Leeds university cuts its fees.

I love this.

HARRISBURG, Pa. – The Pennsylvania attorney general's office Monday sued an online university for allegedly selling bogus academic degrees – including an MBA awarded to a cat.

Trinity Southern University (search) in Texas, a cellular company and the two brothers who ran them are accused of misappropriating Internet addresses of the state Senate and more than 60 Pennsylvania businesses to sell fake degrees and prescription drugs by spam e-mail, according to the lawsuit.

Investigators paid $299 for a bachelor's degree for Colby Nolan – a deputy attorney general's 6-year-old black cat – claiming he had experience including baby-sitting and retail management.

The school, which offers no classes, allegedly determined Colby Nolan's resume entitled him to a master of business administration degree; a transcript listed the cat's course work and 3.5 grade-point average.

Well I reckon there must be plenty of cats that are really quite good at baby minding and shop minding, certainly good enough to be worth some sort of qualification. But I agree, maybe not an MBA.

Strictly speaking, you are only supposed to cat blog on Fridays, but I've decided to overlook that.

More here.

I'm not sure myself what I think of it, especially when governments are so heavily involved, but one of the biggest education stories that has emerged while I've been writing this blog has been educational globalisation.

The BBC presents two contrasting views of this process. Our Education Minister Mr Clarke is for it, and wants only to encourage it, although politicians encouraging something doesn't necessarily mean that it will actually be very encouraged. Here is a BBC report of his globalisation thoughts yesterday:

The UK must be a serious player in the global market for students if it is to prosper, says the Education Secretary, Charles Clarke.

He told a British Council-organised UK International Education Conference in Edinburgh that this was worth £10.4bn a year to the economy.

However, as a result of this report, I found myself following a link back to a warning given by Robert Reich to British higher education:

Britain has been warned of the dangers of following America in the "marketisation" of higher education.

The warning came from Robert Reich, a professor of social and economic policy at Brandeis University and a labour secretary in President Clinton's administration.

I've had a busy day and am still studying Reich's thoughts, but a cursory look-through suggests that this is a particularly important point:

There is also along with the marketisation of higher education there's a greater and greater emphasis on vocational and pre-career university courses and the advertising and marketing of vocational and pre-career - accounting, law, economics, finance, engineering, applied sciences - these are becoming very, very popular, undergraduate curricula in these areas are expanding dramatically, a faculty who are teaching in these areas are paid better and better. And so more seriously the classics – literature, history, some of the basic sciences - have become poor stepchildren. Because you see it follows that as you envision higher education as a system of private investment for private return and as that sinks into the public's mind it naturally follows that the concept of a liberal arts education or an education in humanities or the education in broad-based social sciences or in classics or whatever has less and less justification in the public's mind.

But is there not also another explanation for the decline of the humanities, which is that the potential consumers of these services are distressed by the nature of the product. "Liberal arts education" is surely the bit of US higher education that has degenerated most spectacularly in recent years. This is where bias, ignorance, and hostility to all the kinds of values of the kind that such an education used to promote has run riot most riotously. Vocational courses have a built-in mechanism to enable their quality to be assessed. How well to the products of such courses then do in their careers? This, I submit, has kept them up to the mark and created meaningful competition, in a way that relates to what those customers want from such courses. No such mechanism is built into humanities courses.

And there is also the simple fact that only a few are drawn towards the academic life. The recent trend towards marketisation has accompanied something which might have happened anyway, without such marketisation, which is simply: expansion. Do more higher education, and you are not going to churn out the exact same proportion of historians and literary critics, unless you are very foolish. Could Reich be blaming marketisation for something which is actually just plain common sense, and if he is right to blame marketisation, would it not make more sense to praise marketisation for registering the wisdom of such an alteration of educational emphasis? Would America really be a better country had the universities unleashed a million more humanists, or whatever they are called?

Just a couple of thoughts, which are of course related. I have more homework to do about this piece, but that's no reason for me not to link to it in the meantime, as I hope you agree.

It's alright for some:

… Ben Durham, the 21-year-old blind-side flanker, was the beating heart of Oxford's dominant forward effort, both with ball and in the tackle. Still, despite Oxford's attempts to keep him, Durham’s brain is even more sought after, and next September he heads for the City to work for Goldman Sachs, eschewing a professional rugby career with Gloucester.

"I’ve been at Oxford four years now and I should probably think about leaving," Durham, who earned a first class degree in economics and management and is studying for an MSc in economic history, said. "I played as a professional with Gloucester until my second year (at Oxford) and I found it quite dull. I should imagine if you are Jonny Wilkinson it's fantastic, but being a professional in the Premiership does not appeal.

"With an Oxford degree behind me I think I should go and explore some wider options. Besides, they (professional clubs) won't pay me enough."

Durham, who was educated at Pate's Grammar School in Cheltenham and studies at Keble College, won his third Blue and enjoyed a first win. "I'm glad we won, or I might never have left Oxford," he said. Instead of making hay in the mud at Kingsholm come September, Durham aims to start his job in UK mergers and acquisitions at Goldman Sachs, the American investment bank. This may even have been his last game.

"If I play I want to play good rugby, not just kickabout stuff, but you never know, I might get bored in the City," he said.

Steve Hill, Oxford's director of rugby, has not given up hope of keeping Durham. "Ben is one of the brightest boys we’ve had in the team," Hill said. "He's expressed an interest in being captain and he has secured serious funding from research bodies at Oxford to stay for another three years if he wants it. Maybe his bank will defer until after next Christmas."

Decisions, decisions.

Good to remind ourselves that for some, education still manages to work out quite well.

Oxford won 18-11.

More on turning your hobby into your career, from last Saturday's Telegraph:

 

Six months into to his first year at Leeds University, Nick House ran out of money. He'd blown all his grant on partying, hanging out on the burgeoning Leeds club scene and throwing the odd party.

 

So, like any desperate but resourceful student, he went to see his bank manager to appeal for an extension on his loan. "I remember being handed a form," says House, with a wry smile. "It said something like 'reason for loan (tick box) books/education/training/computer equipment/other'."

House ticked "other" and added the explanatory couplet "nightclub promotion". Needless to say, he was refused a loan.

But the plucky young man, who during the past few years has been largely responsible for revolutionising the student events scene in the UK, wasn't to be deterred.

House looked at Leeds's lively network of 20-30 nightclubs – crammed at weekends, rattling the rest of the time – and dreamt of filling them with the hedonism-hungry student population. He hired a club and raised the cash for his own off-campus, exclusive NUS night called "In Your Dreams". Investing £1,000 of his own money, he printed flyers and hired a DJ. More than 400 Leeds students turned up and had a great time, but House lost a small fortune.

"I was too emotionally involved," he says. "I had fun, got a huge ego boost and gained lots of cred, but I lost money because I was a naive 18-year-old. I knew nothing about print costs, venue hire, distribution, DJs or profit and loss. They even charged me for the hire of the lighting rig, which is a joke."

House learnt from his mistakes. These days his student promotions outfit, Come Play, lures about 20,000 students into nightclubs across the country every week of the term.

 

And of course this story is also a reminder that as higher education gets to be a mass experience and not just an elite experience, that makes the student a major entrepreneurial target.

One thing puzzles me though. At the top of of the story it says that Nick House ran out of money. Yet later he manages to invest £1,000 of his own money. What gives? Or more exactly, who gave?

The BBC reports on a fairly typical piece of public sector failure, in this case of the inelegantly named UKeU. See also these earlier BBC reports, here and here.

The basic problem seems to have been that the people running this thing thought that a good educational idea (even assuming that this is what it actually was which it probably wasn't) is enough for the whole wants-to-be-educated world to come pounding on your door. But, in business in general, and most definitely in education in particular, there is a little thing called reputation. You have to have one of these, it has to be good, and it can take a while to establish it.

And the other problem, of course, is that shovelling stuff onto the internet and exchanging emails with students is no longer rocket science, and is being done by other universities. As Americans would say: wow, never saw that coming.

The attitude of the Minister who inherited this mess reminds me of those comedy sketches about maintenance men who say "Who installed this then?" when the answer is: "You did, mate." You, as in this government. You set it up.

Current Minister Howells says that the "marketing" was poor.

However …

... he would not call the failure of the project a disaster because he was interested in the lessons learned.

Ah. A learning experience.

Times Online has a list of the top universities in the world, arranged in order of merit, first issued by the Times Higher Educational Supplement. I've copied it to my site so that it won't vanish, and you can read it by clicking on the diminished version here. I found it by clicking the graphic here.

Here is the Times Online piece about it.

Here's how the list was compiled:

Universities were placed in the table with the help of findings from a survey for the THES of 1,300 academics in 88 countries. They were asked to name the best institutions in the fields that they felt knowledgeable about.

The table also included data on the amount of cited research produced by faculty members as an indicator of intellectual vitality, the ratio of faculty to student numbers and a university's success in attracting foreign students and internationally renowned academics in the global market for education. The five factors were weighted and transformed against a scale that gave the top university 1,000 points and ranked everyone else as a proportion of that score.

My first reaction on reading the list was "How real is this?", but that sounds real enough, even if it is weighted slightly towards what people think are the best universities, and they could be out of date, as well as just plain wrong of course. It will be interesting to see how things change, say, during the next five years. That's if they do this again.

This list will feed the frenzy of parents trying to bribe/threaten/cajole/beg/prostitute-themselves etc. for places for their worthy or worthless little darlings. "But Michigan is only thirty-first best!" Blah blah blah.

Here's who won:

Harvard, whose faculty members have won 40 Nobel prizes, emerged as the world's best university by a considerable distance, with second-placed Berkeley rated 120 points behind at 880.2. …

And here's how Oxbridge did:

… Oxford scored 731.8, slightly ahead of Cambridge on 725.4.

Here are the totals in the top fifty, broken down by country: USA 20, UK 8, Australia 6, Canada 3, Switzerland 2, Japan 2, Singapore 2, France 2, Hong Kong 2, China 1, India 1, Germany 1.

What hits me is (a) how large the Anglosphere looms, and (b) how badly continental Europe does. I would have expected Germany in particular to do a lot better. I guess chucking out all your Jews is not smart, higher-education-wise.

My beloved London, with 4 of the UK's 8, did particularly well. Hurrah.

More from this book.

Following on from the success, such as it was, of Firelight, Spielberg's next effort as a film maker was Amblin, and this, given that he had already made some movie industry insider contacts, got him the serious attention of Hollywood. So much so that Hollywood made him an offer which he did not refuse …

A couple of months later Amblin was ready for unveiling. Since the negative was held at the Technicolor lab within Universal Studios, the twenty-four-minute movie was handily situated for a providential borrowing.

Universal's president in charge of TV was thirty-two-year-old Sidney Jay Sheinberg, and after a feature screening one night. Chuck Silvers prevailed on him to watch 'this young guy's short film'. Sheinberg agreed and was suitably impressed. He liked the way Spielberg had selected the performers and developed their relationship, he admired what he saw as the maturity and warmth in the movie. Taking in the close-to-mirror image of himself that Spielberg presented in the hastily arranged follow-up meeting was something else again. Sheinberg recalls a 'nerd-like, scrawny creature' appearing: 'The surprising thing was that he looked just like me.'

'You should be a director,' he informed Spielberg.

'I think so too,' came the rapid agreement, 'but I'm still at college. I haven't graduated yet.'

'Do you wanna graduate college or do you wanna be a film director?'

A TV contract at Universal or back to college? Oh, real tough. Spielberg quit college so fast – to hell with graduation – he didn't even stop to clean out his locker. His seven-year deal was drawn up and signed a week after the offer was made.

I can't say that I fully understand all the ramifications of this, but it sounds very important, and very good:

A significant number of Oxford colleges are supporting calls for the university to move towards privatisation and independence from the Government.

An analysis of Oxford's 30 undergraduate colleges showed widespread anger at government interference and concern about funding.

It also produced claims that a move towards independent status – similar to that enjoyed by leading universities in the United States – could begin within 10 years.

The time frame, predicted by colleges that support a move to privatisation, is half that suggested by Michael Beloff, the president of Trinity College, last week. Mr Beloff said that increased government pressure on colleges to admit more working class students, combined with funding shortages, could force Oxford towards independence within 15 to 20 years.

Several college heads went further, however, stating that privatisation was not only inevitable, but desirable - and would take place more rapidly than Mr Beloff suggested.

You see, me, I thought these places were pretty much "independent" already. So file under: But what does Brian know? As I occasionally have to remind everyone: this Blog is for Brian's Education, as well as being an Education Blog done by Brian for all you ignoramuses out there.

Gratuitous picture there of Michael Beloff, from here.

Alex Singleton did a Samizdata piece yesterday about an attempt to muzzle The Saint, a St Andrews University tabloid student publication which has apparently offended the muzzling classes. I commented that the muzzlers would only be making fools of themselves.

Sure enough, Joanne Jacobs, the Instapundit of Edubloggers, has already done a posting about this. Something tells me she won't be the last overseas blogger to notice this.

When you do something stupidly left-wing, there is now a whole new global readership waiting to guffaw at you.

This man is a genius. He is also a teacher. My favourite posting of his that I have so far found on an education theme goes like this:

Where I work they have put up a load of posters promoting British education. "That which does not kill you makes you stronger," says one. This is supposed to be an advert for the University of Sheffield.

I got to him via her and her. They were both focussing on another not-to-be-missed posting entitled YOUR CHILD IS AN ILLITERATE CABBAGE. My thanks to both ladies.

Here is an interesting if depressing Guardian piece about the baleful effects, at any rate as DJ Taylor sees it, of creative writing courses at university.

This week sees the publication of Concertina, the annual anthology of work by recent graduates of the University of East Anglia's creative-writing course. The noises emanating from this literary hotbed are usually so upbeat in tone that I greeted the remarks recently attributed to Paul Magrs with faint incredulity. Dr Magrs - lately employed as a tutor on the much-celebrated creative-writing course - had been reflecting on the calibre of his students, and the verdict was horribly damning.

The bulk of the UEA habitués, Magrs suggests, "tend to be people of about 30 who've burnt out doing something else, who've read some Kundera and some Rushdie and think they're going to reinvent the European novel by writing about their gap year and Ronald Barthes. Somebody even turned up in a beret one year."

No doubt the irritations of the modern academic life can be insupportable at times. No sooner had I finished reading Dr Magrs' piteous lament (he has since moved on to Manchester Metropolitan University) than the printer began to disgorge details of this autumn's inaugural Norwich literary festival. Among other attractions, the event will be sponsoring a "lab" at which half a dozen writers in residence will be offering advice to aspiring talent.

I concur with DJ Taylor in wanting to hold the word "lab" at arms length, given that scientific experiments are not involved here. (See also: "workshop".)

Later in the piece:

Meanwhile, the proportion of novels and poems written by people who are not graduates of, or tutors on, creative-writing courses grows correspondingly smaller. One doesn't have to be a throwback to the age of the man of letters, ear finely attuned to the thump of the creditor's boot on the tenement stair, to wonder whether this is the best training for the embryo writer. Reading the chapters of Jeremy Treglown's new biography of VS Pritchett devoted to the 1950s, I shook my head in horror at the revelation that, even in his fifties, the most influential critic of his day was so cash-strapped that he was obliged to write up his annual vacation for Holiday magazine. And yet a Pritchett safely established as professor of creative writing at the University of Neasden would, you imagine, have lost something of his distinction in the transfer.

Back in the 21st century, the fatal urge to cram campus lecture halls with graduates learning how to produce novels or "life writing" continues apace. Last month, a press release winged through the door announcing that the University of Essex is introducing a creative-writing course. No offence either to the university or its very distinguished founding staff, but: why, exactly?

Why indeed? Well, of course, one answer is that people like studying this kind of thing, and who am I, who spent half of today learning to play with Photoshop simply because I felt like it, to complain? However, I certainly don't see any case for taxpayers picking up any part whatsoever of the bills for such bourgeois pleasures.

Dare I hypothesise (and please note that's all it is) that universities actually solve a problem with courses like these? I'm thinking: universities are being nagged to process lots and lots of graduates. And this would presumably be a delightfully cheap way of doing that. Real labs are much more expensive.

Now, where can I get a course in destructive writing?

My old Libertarian Alliance partner Chris Tame was fond of the word "hum", to describe a gradually spreading murmur in favour of some hitherto neglected notion.

Well, I think I detect the beginnings of a hum:

But the way the education system is going, it would be more honest simply to raise the school leaving age to 22. University is just something you do when you've finished your A-levels, no matter how badly you might have done or how bored you've been doing them.

To suggest to those who are not cut out for even rudimentary academic life that university might not be the best place for them, is to consign them to non-person status.

It's not as if a degree even helps getting a job: all it means is that you've spent longer waiting to find yourself unemployed. If anything, I feel it might impede your prospects. You're just one among a pile of applicants, similarly qualified, none of whom has anything extra or interesting to offer.

I think it's the middle classes that have to start the move away from tertiary education. Concerned parents now insist, ever more anxiously, on finding a university place when they would be doing a lot more for their children by refusing to fund the whole enterprise.

"… the move away from tertiary education …" Well, well, well, fancy that.

 

Remember that when people writing in the Daily Telegraph say "middle classes", they mean fairly well off people in the top 5 percent of wealth and income. Middle as in "not the Queen", so to speak.

The really interesting thing about this article is who it is by. Nigella Lawson. That's right, the Domestic Goddess herself, and not just a bit of posh totty on the telly either. This woman is the daughter of a former Chancellor of the Exchequer and now married to a Saatchi Brother. Talk about well connected.

When people like this start talking about "the move away from tertiary education", then you know that something is going on.

I noticed this when it was first published over the weekend, but it took me until now to pass this on. Sorry, but not really sorry, because this is not a notion that is going to go away.

Wonderful what a price increase does to demand, isn't it? For remember, the idea of this price increase is that it falls precisely on those middle (upper) classes. So, the middle-uppers will, in increasing numbers, turn their backs on the universities. Their kids will get started on Real Life earlier than the riff raff.

How long will it be before "university" starts to have the same social ring to it as "comprehensive"?

I missed this story when it was published, on the 24th.

First few paragraphs:

Philip Green, the retail billionaire, is planning to build the country's first fashion and retail academy in an attempt to "produce the next generation of entrepreneurs".

The owner of Bhs, Top Shop and Miss Selfridge has donated £5m to what would be the first specialist college to train 16- to 19-year-olds for a career in fashion retail.

The college will train 200 school-leavers a year in marketing, finance and fashion buying and Mr Green – who recently tried to buy Marks & Spencer – hopes it will open for business in September 2005.

Mr Green, who left school at 16, said he had been driven to invest in the scheme by his difficulties in recruiting good staff for his own business. "We need to do something to produce the next generation of entrepreneurs," he said. Mr Green said it was often difficult to tell the difference between graduates and those who had left school with only A-levels.

"If you ask a lot of these people why they went to university they don't really know. It's either because they think it's what you are supposed to do or because it gives them another three years before they have to go out to work.

"If you get underneath it all some of it really defies logic. We take on A-level people and graduates who are three years older but are only earning £500 more. That's quite scary given that it probably costs them £30,000 or £40,000 to get there."

A-men.

Further to my reference yesterday to Professor Instapundit, he is doing some election coverage for Guardian Unlimited, and via that I came across these photos, taken by the man himself at the University of Tennessee.

It all looks idyllic.

This one, which he also uses to entice you in, but which I do not understand at all, is my favourite:

His religious-theme photo for the Guardian is a fun snap also.

Alice (as "in Texas") has some thoughts about universities:

>But that's the irony: universities probably would still have some kind of place, if they just updated their ideas and got real. The trouble is, they are too insecure to confront that. But unless they come to terms with the fact that knowledge is growing itself outside universities now, and that for all sorts of reasons, people are not going to pay huge sums of money just so an institution can rubber-stamp its learning-location as well as its examination score, they are doomed.

Which is to say, genuinely intelligent people will opt out of them, so their standards will spiral down and down. And the people at the Justin Timberlake conferences won't notice what parodies of themselves they have become, of course.

I don't think I agree. The great thing about going to university is all the other people who go, from among whom you are almost bound to find human gold. You get to drink and **** and talk all night with them, and unless and until the world invents another way for the semi-brainy and brainy-brainy to find one another at That Age, the university idea will still have plenty of life in it. People will curse and rage against these places for being so silly, but other people will still want to go. The Internet may well replace lots of the academics, but lots of other academics, instead of being rolled over by it, will learn how to make the Internet an ally rather than an enemy.

I mean, I'd love to have had someone like this as one of my professors. Reading him every day or two is good, but chatting with him every week or two would be even better.

Dare I suggest that Alice's fulminations are evidence of the geographical fallacy, as I like to think of it, which say: geography (i.e. geographical proximity) doesn't matter any more, because of Modern Communcations.

Also, universities have been through very bad times before. In the nineteenth century, it is my understanding that British universities, instead of, as now, being rotten with third-rate "humanities" bullshit artists who publish far too much, were rotten instead with third-rate theologians who didn't publish anything at all. Science, meanwhile, was being developed in spite of the universities rather than because of them. But eventually Science took over the universities and made a new golden age for them.

But that last bit is somewhat of a guess. Better-than-guess comments, anyone?

Gratuitous university picture:

… which I googled my way to via here.

There's trouble a't' uni':

The row over performance related pay between Nottingham University and its lecturers reached a new deadlock today as the Association of University Teachers fulfilled its promise to stage an academic boycott of the university.

Later they quote AUT assistant general secretary, Matt Waddup, and my guess would be that the key paragraph in this story is this one:

"We believe that the university is placing its international reputation in serious danger," he added.

Universities in Britain are morphing from (exaggerating only somewhat) places where locals tread water to places where foreigners race through the water and do not want to be interrupted. They are going global, and doing global business. Thus, I classify this story under "globalisation" as well as just "higher education".

Result: a world in which universities demand actual performance, as opposed to mere charming eccentricity, but also one in which unions have a whole new kind of economic success to threaten and to want in on. Guess: there'll be more of this kind of thing.

Mark Holland has been out and about, biking if it's fine, windsurfing if it's wet, and on his travels he encountered some students, studying:

Also out on the water today were a flotilla of mostly learner kayakers mixed in with a few who knew their stuff.

Speaking to a couple of them afterwards I learnt that they are at the local uni studying for a BA Honours Degree in Adventure Education. I didn't laugh honest. In fact I'm rather jealous. …

I'm not. This is my idea of hell on earth. But, each to his own.

Michael Brooke comments:

My degree - Business Studies with a focus on arts management - had a couple of compulsory terms of Leisure Studies, which wasn't anything like as relaxing as its title suggests.

It turned out to be surprisingly fascinating, though, drawing on history, culture, politics, sociology and technology (cheap air travel, television, the internet) to examine the changing ways in which we've made use of our leisure time and how our attitudes towards it have differed.

I've recently taken a holiday, which I have spent entirely on chucking stuff out and organising what remains, nesting in other words. Very satisfying.

I did a piece for here today, about graduates having a tough time getting jobs, and at the last moment I realised it would do just as well onto Samizdata. So there it is, and the comments are piling up interestingly.

Michael Jennings PhD (who has just got himself a fine new job and is therefore an example of a successful education) emails with a link to this article by Gregg Easterbrook about the relative merits of the Big Name US colleges compared to the less well known ones which are damn near – and sometimes absolutely - as good. But, he says, as the gap narrows, the obsession among parents with getting their children in to the Big Names only gets more obsessional:

As colleges below the top were improving, the old WASP insider system was losing its grip on business and other institutions. There was a time when an Ivy League diploma was vital to career advancement in many places, because an Ivy grad could be assumed to be from the correct upper-middle-class Protestant background. Today an Ivy diploma reveals nothing about a person's background, and favoritism in hiring and promotion is on the decline; most businesses would rather have a Lehigh graduate who performs at a high level than a Brown graduate who doesn't. Law firms do remain exceptionally status-conscious—some college counselors believe that law firms still hire associates based partly on where they were undergraduates. But the majority of employers aren't looking for status degrees, and some may even avoid candidates from the top schools, on the theory that such aspirants have unrealistic expectations of quick promotion.

Relationships labeled ironic are often merely coincidental. But it is genuinely ironic that as non-elite colleges have improved in educational quality and financial resources, and favoritism toward top-school degrees has faded, getting into an elite school has nonetheless become more of a national obsession.

So what is my comment supposed to be about that? No problem. Michael Jennings PhD supplied comment as well as the link:

My personal experience is that the quality of the education varies a bit between famous and less famous but solid universities, but not really all that much. (Less elite universities will also often make special arrangements and give special attention for talented and successful students when they get them, too). What does vary a lot is the talent, ambition, and general interestingness of the students. I studied at a solid but obscure Australian university, a well known Australian university, and an internationaly famous university, and the number of interesting people I found to talk to increased steadily with the reputation of the institution.

I went to Cambridge (England) and screwed it up, being slung out after two years. (I should have left after one.) Then I went to a lesser university, and made it work much better.

Gratuitous picture:

Ivy. You knew that.

My friend David emailed with a link to a piece by Gary North, holding forth on why the job market loves college graduates. Sample quote:

… A college graduate has shown that he has been willing to suffer enormous boredom, broken only by weekend parties, for five or six years. (Very few students get through in four years, as their savings-depleted parents will tell you in private.)

Here is someone who has survived years of a system designed by bureaucrats to produce bureaucrats. He has either been subsidized by his parents (50% of college students) or else has paid his own way (that’s the one I want to hire). He has put up with years of academic nonsense spouted by left-wing bureaucrats who could not hold a regular job in industry, let alone run a business.

Here, in short, is a certified drudge. Better yet, he has been certified at someone else’s primary expense: parents, taxpayers, and collegiate donors with more money than sense.

At this point in concocting this posting I got stuck, because I really don't know whether North is right or not, or what. But an interesting link should not depend on me having something smart to add to it, so here it is anyway.

Gary North includes another interesting link later in his piece, to something called Cooperative Education. Worth checking out. The idea is to improve on the cost and inefficiency of years of higher education, followed by potential job market disappointment.

This is what you expect to read about only in junk spam:

Cash-strapped British universities are awarding degrees to students who should be failed, in return for lucrative fees, The Observer can reveal.

The 'degrees-for-sale' scandal stretches from the most prestigious institutions to the former polytechnics and includes undergraduate and postgraduate degrees, foreign and home students. In the most extreme case, The Observer has evidence of a professor ordering staff to mark up students at risk of failing in order to keep the money coming in.

Lecturers at institutions across the country, including Oxford, London and Swansea, told The Observer the scandal is undermining academic standards, but they cannot speak publicly for fear of losing their jobs.

Depressing.

So much for my blogging holiday, which is still happening, by the way.

Continuous assessment has long been regarded as potentially very inaccurate assessment, since cheating in such testing regimes, by teachers as well as pupils, is so hard to prevent. This is why carefully supervised exams in closed session, with no cribs allowed, were invented.

Here is another reason for such examinations: parents who help their progeny get into university, and who then continue to help them once they are there.

This leads, says Frank Furedi, to the "infantilisation of the university student".

Interesting BBC report about people queueing up to become plumbers. They were inundated not to say flooded with applicants, ho ho I think the last paragraph is the best:

Earlier this year Birmingham University biologist Karl Gensberg left academic life to retrain as a gas fitter, saying he hoped to double his £23,000 annual salary.

Gratuitous picture of my stupid doesn't-work shower:

How long before they start having university plumbing degrees (feminist perspectives on piping, U-bends – a structuralist analysis, plumbing theory, blah blah), which teach you nothing about how to actually plumb, but which you have to have before they let you start doing it and learning it? This will be announced as the solution to the British plumbing problem, but it will just make it ten times worse.

One of my duties now (for which I am actually paid!) is to write a short weekly piece for this blog.

I've already aired the subject of intellectual property on my Culture Blog. But here is an article on an educational theme which is also about an intellectual property matter. Someone stole Kim Lanegran's PhD dissertation.

Last summer I discovered that he had defended his dissertation three years after I defended mine. I requested a copy of it through interlibrary loan. As soon as the dissertation was in my hands, I flipped first to the bibliography to see which of my works he had cited. Yes, I'm vain.

"Humph. He didn't cite my dissertation," I thought. I flipped to the table of contents. "Wow, he asked the same questions I did." I read the abstract. "Damn. Those are my words."

My heart pounded. This was my dissertation!

In the acknowledgement, he thanked his beloved for her patience during the years it took him to write it. Write it? He didn't even have to type it; I sent it to him on disk.

He copied many of my chapters word for word. Other chapters were slightly altered so as to make the arguments totally fraudulent. I did research in three African towns; Mr. X said he had studied two other towns. So where I quoted statements by an activist or scholar from town A, he changed the names and said that they were speaking about town Z.

It was equivalent to taking a quotation from Garrison Keillor about life in Minnesota and saying that Woody Allen said it about New York City.

Lanegran righted this wrong, and ended the academic career of the plagiarist, but she was deeply depressed by it all:

While gathering evidence to prove that my dissertation was actually mine, I confronted many dark thoughts about this profession. Mr. X must have thought that he would get away with his theft because nobody reads dissertations. Was he correct? Was all that work simply a hoop to jump through to get the Ph.D.? What is the value of a doctoral degree if dissertation committees take as little care with their students as Mr. X's did with him?

His adviser is a prominent scholar I've met at conferences. Although he is not an expert in the country or social movement covered in my dissertation, shouldn't he have known Mr. X's ideas and writing style well enough to recognize that the submitted dissertation did not sound like Mr. X's work? Shouldn't the committee have expected to see the process of Mr. X's arguments evolving or read drafts of chapters? At the very least, shouldn't the committee have told Mr. X to update my literature review and rework some of my convoluted logic and awkward prose?

Is cheating so pervasive that even someone who seeks a career in academe will violate the fundamental principle of giving other scholars credit for their work? If so, what hope do I have of inculcating that principle in students eager to escape quickly with their B.A. in hand?

When people talk about the "expansion of higher education", they need to understand that this is the kind of thing they are talking about, as well as the better things that they obviously also have in mind.

The intellectual property issue here is not just that Kim Lanegran's property rights (if that is what they were) were violated, but that the employers of the plagiarist had been defrauded. He presented himself to them as the writer of something which he had not written.

And since this is all about correctly attributing ideas, I need to tell you that I only found out about this article because I consult Arts & Letters Daily, pretty much daily, and definitely today.

Arts & Letters Daily links to this piece about how academics are now being pushed by their own faculties towards the media.

… As schools vie to attract top students, top faculty, and top-dollar gifts, they count on their bookish professors to leave the library and enter the studio, where their insights on the day's news might help put their institutions on the map.

"It lends a certain credibility when they see you on television," says Mr. Williams, an expert in military affairs. "It may boost student enrollment in my courses."

For schools aspiring to enhance their reputations, the task of positioning faculty for a "media hit" has become big business. To get their professors into reporters' Palm Pilots, 624 colleges and universities pay between $500 and $900 each per year to be listed with ProfNet, a private database. Some go further by paying thousands to private firms whose sole mission is to get professors quoted in the press.

Spokespeople in higher education tend to agree that the time, effort, and money they invest to get professors quoted in news stories are priceless.

You can imagine all manner of moans about what a bad thing this is. "Dumbing down", "soundbites", etc. etc. But I think that the intellectual dangers associated with universities becoming media backwaters are at least as great as the dangers of media involvement.

I am, of course, biased. My background is political think tanks in general and the Libertarian Alliance in particular, and about half the point of these enterprises is to get political ideas spread around - the other half being to think of and about them. And having been involved in both processes for the LA, I can tell you that far from interrupting or hurting the thinking bit, the media bit actually stimulates further thought.

Ask yourself this. When the history of Britain during the second half of the twentieth century is written, as it is starting to be, which institutions will loom large:a think tanks, or university faculties? And surely a big reason for this is that whereas universities during this period have been wary or even hostile of media engagement, think tanks have lived for it. Has this made think tanks any less inclined to think? I strongly think not.

What think tanks have actually supplied is a kind of media front-end for academics, of the sort their own universities have been unwilling or unable to supply. The think tanks have used universities rather than straightforwardly competed with them. But if you measure intellectual impact – young brain cells stirred up, old geezers made to rethink, worthwhile soundbites crafted and launched, etc. etc. – and compare it with money spent, I reckon the think tanks have done very well, compared to the universities.

One obvious advantage of the media is that they face professors with something that they don't always get when tucked away safe in their faculties: disagreement. I still treasure the memory of a run-in I had with my old Essex Sociology Professor, Peter Townsend (partly because I wrote it up at the time for the LA), where we generally went for each other's throats on the subject of poverty – what causes it, how to end it, etc. etc. The abiding impression I got from this altercation was that Professor Townsend (gratuitous picture to the right) regarded it as something of a scandal that anyone should dare to disagree with him on his area of academic specialisation. Yet for this very reason, I am convinced that the experience can only have done him good, and maybe a lot of good. At the very least it will have acquainted him a little more forcefully with the ideas and attitudes of those whom he seeks to convert, persuade and convince.

More fundamentally, lots of people arriving at university for the first time are often shocked by how indifferent to ideas many people at universities actually are. I have many friends who have told me that they have had a better education at the hands of things like the LA than they got doing economics at university. Many universities exude the atmosphere not of intellectual hothouses bursting with fascinating ideas and arguments, but of rusty old machines idling along, shovelling a stagnating syllabus from A to B rather than causing anyone to get at all excited about it. A good old ruckus on the television between your crusty old Professor of Biology and the local Creationists, or between the Professor of Physics and some deep green anti-technologists or anti-nuclear peaceniks, might be just the thing to liven things up and get the students interested again, and generally to get people talking to each other again, in animated rather than tired voices.

As for that old "soundbite" canard, a soundbite is just a really well made point that you don't like, or just wish you were eloquent enough to have created but are actually not. The pressure from the media to answer dumb questions with short answers is often immensely stimulating to further thought. Professor Waffler, in one sentence because soon we have to go over to the newsroom: What do you do? Or: Why do you bother? Or: Why should we pay for it? Such questions are, I suggest, not so very dumb and are well worth thinking about until such time as you can answer them with a set of soundbites. And when you've got your soundbites, try sharing them with your students. They might finally get the point of you and of what you do.

As for media whore professors who are nothing but soundbites, well, they'll be found out sooner or later. Yes, there are dangers connected with media involvement. But universities can't be all light. They need a bit of heat. And in practice, I say, the two tend to go together.

This will be very stale news to Americans, no doubt, but it contained a lot of up to the minute news to me. It's a piece by Ross Neverway, who has just got a place at Harvard, in today's Telegraph:

So what about the cost? The headline figure of £25,000 a year - tuition fees plus living expenses - is far beyond my family's means. However, I was advised by a Harvard graduate who teaches at my school not to let this bother me, and it was the best piece of advice I received.

Harvard admits students on merit and without any reference to their ability to pay, which is known as a "needs blind" admissions process. Details of an applicant's financial situation remain sealed until a place has been offered. The help the student's family will need is then assessed and scholarships awarded accordingly, to American and international students alike.

I was fortunate enough to receive a scholarship of £20,000 a year. That Harvard, thanks to its huge endowment, can be so generous is one of its greatest strengths. Typically, about 10 per cent of each year's intake is made up of international students drawn from 60 or more countries. In my year group – the class of 2008 – there will be 30 students from the UK, chosen from the 217 who applied.

What particularly impressed me was that Harvard seemed intent on wooing me to accept its offer, though I did not need much convincing. Last month, I attended the "visiting program" weekend to sample Harvard life and get a better idea of the nature of my next four years.

I was given every opportunity to meet faculty members, fellow applicants and current undergraduates, and inspect the campus and its facilities. Founded in 1636, Harvard was America's first university and is now probably the world's foremost educational institution.

Okay, those last two paragraphs are comment rather than news, but I agree with Ross. It's very impressive, and he's a lucky guy.

Yes, more pretty pictures. Pretty pictures get people interested, and curious to find out what the text says. Plus, pictures are fun. (That, at any rate, is the thinking behind all the pretty pictures you see in children's books.)

First, a replay of an advert that has already been featured here, which I now see everywhere, this time on a bus:

Yeah mate. Get yourself a degree from London South Bank University and you won't have to spend the rest of your life riding about on a bike!

And the other two were both taken from the telly over the weekend, while I was watching the test match.

"learndirect", however exactly you spell that (the capital letters or not thing I mean – personally I would greatly prefer Learn Direct), is actually not such a bad operation if my recent experience is anything to go by, even though I presume it is run by the Government. I rang them last week in connection with finding out about digital photography courses, and they were helpful.

This, for me, is the most interesting one:

These people seem to be actually sponsoring the cricket, and this advert suggests thoughts about all manner of things that may or may not be happening in the world. But for here and now, I'll just stick with the pictures.

Yes. they are indeed sponsoring the cricket, or at any rate the broadcasting of it. Here is their logo again, this time with the Lords "Media Centre" (alias: Space Pod) in the picture.

Not that I have any idea how good Computeach actually are at teaching … Compu.

More British educational export business in China, this time by the London School of Economics. This from the BBC:

The London School of Economics is taking its summer schools to China this summer for the first time.

The courses will be run in partnership with Peking University.

Dr John Board, head of the LSE Summer School programme, said: "We are delighted to be offering this selection of flagship courses from our London programme in Peking."

"It is a step into a new market but one we are confident will attract interest."

The bosses of British universities sound more and more like businessmen, which would be because, more and more, they are businessmen.

Further evidence that British universities are at least semi-trading in semi-markets:

It's an advert in the tube, meaning (for non-Londoners) the London Underground railway. A bit blurry I'm afraid. Taken on the move. But you can just about make out that it's London South Bank University, and that this is their website.

More international business for Britain's universities:

A record number of university applications this year includes a threefold increase in students from some of the former communist countries joining the European Union on Saturday.

Official figures from UCAS, the universities and colleges admissions service, published today, show a surge of interest from the 10 accession countries.

But now here's the tricky bit, for the universities:

These young people will be treated as home students, paying £1,150 a year in fees instead of the overseas charges of £8,000 to £19,000.

Ah.

Nevertheless, an interesting development. Do you get the feeling that it is perhaps going to get rather harder to get into a British university from now on?

And, perchance, more expensive. After all, it sounds like the only way they are going to be able to charge more to all these Eastern Europeans is going to be to charge more to the locals also.

Theodore Dalrymple, writing in the Spectator about the (impeccably legal) corruption of Britain's public services, has this to say about British education:

We cannot even organise a public examination system for schoolchildren in this country so that the results mean what they appear to mean. As for our universities, they blatantly steal the money of foreigners by virtually selling degrees that will soon start to devalue like the mark after the first world war. No longer scholarship and learning, but bums on seats and grade inflation to guarantee yet more bums on seats next year, these are the aim of our institutions of higher education.

I on the other hand like to think that since our universities will be operating in a genuinely competitive international market, all those foreign students will keep them up to the mark, and will thereby be doing us an even bigger favour than parting with their money to us.

Let's hope that I'm right about that, and that Dalrymple is being too pessimistic.

Arts & Letters Daily links to this article, which is about this blogger. First I'd heard of her.

If you are looking for academic angst, you have now found it.

Question: When does a blog turn into a book? Answer: When the blogger stops writing any more and just leaves it there, but when it's still worth reading. Here's another blog-book.

Blog-book. Blook. Have I just made up a new word?

No need to stop reading blooks just because the bloggers have stopped writing them. After all, books have to be finished before we are even allowed to start reading them, but we still read them.

And now, here come the Indians:

Indian students will be the third largest overseas students in the United Kingdom by 2020, outnumbering those from USA, Germany and France, a study indicated on Wednesday.

As many as 29,800 Indians are expected to study in the UK by 2020 as against 8,600 in 2005, the study by the British Council and Universities said.

China, however, will have the largest number of overseas students in the UK – 130,900 – in 2020 as against 32,000 in 2005, the study said. It will be followed by Greece which will have 34,800 in 2020 as against 28,000 in 2005.

Britain could earn £13 billion a year from international students in higher education by 2020 in addition to the £3 billion they currently contributed to the economy, the study stated.

A separate government-funded study calculated that education has become one of Britain's most important export industries.

The report by Geraint Johnes, Professor of Economics at Lancaster University, said the economy earned £11 billion annually from 'exports' of tuition for foreign students, training, examinations, publishing and educational programming.

That places education in the same league as exports of oil and financial services, which earned Britain £14.3 billion and £13.6 billion in 2002, according to figures from the Office for National Statistics.

It is also slightly ahead of the British car industry, food beverages and tobacco, which earned £10 billion in exports. Education also dwarfs exports of ships and aircraft, at £6.5 billion, while computer services earned the country only £2.6 billion.

Britain at present has a quarter of the market in foreign students, with 270,000 enrolled in its universities and contributing an average of £16,000 a year each in fees and living expenses to the economy.

The British Council study, entitled 'Vision 2020: Forecasting International Student Mobility', concluded that the total could rise to 511,000 by 2020 if Britain maintained its present track record for recruitment.

However, student numbers would rise to 400,000 by 2010 and 870,000 in 2020 if both the country and its universities were promoted more aggressively in fast-growing new markets.

Demand was rising quickest in Asia, with annual growth in student numbers forecast at 15 per cent in China, 13 per cent in India, and 12.6 per cent in Pakistan.

Chinese students alone would outnumber those from the whole of the enlarged European Union of 25 states by 2020.

Some 145,000 students could be studying in Britain by then, compared with 43,000 now, making China by far the biggest and most lucrative single market for British education.

India would become the third-largest market with 30,000 students, as many as France and Germany combined. Asia would overtake Europe as Britain's main source of foreign students, accounting for more than half of student places.

Fascinating. I kept trying to find a place to stop copying, but kept wanting the next paragraph, and the next, and the next.

I speculated yesterday (see the immediately previous posting) about what impact all those Chinese students will make, upon China and upon the world. What the above report makes me ask now is: what effect will all this have on Britain, and on British education?

I'm interested that education is only "slightly" ahead of the car industry here. I thought the car industry here to be very tiny, but apparently not. I guess it's merely that our car industry isn't owned by us any more. There's still plenty of it.

The Chinese continue to develop their connections with the educational Anglosphere. Says People's Daily:

The Chinese Ministry of Education has signed an agreement with the IDP Education Australia to collaborate on a number of programs.

The programs include holding university preparatory courses in China approved by 38 Australian universities, and establishing joint courses between the two countries. The plan will help Chinese college students transfer to Australian universities for further study.

Meanwhile, both sides are cooperating to develop training courses and projects for Chinese government employees and company managers.

I know, I know, it's all very clumsy and government-to-government. And the link to Australia is somewhat comical. But I think this stuff is interesting. What the enormous numbers of Chinese students now studying abroad or being educated in China by foreigners get up to in their lives is going to be one of the world's great stories, however it plays out, of the next fifty years.

Anyone grumbling about education in Britain would do well to read the stories that emerge these days from the world of African education.

Consider this:

What appeared to be a peaceful protest by students of Ekiti State College of Education, Ikere-Ekiti, in support of the acting provost whom they preferred to continue in office, turned bloody with several students killed when armed policemen shot at them unprovoked.

Two students of University of Ilorin were killed during a recent protest over water scarcity on the campus.

At the University of Lagos, a bus driven by officials of National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS) killed a final year student.

Lagos state University (LASU) records an average of a student killed quarterly by cultists.

Not quite long, Ambrose Alli University (AAU), Ekpoma, Edo state, was in the news when five students were killed on a single day by a cult gang simply because the deceased spearheaded anti-cult campaign on campus.

Student killings were reported at the polytechnic Ibadan, University of Benin, Delta State University, Abraka, University of Calabar, University of Port Harcourt, Enugu State University of Technology (ESUT), Federal University of Technology, Minna, University of Uyo, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, just to mention a few.

During this current academic session soon to end, no institution of higher learning in the country was spared the spectre of violent, tragic death of students killed either by police or cultists. To be exact, more of the student killings were caused by cultism – a deadly menace which has remained intractable.

Students killed when protesting over water scarcity. Deadly cults. It puts arguments about top-up fees into perspective, doesn't it?

Here is a useful, as opposed to snide and Guardian-readerish, summary of Conservative Party education policy. Their opposition to university fees …

On universities, meanwhile, the traditional Tory line of slimming down state involvement is reversed: the party is committed to abolishing fees, which inevitably means the state being more involved.

… is highlighted, quite reasonably, and it sticks out like a sore thumb.

The BBC reports how Britain's Universities already operate a market, when it comes to students from abroad, which for these purposes now means outside the EU.

Although it gets little attention, there are already high-cost, variable fees in British universities. They are the focus of a fast-growing and competitive marketing sector.

Large numbers of part-time students face variable fees, of course.

But the boom area – big business for many universities – is international students.

For these purposes that means any students recruited from outside the European Union. The latest estimate is that there are about 175,000 overseas, fee-paying students in Britain.

There are no limits imposed on fees for non-EU students. Undergraduate fees of £7,000 - £9,000 a year are typical and they can be much higher for postgraduates, especially on MBA courses.

Universities of all types are now investing heavily in this growth market. Overseas recruitment has grown by about 6% a year for the past five years.

It is estimated that overseas students are worth about £1bn in fee income to universities and contribute about £8bn to the UK economy.

The expansion of overseas recruitment – Tony Blair's initial target was an extra 50,000 students - is one government education target which has been met with room to spare.

Yes, I've already reported on a slice of this particular action.

I caught a snatch of a London TV news report this evening about how German universities are trying to persuade British students to do their degrees in Germany, for free. No need to worry about loans and top-ups if you go there.

What they didn't explain was what was in it for Germany. Is it that they can't stand their own students and figure that they'll get slightly better ones this way? Are they trying to make sure they learn and teach English idiomatically, complete with up-to-date swearing?

Touting for business I could understand, but where is the business here?

Google google – this is the same story. Yes, the mentioned a woman called Lemmens on the TV.

Quote:

LONDON - Free higher education in the home of Western civilization's most provocative thinkers, a chance to learn a second language - and a legal drinking age of 16? It's a formula that might appeal to both stressed parents and students alike!

Germany is willing to accommodate what could be a dream for many American families, worried about the skyrocketing cost of higher education.

“Our idea is to get the best people to the universities,” said Nina Lemmens, the London-based director of the German Academic Exchange Service, the DAAD.

This week, Lemmens has been promoting the free international degree program in English to British students, who also are worried about higher college fees. But she explained the German universities also are keen on recruiting American and other international students for their tuition-free programs.

Maybe the snag is you have to be extremely well schooled to qualify. But, does anyone have any further light to shed on this apparently rather odd little sales trip?

Is it perhaps some insane unintended consequence of German quota-fulfilment arrangements, where they are desperate for educational bums on seats because that's how they are paid, even though the bum-owners pay nothing?

A British University is going to set up shop in China:

The University of Nottingham is to open a campus in China.

This £40m project, agreed with the Chinese education authorities, will be the first time a UK university has opened a purpose-built campus in China.

The first Chinese students are expected to start courses in September - with the start-up academic staff being deployed from the UK.

The university says "internationalisation" is an important part of higher education's future.

And so do I. After all, what with cheap international phone calls, and email, the internet, etc., it has suddenly become a whole lot easier to organise this kind of operation.

Any, er, problems?

Addressing human rights concerns, the university says: "We shall extend to our China campus our approach of working with Chinese institutions, presenting students with a balanced viewpoint, and teaching in different ways (with more independent thinking).

"We think this will go well with reform and modernisation in China itself."

Fingers crossed, in other words.

The boss of the China operation is a revealing choice.

The vice-president of the Ningbo campus will be Professor Ian Gow, formerly director of Nottingham University Business School.

It figures. These days, the business of China is business.

A friend of mine is trying to decide whether or not to take a post-graduate course offered by the London School of Journalism. Key question: will she be more likely to get a job in either print journalism or broadcasting after doing such a course than she would be right now, as a mere law graduate? Anyone able to comment?

My thanks to Andy Duncan of Samizdata for noticing that Britain's academics are, apparently, about to go on strike. Unless of course their employers back down in terror at their threat.

Now if I was a betting man, and had to guess the contingent of British society which still possessed the highest percentage of Marxoid buffoons, after the disastrous collapse of Marxism in Eastern Europe, I'm sure you wouldn't give me tremendous odds against it being University lecturers.

But what's really amusing is that they still think anyone at all, outside the ivory tower, cares enough about them to quake in their boots, at their threat of a three hour strike. Well, I've got some news for you dear Marxoid professors. The nation ain't going to be paralysed. Indeed, it's barely going to register at 0.001 on the Richter Scale. Worse than that, it's barely going to register at 0.001 on the Newcastle Brown Ale Scale, on your own campuses. Mine's a large one, and a deep-fried Pizza, please, stout yeoman of the bar.

Yeah. Ha ha. And indeed, if it's "humanities" lecturers and the like, then forget it. The nation will be able to endure being thus held to ransom indefinitely. But surely some university lecturers are actually doing valuable work, which their students appreciate and might actually miss. I can imagine some students and hence some universities actually wanting some lecturers to go back to work at once.

If this strike stimulates a national debate about which lecturers will actually be missed, and how much they will be missed, it will have done British higher education a great favour.

But as for those post-modernist literary wafflers, who have been telling themselves how essential they are for so long that some of them may even believe it, they are perhaps about to get a rude shock. Most people despise them, and would be happy for them to remain on strike for ever. Certainly I do and I would. I seriously doubt if they are so severely stupid as to expose themselves to this kind of public derision, but you never know your luck. Maybe some of them are that daft, and will make prize asses of themselves on Newsnight in the days to come. If I witness any such foolishnesses, I'll let you know.

More seriously, I think this is very good news. It signals that British universities are a-changing, and in a good way. Some lecturers are going to get paid more, and others less, and the lumpen mass of them is frightened.

As I say, good.

When, as I regularly go, I type "education" into google, most of the stuff I get occupies a sort of parallel universe of political posturing, a world in which press releases are one thing, and what is actually happening is something utterly different and can only be vaguely guessed at. This article, about education in India, is rather different. It gives you a real feeling for what is going on out there. In case it entirely disappears soon, here it is in full. It's today's special story (whatever that means) from News Today (which describes itself as "South India's leading English evening newspaper"):

Coming out in favour grant of full autonomy to educational institutions, Governor P S Ramamohan Rao today said government intervention would affect the quality of education in the country.

Speaking after inaugurating a nine-storeyed staff quarters of the Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT) here, built at a cost of Rs 8.5 crore, Rao said, 'full autonomy should be given to educational institutions which will help improve the quality of education. Even the Judiciary should not intervene in the field of education, leave alone the government', he said.

To realise the dream of President Dr A P J Abdul Kalam of India becoming a superpower, students should enrich their knowledge through various sources and not depend on classroom-teaching alone. Students (mainly those in the engineering and management streams) should be innovative and strive for self-employment rather than depend on government jobs.

'Maintaining law and order, providing healthcare, basic amenities and education are the main focus areas of the government and not providing jobs in the government. It (job) should come from one's own effort', he said.

Referring to a recent study done by a group of economists, he said it had been projected that in the next 30-35 years, India would become the third largest economy in the world after China and the US. However, this growth would be mainly due to its large population rather than in terms of per capita income.

This would not be real growth and only if the country's per capita income was raised, it could see real growth. For this to happen, students should work hard in their respective fields.

Earlier, G Viswanathan, Chancellor, VIT, said there should be no barrier in students from a particular State appearing for entrance exams of neighbouring States as was the case now, according to certain University Grants Commission (UGC) norms.

This barrier, he said, should be removed by bringing in changes appropriate changes in the existing UGC norms.

Viswanathan said governments seemed to be more keen on giving licenses to educational institutions to start colleges or universities rather than verifying if there was need for their being set up. This had led to a decline in the quality of the education as a large number of colleges and universities had cropped up. At present, there were 15,000 universities in the country. In Tamilnadu alone, there were more than 250 engineering colleges, he said.

G V Selvam, Pro-Chancellor, VIT and P Radhakrishnan, Vice-Chancellor, VIT, also spoke.

Maybe it's my Anglo-Saxon prejudice that the way to understand something is to witness an argument about it, rather than just be bludgeoned by unanimous experts. But personally, I that that the way to understand something is to witness an argument about it, rather than just be bludgeoned by unanimous experts.

I also, of course, agree with Governor P S Ramamohan Ra. I think it's great that the government of India is just dishing out "licenses" (whatever that means) regardless, rather then second guessing the people of India about whether there is a "need" for new colleges to be set up. Sounds like the free market in education out there is really motoring, and this really will turn India into a superpower.

I have a busy Monday, so that is probably all for today. Thank you News Today, for doing all the work.

I'm guessing, but I should imagine that this will have a huge effect, because the hunger of Chinese people to get educated far outstrips the traditional means available for them to contrive that. (Commenters, you are welcome to tell me I'm wrong.)

BEIJING, Feb. 10 (Xinhuanet) -- China has selected 151 academic courses as high-quality ones and put them online through the official website of the Ministry of Education (MOE), with a view to giving excellent education resources free to the public, a high-ranking official said here Tuesday.

Wu Qidi, vice-minister of education, said at a press conference that the 151 courses, selected out of nearly 500 courses, was the first step of a national project on improving higher education quality.

The MOE plans to promote 1,500 academic courses in five years and realize the sharing of education resources with the help of modern technologies.

She said the selected academic courses, all given by Chinese professors, were recommended by schools and local education administrations, and gradually approved online by specific jury committees organized by MOE.

According to Wu, China's national academic courses not only emphasize the subject itself, but also include construction of teaching material and teaching staff.

An MOE investigation showed that since 2001, the degree of Chinese students' satisfaction with teaching material and their teachers has increased by 22 percentage points.

Wow. Twenty two percentage points more satisfaction. Imagine that.

Seriously, do you get the feeling of hundreds of cats, solemnly and with due deliberation, being let out of hundreds of bags? I do. The Internet is, I believe, one of those revolutionary technologies which changes everything it touches, no matter how carefully it is supervised. This news report reminds me of things I've read about committees of Elizabethan bishops equivocating for months, and then finally allowing some book to be published.

Here are two interesting articles from economist.com about university finance, a short one, and a longer one.

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