SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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.
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Thursday August 24 2017, @11:59AM (1 child)
...except for the slight fly in the ointment is that TFA is about UK Universities where the change in funding over the last 30 years has been moving away from 100% government-funded tuition and block grants for research to tuition fees funded by student loans, and competitive tendering for government research projects. Its the need for universities to "compete in the marketplace" that has been accompanied by the rise of the bureaucrats, accountants, MBA-speak business strategies and corporate identity bullshit.
30 years ago, in the UK, if you got the grades at school and got a university place, the government would pay your fees and there was an additional grant for living expenses, tapered according to your parents' income (and, yeah, that included Oxford and Cambridge). Then someone decided that this discriminated against kids who didn't give a shit [theonion.com] and that 50% of the population should go to university, even if this meant that the government couldn't afford to pay for it and had to replace first maintenance grants and then free tuition with loans...
(Score: 1, Troll) by wisnoskij on Thursday August 24 2017, @12:15PM
Except that government spending per student has been raising steadily for decades. The government did not decide that it did not want to cover 100%, the universities decided that students would be willing to pay extra on top. And that this would cause the government to give them even more money in a perpetual game of cat and mouse. The government is still the number 1, only really important customer. Going after their money is still worth more than pleasing every student and potential student in the entire country.