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posted by martyb on Thursday August 24 2017, @02:56AM   Printer-friendly
from the giving-them-a-lecture dept.

Meaningless tasks and faux-business strategies prioritised by British universities have skewed their real roles of teachinig and research. Looking at decades of university growth, most expansion has been by university administration, not faculty. On the other side of the pond, one US study found that between 1975 and 2008 while the number of faculty had grown about 10% the number of administrators had grown 221% during the same period. In the UK, the large majority of universities have more administrators than they do faculty members. We are on the way to realizing an “all-administrative university” if nothing is done. André Spicer at The Guardian comments that since universities are broke, we should cut the pointless admin and get back to teaching.


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  • (Score: 1, Troll) by wisnoskij on Thursday August 24 2017, @11:34AM (5 children)

    by wisnoskij (5149) <{jonathonwisnoski} {at} {gmail.com}> on Thursday August 24 2017, @11:34AM (#558405)

    No one has cut public funding to universities. In fact the government has more than doubled the amount it spends on university per student over the last few years, even after adjusting for inflation.

    The only thing that happened, is what happened everywhere. The government decided it was a good idea to pay for university, then the universities decided that students were still willing to pay on top of that so they doubled tuition costs.

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by kazzie on Thursday August 24 2017, @01:00PM (2 children)

    by kazzie (5309) Subscriber Badge on Thursday August 24 2017, @01:00PM (#558423)

    There are important limitations to what you assert.

    When UK tuition fees were re-introduced in 1998 (after being abolished in 1962), they were a "top-up" to existing funding from central government, and fixed at £1,000 per year (plus increments for inflation). In 2004 universities were allowed to choose to vary their fees up to a maximum cap of £3,000. Unsurprisingly, they virtually all leapt to the new maximum.

    Come 2013, when the cap was raised to £9,000 (and again, all Universities' fees leapt up almost immediately) the teaching element of central government funding was eliminated. The cost of teaching undergraduates is met entirely by the fees charged to students. These fees are initially paid by a government-backed loan, which like loans toward living costs, is repayable (with interest) when the graduate (or dropout) is earning above a certain threshold.

    Not all student loans are paid back in their entirety: there is a sunset clause (X years) when any outstanding debt is written off. So despite a policy change to move the cost of university education from the general taxpayer to the individual, the taxpayer will still have to foot a proportion of the bill.

    (The above applies to undergraduate courses at universities in England. Significant policy variations exist for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, but they effectively operate in the shadow of the English system.)

    Sources: University fees in historical perspective [historyandpolicy.org], Timeline: tuition fees [theguardian.com], Timeline of Tuition Fees in the United Kingdom [wikipedia.org] University funding to be cut before increase in tuition fees [theguardian.com]

    • (Score: 2) by wisnoskij on Thursday August 24 2017, @01:15PM (1 child)

      by wisnoskij (5149) <{jonathonwisnoski} {at} {gmail.com}> on Thursday August 24 2017, @01:15PM (#558428)

      I am not sure how this is not what I was saying.

      The government paid for tuition, so the universities fired teachers and hired lobbyists, bureaucrats, and accountants to cater to their one customer, the government.
      And as history shows us that paid off, and they have gotten pay raise after pay raise.

      • (Score: 2) by kazzie on Thursday August 24 2017, @03:20PM

        by kazzie (5309) Subscriber Badge on Thursday August 24 2017, @03:20PM (#558460)

        Are you referring the the UK situation between 1962-1998? Yes, the Government paid for all tuition in that period. Since then, they've been contributing a progressively smaller proportion of tuition costs.

        I grant you that numbers attending university have increased over the decades, (See Tony Blair's policy that 50% of young people should go on to Higher Education, ref [bbc.co.uk]) and that probably couples in with much of the increase in admin overhead mentioned in TFA. The number of places offered by universities was strictly controlled by government until 2012 (by which time students paid for the full cost of tuition from student loans, so no direct cost to the government), when they started relaxing limits for high-graded applications. Universities can now take on (pretty much) as many students as they can get, but it doesn't cost the government anything (depending on how loan repayment is managed.) (ref [jobs.ac.uk])

        Similarly, pay rates for Vice-Chancellors has ballooned (unlike other pay grades such as academics) and is now becoming a political issue. (ref [bbc.co.uk] ref [bbc.co.uk])

        But I don't agree with you that "No one has cut public funding to universities", "the government pays for the vast majority of the tuition", or "the government has more than doubled the amount it spends on university per student over the last few years". Citation needed, perhaps?

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by TheRaven on Thursday August 24 2017, @01:45PM (1 child)

    by TheRaven (270) on Thursday August 24 2017, @01:45PM (#558439) Journal

    No one has cut public funding to universities. In fact the government has more than doubled the amount it spends on university per student over the last few years, even after adjusting for inflation.

    I draw your attention to the table on Page 3 of the relevant government report [www.gov.uk]. Since 2009, the grant for teaching has dropped from £5,030m to £2,860m. The total amount per student paid by the government has dropped in real terms from £6,050 to £5,510. If you think £5,510 is more than double £6,050, then you probably paid too much for your education.

    The amount that the government is spending on loans (overheads and expected default rates) has gone from £2,110m to £3,870m, which corresponds to more students taking on debt to cover the costs of their courses. The increase in loans and student debt is helping to cushion the reduction in government spending, and is contingent on making students pay interest 3% above inflation on the loans.

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    sudo mod me up
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 24 2017, @06:57PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 24 2017, @06:57PM (#558548)

      making students pay interest 3% above inflation on the loans.

      Which needs to be higher still if we are to have any chance of killing non-academic subjects like "gender studies"!