More money means a better education, right? It is a simple formula. It works so well.
If I pay a premium I get first-class air travel with comfier seats and free alcohol instead of paying less and being herded like aviation cattle on to the plane. If I give Rupert Murdoch more money he gives me more of Sky’s wonderful movies and sports channels along with the endless tripe of Bravo and Dave. If I pay £5.50 for a block of cheddar in Waitrose it will be better than the 70p fermented nightmare I would have to settle for in Asda. And so the simple formula works that if I pay more for an education I will be at a better university, right?
Maybe a more elaborated version of the above is what the university’s movers and shakers are thinking as they sit in Heslington Hall and prepare to announce how much they are going to charge the bright young thinkers of tomorrow. If we charge like the £5.50 Waitrose cheddar then we will be more like an Oxbridge education. If we make people pay a pittance (like the 70p Asda cheese) we will fail, fall, die and be like Leeds Met.
But what if more money doesn’t mean a better education? What if there is a simple flaw in the wonderful pseudo-economic logic of our thinking? What if education, learning and universities aren’t like cheese?
I have just come back from a study abroad year at an American university – Rutgers University in New Jersey. A solid academic establishment that is usually positioned anywhere from 60th to 100th in global university rankings. And to enter these hallowed halls what do you have to have in your wallet to pay in university fees? Somewhere around the mark of $25,000 to $35,000, that is about £15,500 to £22,000 a year.
But if you pay that astronomical sum you are no longer giving across a fee for the opportunity of learning, you are paying for an education product. And because everyone pays the same high price everyone has to have the same opportunities to succeed. How is it fair that Mrs X pays $35,000 and gets an A when Mr Y paid exactly the same for his product and only gets a D? It would be like two people buying the same nice £5.50 block of Waitrose Cheddar and one getting to eat all of it and the other only getting to eat half.
Instead of the onus being on the undergraduate to educate themselves, to facilitate their learning and to independently research the onus is on academics to package courses with all your necessary reading to get top marks listed in a step-by-step weekly guide and with all academic work involving hoop-jumping and form filling. I don’t think I will ever forgive one of my professors for making me do a “match the person to the description” in a midterm exam or another professor for his continued use of map quizzes.
The tacit understanding of American undergraduate education appears to be to make a system whereby everyone, if they just put in enough hours and jump through enough hoops, can succeed, not by natural ability but by being pushed through the system.
Obviously there are exceptions on both sides and, of course, it would be wrong (both realistically and academically) to sweepingly devalue the personal work of actual professors. But there are worrying and striking differences between the way Brits and Americans treat (or in the American case maybe “baby”) their undergraduates.
You might be wondering why US undergraduates haven’t risen up against paying into a system that does not actually measure intelligence and ability but measures form filling effort. It is probably because many have been co-opted into misunderstanding the point of the US education system. Rutgers has a 52,000 seater American football stadium, a multitude of free gyms and subsidised spa, to name but a few aspects of its stellar facilities. A couple of weeks ago the university even paid Snooki (star of Jersey Shore) $32,000 to give a lecture.
The fees are being spent on facilities and public relations junkets which have nothing to do with education but which American students have been told are necessary for their universities.
Go ahead Heslington Hall. Charge thousands for an education product. Make it astronomically expensive so you can shove a pair of ripped fishnets and smack a load of makeup on the body of the university like it is a cheap hooker. Chase sixth-formers like the disgusting education whore that you will become. Education is not a product and it will not improve one iota when you charge more for it.
However, the cynical side of me thinks that our university’s elite haven’t been thinking through such an argument. There haven’t been ideas raised on the education product or anything else. I think the announcement on raising York’s fees will demonstrate a simplistic and short-term way of thinking from the management. “Every other good university is going to charge £9,000 so we have to otherwise we will look like a crap university.”
In end it has nothing to do with long-term plans, morals or beliefs. It is simply what they can get away with while making York into a cheap syphilis-ridden prostitute of education.
Care to outline your argument with reference to the university’s finances? They may well be able to break even by charging everyone less than £9k, but surely the issue is what they do with any extra income they get? If they use it to subsidise students from poorer backgrounds then arguably that is better than charging everyone a bit less. Or, they may use the extra income to fund particular aspects of research, or improve student accommodation, or increase the number of places at the university etc.
Just a thought here following Matts logic, isnt part of the problem with uni at the moment that studenst (especially humanities) feel they dont get a proper education? More funds means more professors and the chance of more contact hours. As a politics student on 5-3 hours a week for 3 years my fee’s have in essence paid for a glorified library card and hopefully a piece of paper with a qualifiation at the end of it. Im not sure many people feel they really learn from their tutors, maybe the work they are old to read they do but it certainly isnt taught.
Just another idea as well, increasing fee’s also makes stsudents thing more carefully about why they are taking a degree, which to be honest should be to help become employed. As such with a fee increase, students will expect their degree’s to teach them the skills they need and proove to employers that they are useful qualifications. For a university whose graduate career prospects are poor and the club of PEP used to run all the careers fairs (and still does many) this pressure on faculties should also be good for students and the universities image.
I couldn’t agree more with Chris. When you get down to it, as politics students on 5 hours a week, we’re paying around £20 an hour to the University (based on £1,000/ten week term and 5 hours a week – so it’s actually slightly more). Doesn’t soundc like a lot, but then consider that the 200 other people in the lecture theatre are also paying £20 for the privilege. £4,000 for an hour’s work seems just a little bit crazy to me. I could get library and journal access privately for a hell of a lot less than £3,300/year, and do independent learning that way.
No. I pay the University through the nose, and I expect to get something back. And that’s on £3,300/year. I’ll say this now, not in a million years would I pay £9,000 for my course, it’s not even worth a third of that…