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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: 3, Interesting) by urza9814 on Thursday August 24 2017, @04:46PM

    by urza9814 (3954) on Thursday August 24 2017, @04:46PM (#558491) Journal

    When I worked as a teacher assistant I observed how cheaply students could be educated, so I don't understand why costs are spiralling when they should be reduced with the growth of digital libraries.

    Yeah, how cheaply they COULD be educated.

    The way it worked when I was in school, the university would send you a list of required textbooks after you'd scheduled your courses. Sometimes you'd get to class and the first thing the prof would say is "You don't actually need the required textbook, all the material we'll be using is online, but the university required me to assign a textbook. Hopefully those of you who already bought it can still return it." Hundreds of dollars wasted per student (thousands if you were dumb enough to buy from the university bookstore instead of finding international editions online) all because some administrator thinks they know how to teach better than the guy actually teaching. Which makes you wonder why they're hiring people whose judgement they think is so faulty...

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