Education

Via, this complete gorgeousness.

Second, you seem to think that we might censor a student’s thesis, which is lawful and already in the
public domain, simply because a powerful interest finds it inconvenient. This shows a deep misconception
of what universities are and how we work. Cambridge is the University of Erasmus, of Newton,
and of Darwin; censoring writings that offend the powerful is offensive to our deepest values. Thus even
though the decision to put the thesis online was Omar’s, we have no choice but to back him. That would
hold even if we did not agree with the material! Accordingly I have authorised the thesis to be issued as
a Computer Laboratory Technical Report. This will make it easier for people to find and to cite, and will
ensure that its presence on our web site is permanent.

Read the whole thing but this is close as you will ever come to seeing an academic, in academic language, in an academic manner, simply stating \”fuck you matey\”.

Quite the most gorgeous wondrousness and, dare I but hope, a lesson in style for academics everywhere.

When they be lyin\’, say so. When they be attemptin\’ that oppressin\’, say so.

That is what you be havin\’ that tenure for, after all.

In 1998, when Jiang Zemin, then the president, announced plans to bolster higher education, Chinese universities and colleges produced 830,000 graduates a year. Last May, that number was more than six million and rising.

It is a remarkable achievement, yet for a government fixated on stability such figures are also a cause for concern. The economy, despite its robust growth, does not generate enough good professional jobs to absorb the influx of highly educated young adults. And many of them bear the inflated expectations of their parents, who emptied their bank accounts to buy them the good life that a higher education is presumed to guarantee.

“College essentially provided them with nothing,” said Zhang Ming, a political scientist and vocal critic of China’s education system. “For many young graduates, it’s all about survival. If there was ever an economic crisis, they could be a source of instability.”

In a kind of cruel reversal, China’s old migrant class — uneducated villagers who flocked to factory towns to make goods for export — are now in high demand, with spot labor shortages and tighter government oversight driving up blue-collar wages.

But the supply of those trained in accounting, finance and computer programming now seems limitless, and their value has plunged. Between 2003 and 2009, the average starting salary for migrant laborers grew by nearly 80 percent; during the same period, starting pay for college graduates stayed the same, although their wages actually decreased if inflation is taken into account.

How so very unlike our own dear educational system, eh?

You might even think that with the same thing happening in two wildly different economies, on different sides of the world, that there might be some sort of universal rules about this.

You know, the laws of supply and demand perhaps?

The Question Punk Is Do You Think Your Course Is Worth £9000?

?

If you answer no then there isn\’t a problem. Do something else.
If you answer yes there isn\’t one either. Grow up, invest in your future.

His secret information, available only by FOI, about BME admissions to Oxbridge: available on the university\’s website actually.

Oh, and it appears that he\’s innumerate as well. Quite unaware of the law of small numbers.

So, our question for the day: why do those who would rule us think that lying to us is the way to go about getting our support?

Caption to Torygraph picture:

Teenagers will lose up to fiver percent of their marks for failing to maintain high standards of written english

Perhaps the Australian schools should do the same?

Shows how out of touch I am though: I hadn\’t realised that the examination system was so dumbed down that proficiency in language wasn\’t marked in the first place.

D\’ye think you could change the URL of your place?

bris.co.uk rather causes an unfortunate wince in anyone who has ever told the joke about the Jewish circumcisionist.

Hasn\’t got a hope in hell of being implemented of course. For it is a sensible, reasonable and logical plan.

But I repeat myself.

Or at least, so we are told and asked over at LC.

maybe so, but Finland, with a GDP below ours, manages to send 80% of its young people to university on 100% grants.

So why can\’t we do this?

Largely because the 80% number in Finland is entirely bollocks.

Here\’s the OECD numbers for tertiary education in Finland.

Looking at the 25-34 age cohort ( we don\’t want to look at older ages because there\’s been an expansion of tertiary education everywhere over the past generation or two) Finland graduates some 23% through the university system. That\’s a little above the 20% of the OECD average.

However, Finland also graduates another 17% through the polytechnic system (as against 9% for the OECD average). These poly degrees are considered to be rather lower in value than a uni degree (to some extent like the distinction in the US between an Associate or two year degree and a Bachelor\’s or four year one. Not quite, but the holder of a poly degree would usually be asked to do another year of classes before being accepted into a uni Master\’s degree course).

And lumped in with the poly degrees are also all of the vocational and trade schools: graduating from the police college for example. Plus chippies, plumbers and brickies, I have no doubt. (We have a couple of Finnish readers here and I\’d welcome clarification on that point).

So, including all tertiary education, vocational, poly and academic uni, Finland graduates some 40% of the age cohort. Less than the UK does for university alone.

So where does the 80% number come from?

That\’s actually the graduation rate of those who have actually started at one of the tertiary institutions: it ain\’t the proportion of the population that gets degrees, it\’s the proportion of those who start degrees who go on to get degrees.

So, your Friday nugget of information: those who try to tell you that 80% of Finns go to uni are talking bollocks: if not actually innumerate.

Seen it before really:

A few coachloads of students went from my university down to the big Grosvenor Square demo and the ensuing scrap with the police led to the same sort of headlines that we can read this morning. Then, as now, there was concern, there was anger, there was indignation, but above all, the whole thing was tremendous fun.
Whether you are a member of the Bullingdon or a militant Trot, the sound of breaking glass is deeply satisfying to a young man, and today, as in 1968, the press reports will be avidly scanned by the protesters. Politicians and columnists will huff puff and fulminate, and in a week or two the whole business will be forgotten.
The leaders from 1968 must be feeling nostalgic too. Jack Straw, still a student in the second half of his twenties now a right-wing Rt.Hon., Tariq Ali (comfortable media person) Daniel Cohn-Bendit (aka Danny Le Rouge) (Eurocrat) Anna Ford, then President Manchester SU, (media celeb) will all be able to get out their press clippings and have a good old wallow.

That generation of student’s isn’t going to forget this betrayal easily and in five years time they’ll be ready to punish both parties.

So, err, when do these higher fees and loans come in then?

After the current generation have graduated maybe?

This book looks at the ways in which The Matrix Trilogy adapts Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, and in doing so creates its own distinctive philosophical position. Where previous work in the field has presented the trilogy as a simple ‘beginner’s guide’ to philosophy, this study offers a new methodology for inter-relating philosophy and film texts, focusing on the conceptual role played by imagery in both types of text. This focus on the figurative enables a new-found appreciation of the liveliness of philosophical writing and the multiple philosophical dimensions of Hollywood films. The book opens with a critical overview of existing philosophical writing on The Matrix Trilogy and goes on to draw on adaptation theory and feminist philosophy in order to create a new methodology for interlinking philosophical and filmic texts. Three chapters are devoted to detailed textual analysis of the films, tracing the ways in which the imagery that dominates Baudrillard’s writing is adapted and transformed by the trilogy’s complex visuals and soundtrack. The conclusion situates the methodology developed throughout the book in relation to other approaches currently emerging in the new field of Film-Philosophy. The book’s multi-disciplinary approach encompasses Philosophy, Film Studies and Adaptation Theory and will be of interest to undergraduates and postgraduates studying these subjects. It also forms part of the developing interdisciplinary field of Film-Philosophy. The detailed textual analysis of The Matrix Trilogy will also be of interest to anyone wishing to deepen their understanding of the multi-faceted nature of this seminal work.

Forgive me, but I (and this is going to make family gatherings more interesting, ain\’t it?) do rather regret that by far the brightest of my generation of our family (we are first cousins) decided to spend her life on this twaddle.

And, yes, this is what all those media studies graduates are being taught.

Bring on the bonfire of the universities say I.

Dear Ms. Benn,

Your recent Guardian column is headlined: \”A covert war on schools.

Behind Gove\’s new agenda, the state school system is being persistently undermined\”

Yes, this is the fucking point of it all.

yours etc.

Tim Worstall

This looks like a good thing:

Morrisons is to announce tomorrow that it is to fund 20 undergraduates a year on its three-year degree course in food manufacturing, which starts in January. The students will spend half their time working in the company\’s factories and half studying for the course, run by Bradford University\’s management school.

The supermarket admits the course will leave little time for the recreational side of university life. Students will not take university holidays, but will have an annual leave allowance. They will receive £15,000 a year and will not have to pay their tuition fees of £3,290 a year. The students are also guaranteed a job once they graduate and must work for Morrisons for at least three years.

Companies, the armed forces, certainly used to run these sorts of schemes all the time. And they\’re really only an advanced form of apprenticeship after all, which are generally assumed to be a good thing.

Plus, this is a nice answer to those on the left who are shouting (I\’m sure the idea originated with Ritchie but it\’s spread) that corporation tax should rise because it is business which benefits from peeps getting university educations.

If market processes produce this (as we are told) desirable result, that business does indeed pump money into universities, then clearly there\’s no need for government intervention to force them to do so, is there?

Although I do have a feeling that this won\’t be considered acceptable: Morrison\’s is spending money on the education that it desires its hires to have: not money on what the education establishment thinks they should have.

Tsk, can\’t have that now, can we?

But the flaw in your logic is that most European universities are entirely shit.

We can either just send the clever kids to Uni like we used to and afford to pay them a grant, so that they leave with very little debt; or we can allow all the duffers to go, in which case we can\’t afford to subsidise every one of them,

Virtually all taxpayer funding will be removed from the majority of degrees and students will have to borrow tens of thousands of pounds to cover the doubled cost of courses.

Seems sensible enough really.

The major beneficiaries of a degree are the people who hold that degree in the higher lifetime earnings they gain from having that degree. So it should be they that pay the costs of gaining that degree.

There\’s no real way to have private funding of the loans though: yer average 18 year old isn\’t the greatest credit risk for £50k now, are they? So government provision of the loans seems fine.

The greater societal benefit of having lots of graduates: I\’m entirely unconvinced about that. Yes, I\’d say there is a public good to having a largely numerate and literate society, thus meaning tax subsidy to that part of the education system that provides that (and if only we did have a part of the education system that does provide that) but having 40, 50% of the age cohort with degrees?

Given that the vast majority of them go on into careers which were not traditionally thought of as requiring a degree I don\’t really see it I\’m afraid.

In fact, I rather hope that the unwrapping of the current subsidy, the making plain what are the true costs, will mean fewer taking a degree in the first place.

But the basic concept being proposed seems just fine to me. Here\’s what a degree costs, we\’ll help finance it but you\’ll have to pay for it: just fine by me.

The Left are viscous

They are indeed thick….

Information here.

I\’m not entirely sure I\’d get all Henry II on their asses, as His Grace proposes, nor Lear, but certainly we can get Edward VIII: something must be done.