The Bradley Report [Here] is proposing, among other things, that [Australian] students have vouchers to attend the university they want to, rather than making the university the funding recipient directly. Two things stand out to me. One is that this makes higher learning a marketable commodity, in which the desires of the consumers determines what is most important intellectually. So if everyone wants to be a business manager, accountant or surfing doctor, that is what we should fund? There's no important cultural legacy to be supported? If not, why does the government support art? Surely that, and sport, should also be subjected to the same market forces?
The second point is that markets routinely fail and are subject to corruption. If learning is a commodity, and the general trend, begun under Labor in the 80s, to seeing higher education as a sausage factory that feeds into industry alone, then academics ought to be free to make their own market decisions instead of following the dictates of university administrators and federal and state bureaucrats. Hence, if we find that lots of kids want to learn about, say, philosophy of mind, then we should be free to teach that and not be forced to teach anything else, right? Because markets are so damned good at getting to the meat?
Learning is not a commodity, or at least, not just a commodity. Academics mostly are passionate about their subject and do it not because they think there's a dollar in it, but because they think it is important that people know about the king-parliament disputes of the 17th century, or how to read Akkadian, or the underlying arguments for monism, or the taxonomy of flowering plants, etc. It has nothing to do with being able to attract many valuable students for the benefit of the administrative unit.
In the philosophy of science there is a notion: the Invisible College (not a close match to the Unseen University of Terry Pratchett). It refers these days to a group of scientists who share research although they are not in the same institutions. They share cell lines, animals, materials, results, and often coauthor papers. If the commodification of learning continues, then the allegiances of academics who love their topic will be to their colleagues elsewhere and not to their university. This might give bureaucrats some pause. If I would rather have a colleague elsewhere get research funds than my own organisation, and there is no ideal of the University any more, they might find they lose in the longer term. I have a greater allegiance to my colleagues than I now do to my institution, although my next employer seems to retain a lot of the ideals of the University that I came in expecting to find. This may upset politicians and administrators, but they have only themselves to blame.
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"they think it is important that people know about the king-parliament disputes of the 17th century, or how to read Akkadian, or the underlying arguments for monism, or the taxonomy of flowering plants, etc"
I'll grant you the other stuff, but people who think taxonomy is important deserve to be panhandlers. Not because the market dictates it; just in a cosmic justice sense.
;-)
What kind of taxonomists do you think this is true of? [smirks and waits for the trap to spring...]
What, John? Do taxonomists belong to more than one baramin?
Oh, and are you aware that USyd paid for one of their bloggers (rpg) to go to ScienceBlogging08 in London this year? It would be one way of buying your loyalty, I guess.
John, in Romania we have something quite similar to the Bradley proposal -- departments receive money per student capita (just that they receive the money directly). In the several years (8-10, or something like that) we've been running this scheme the overall number of enrolled students has grown quite a bit, because they're letting everybody in and nobody is left out: that is, it's almost a practical impossibility that students fail exams, get expelled etc. No matter how bad the student is, s/he is expected to pass the exam. The scholarly quality of the courses is adjusted accordingly, and if that's not enough, well, the student gets a gentle push uphill when it comes to it... (I said the "overall" number; generally, there are less and less students in the sciences departments and in philosophy, and more and more in the trendy ones, like business school, communication, political sciences, public policy etc).
Of course, the faculty numbers remain the same, so that they get a paycheck that rivals those from Western universities (a full professor at the University of Iasi takes home about 3.5-4k euros each month). In the meantime, PhD students have to cope with seminar groups of 40-50 people and lecture series of 150-200 (for about 200 euros/month).
Far be it from me to disagree with you, so I won't.
I would hope that the universities, if vouchers are introduced, do not dumb down just to collect money.
Of course, I would prefer that the universities continue to be funded centrally. However, if all the students want to take politics or media studies and have the entrance requirements for them (in those two cases a brass neck, gift of the gab and an internet link should do) then even today universities will expand those courses.
Sadly, the idea of education for educations sake and doing something that takes thought and effort isn't much appreciated by the bulk of the populace and isn't normally very well rewarded.
Mathematicians, engineers, philosophers, doctors, scientists and others of that ilk are, I suspect, born that way. With some nurture thrown in.
The majority will, being sensible in some ways, go for what is seen to have the greater financial reward. Forsaking the greater reward of learning how to learn as well as how to think more logically.
The way it was in Illinois was that the university budget was figured on the projected number of students. If you ended up with fewer, you had to give money back. If you ended up with more you had to absorb the cost somehow. Such a deal!. One year, we overestimated badly. We saved money by running the university vehicles on bald tires. I blew out five on two vehicles during a one-day field trip.
Then we got into a state scheme called "normative cost"; the idea that every university should teach an hour of freshman biology for the average cost of all universities. Universities and departments who were above the normative cost got their budget slashed. My department got slashed for reasons I never understood. The result was, by the time I became Chair, we were the most efficient (PC speak for underfunded) Biology department in the State, and the most efficient department in the university. So, I spent my time as Chair yipping about this (making well reasoned, compelling, powerful arguments for more resources), and had pretty good success.
It gets worse.
Under the voucher scheme, universities are free to enroll as many students per course as they wish - with no requirement to increase staff numbers, and there is no cap on the Government's outlay to them (p. 157).
There is no time limit to a student's enrollment, so a student could continue indefinately and still be entitled to participate, and the Government would still have to pay (p. 157).
Universities can set their own entry criteria for each course - which could be through exam results, or the size of mummy and daddy's bank account (p.157).
See recommendation 29 of the Review.
Why all this animus for taxonomists? I'm working on a computer system foir a couple of them now, and they seem to be lovely people.
If a little picky.
But after building systems to perform Fringe Benefits Tax computations according to legislation that changes every year, and to determine program eligibility for adult migrants ("adult" means as at date of visa application, or date of arrival in Oz - depending), picky is a problem I'm used to dealing with.
It's something of an in-joke. I love taxonomists - they are my study organism after all - and I know quite a few these days.
Chris, I think we are headed further down the road we have previously travelled with international full-fee-paying students. Which is to say that standards will slip from pressure from above, in favour if income. This bodes ill for me, because I don't amend my standards based on administrative criteria, but on professional ones. I suspect a fair few academics will share that ideal, and hence will be weeded out of academe...
I'm going to have to read the report again to check that my first impression is correct.
I note that they suggest that universities be rigorously assessed to be able to operate as a uni. But then also suggest that number of graduates be monitored - especially minority groups, and they want to increase the %age of graduates in the population.
Hmmm . . . lets see, do unis invest in extra resources to help students reach the required grades?
ooooooor . . . do they lower the standards for a pass?
Silly question really, since this situation has occurred before with overseas students, and when student numbers were the basis of funding to university departments, and we all know what happened then.
I am aware of two instances where all the members of a class flunked because none of them performed up to the professor's standards. In both cases, there was a small irregularity which allowed the university not to support the professor. So, if you are going to maintain your standards, be darn careful how you go about it.
The buzzword back in the '90's was retention. Nothing new under the sun.
New Zealand universities and departments get funded per student (technically per "full time equivalent"). The favourite trick to milk this system is to enrol lots of first-year students (first-year courses being cheap to run) and fail them at the end of the year. Law schools do this, as does medicine. Biology departments in unis that run medical and vet degrees get a lot of their money from all the students who have to take 1st-year biology papers.
Enrolling Students heavily in first year and then failing them is all very well, but the new standards will monitor graduates, and so the Bank of the Vice Chancellor, er . . . sorry, Office of the Vice Chancellor, will take a dim view of Departments that fail students.
Chris Nedlin: you don't fail them for individual courses, you just set the bar so high on the 2nd-year core subjects that 75% of them will have to do something else... I'm not defending this by any stretch of the imagination but it does happen (among other things, it has the effect that people who wanted to be doctors bump out the people who wanted to be dentists, who bump out the would-be physiotherapists, and then no-one ends up happy).
In the FTE payoff system I am familiar with, a sophomore FTE is worth more to the university than a freshman FTE, and so on up the line. This is one thing which supports the concept of retaining students and even graduating them. I've seen programs get in trouble because they did not have the expected number of graduates for their number of majors. We had some problems with our Master's program because so many of our students were able to get good professional positions before finishing the degree requirements.