

UK universities 'face online threat' - tomwalker
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-21670959

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Retric
Bureaucracy is the real threat to universities not online competition.
University's need to maintain a solid reputation, but faking the reputation
game has become so common that most University's are ridiculously inefficient.

Consider, Why would you care if your English professor published anything?
With that said, a lot of waste seems really important to the people designing
budgets so they have issues dealing with leaner institutions.

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jiggy2011
I'd want a professor who has some experience in the broad subject area beyond
simply teaching it. Whether that is industry experience or publishing papers.

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jiggy2011
I wonder how much this will happen? It seems that qualifications from cheaper
institutions are always valued lower than those from more prestigious and
expensive ones. I doubt that this is entirely due to the more prestigious
universities having harder course content.

In the UK there seems to be a strong correlation between how valuable a degree
from an institution is perceived and how many "posh people" attend a
particular institution.

I've often wondered how often "we want somebody with a degree" actually means
"We want somebody from a particular social class". The labour government's
answer to this was the ensure that more young people got a university
education from across that social spectrum but this doesn't seem to be
reflected in the employment figures of young people.

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bromang
the "value" of a degree from a certain university in Britain correlates almost
entirely with the difficulty of gaining entry to that institution. "Posh
people" tend to do much better on average academically than the rest of the
population, so it is hardly surprising that they are found in such large
numbers in Britain's top universities.

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jiggy2011
So at that point the degree is really a proxy for A level results. I would
wager that A level results correlate more strongly with social class than
degree results once you factor in mature students etc. Though I have no idea
if that is true.

I imagine that pure online universities will have low or non existent entry
requirements. So will be interesting to see how their value is perceived.

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Silhouette
Good. Having gone to a very well regarded university in the UK in my time, the
attitude of a lot of the academics regarding teaching undergraduates was not
just poor but offensively so, and the institutional complacency was
staggering. At the same time, there was a relatively small but exceptionally
hard-working and dedicated set who clearly worked hard on their presentation
for lectures etc. and who clearly made a real effort to support the
undergrads.

Today, undergraduates pay thousands of pounds per year for the "privilege" of
that kind of education, and the UK hasn't developed the culture of some other
countries that have always had expensive education systems in terms of
employers recognising the debts students have taken on and paying compensation
accordingly. Indeed, with something like half of young people now being pushed
into a higher education system that used to train perhaps the top 5-10%
academically of the year group, a lot of kids are graduating and finding their
degree still won't stop them literally stacking shelves or making telesales
calls for a living.

If someone can take advantage of modern technologies so that all people at
that stage in their education could benefit from the kind of hard-working and
gifted teachers I mentioned, at a fraction of the cost, and without putting up
with the arrogant, patronising or simply lazy attitudes of probably the
majority of academics who wind up teaching them, then the kind of university
that can only offer the latter deserves to die, while the services that
provide a better education and the good people behind them deserve to
flourish.

