2010. Of course, this target will not be reached any time soon since the current figure is around the 40% mark. However, is the whole idea misguided from the start?
My answer is yes. The 50% target is artificial, not taking into account those who may prefer moving into employment or vocational apprenticeships. It also aims to push more people into an increasingly underfunded higher education sector. Cuts are already taking place at many universities around the country in anticipation of the swingeing overall budget cuts announced by Lord Mandelson.
Such cuts affect the level of education of students currently studying at university. Increasing the student population while at the same time decreasing the teaching capability of fewer lecturers seems counter-intuitive.
The student population should be allowed to grow or shrink organically depending on the actual number of people who wish to attend university. This would mean that those who don’t actually want to be at university but have been persuaded by careers advisers won’t have to endure three years of a course they are not interested in. Conversely, as long as the funding situation is sorted out (i.e. not blindly lifting the fees cap without a strategy in place), people who currently cannot afford to attend university will be able to.
Overall, this will result in an increase in the value of degrees, and more motivation within classes of people who actually want to be studying. This can only be a good thing and better than artificially inflating figures for the sake of a few league tables.
A spokesman for the lecturers’ union, the University and College Union (UCU), said: “Hardly groundbreaking or surprising stuff from the brains behind the poll tax, rail privatisation and other policy disasters.”
Over the past few years, the notion of students as consumers and universities as businesses has come to the fore. This is undeniably a theory borrowed wholesale from the commercial sector and awkwardly shoehorned into education.
If anything, it shows the absolute contempt that university managers hold their students in, despite the students being the very reason universities exist in the first place and paying for the privilege of being there. Managers have been infected by the commercial practice of maximising profits and salaries while seeing their core activities as secondary in importance.
It must be remembered that the education sector is completely separate from the commercial sector and the theories from one do not necessarily fit will within the other.
