Education Guardian teamed up with Ones to Watch, the website that showcases the best UK student journalism, to launch a writing competition. We asked:
"With fees tripling to £9,000 a year at most universities, is it inevitable that the student will become a consumer?"
Here's our winner, Luke Braidwood.
"It's 9.45. I'm mildly hungover and relying on a strong black coffee to stay awake. The dulcet tones of a greying, portly biochemistry professor rumble around a gloomy lecture hall, which is clad in oak and filled with plastic chairs.
"We're learning about the organisation of the plant metabolic network, which is only about half as much fun as it sounds. After the summary, which seems strangely unfamiliar, we rummage around in our pockets, pull out £30, and place it on the front desk in a heap of crumpled notes and loose change. Sam asks me to lend him some cash; he's forgotten his wallet for the third time this month.
"The professor pulls out a hessian sack and sweeps the money (about £1,800) into it, then walks outside whistling.
"I have 10 lectures a week, some of them obtuse or incomprehensible, and place £300 weekly on front desks of lecture halls. There are 30 teaching weeks in a year, so I'm paying around £9,000 for all my lectures. I think about this as I look for a paracetamol in my bag, and wonder if I'm getting my money's worth."
The Full Insanity.
If students really are consumers, then I'm in a great business. These kids are idiots and I'm happy to take the fools' money.
ReplyDeleteJesus H Christ.
ReplyDeleteBeaker Ben, these students would stop taking your classes. They'd certainly not take mine (unless forced). Under this model, we'd all starve to death.
Oh, and the writer hasn't a fucking clue what _Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?_ is about. "It's like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep with education instead of appliances." WTF is he talking about? What appliances? If he's referring to the andys, he's also completely off, as they are not appliances. If he's referring to the Penfield Mood Organ, he needs to explain his analogy, because unless you've read the book, you wouldn't understand that the PMO is a "select your mood for the day" device used by Rick Deckard and his wife at the start of the book. [The irony is that the wife selects for a "self-accusatory depression".]
No, the more I think about it, his analogy sucks and there's no saving it. Sounds like ol' Luke got assigned the book but decided it was a "waste of time and money" to read it, but thought it would sound cool in his blog post. Fucktard.
The writer probably meant Philip K. Dick's "Ubik", where people pay small fees for everything, including the ability to open your own front door.
DeleteYeah, and what's all that about rummaging for cash? Hasn't this yutz heard of electronic payment?
ReplyDeleteSeriously guys. Complaining that this guy wants to throw money into 'a hessian sack' is like complaining that Jonathan Swift wanted to eat babies. It may or may not be good satire, but it's definitely satire - a thought experiment about what would happen if students actually had to pony up their tuition lecture by lecture.
And there's a reasonable question in there: If the lectures suck (and a lot of profs do give some powerful shitty lectures) so bad that the student could learn more reading a textbook for 1/10 of the price, what is the value-added in paying for the lectures? If the only value added is getting some sort of 'seal of approval' from a school with a good reputation (which often has only a weak correlation with quality of teaching) among employers, does the student really benefit? Does his/her subsequent employer? Does society?
The politicos and adminflakes who want to commodify education and charge 'market rates' might want to come up with answers to these questions.
A "hessian sack" is a burlap bag.
DeleteIt's a Britishism.
I know.
DeleteDo you know how much wealthier I'd be if the students paid me $30 directly for teaching? Holy crap.
DeleteAhem.
That said, there were classes when I was an undergrad that added nothing to my education themselves due to bad lecturing, but directed me to great texts and forced me to master and consequently test my mastery. I just flat out didn't go to those lectures.
My students don't have that luxury (well, okay, mine do, but most of them don't in other classrooms). Why? Because so many students have defaulted on student loans that attendance is now mandatory. Somehow that's supposed to keep kids from dropping out.
They have to glue their ass in the seat whether they've learned the material elsewhere, whether they've already finished an assignment ahead of time, and whether they learn better by (again) good books.
This really only punishes (for real) the best students who don't deserve the policy. The worst students who bitch and moan about having to be there tend to fail anyway.
Combined with this are the wide array of corporate-produced incredibly shitty ass textbooks. One admin my department insists that profs under her choose from these rather than more primary (or hell, secondary) sources. The publishing reps are always in her office gifting her with wine, taking her to dinner, and generally giving her free shit out the ears. The students and other professors suffer the consequences.
It's only been about 15-20ish years since my co-hort of new proffies started college and none of us can believe how much has changed. Fees and textbook prices have risen exponentially. The material in textbooks has been so dumbed down in many fields that I can learn more from Wikipedia on the same damn topic.
Given one of those bad lecturers now, I'd have to A) be there every day so that I would have sick days left in case I actually got sick so I wouldn't fail due to absences and B) not have a good strong book to fall back on.
In short? I'd be screwed if I didn't seek out additional material on the course. Today I'd like to think that I'd do that, but at the time, my budget probably would have prevented it. If you ordered a book Interlibrary Loan from that library and it happened to cost the library too much to get ahold of, they would actually come back and charge the student. I got a couple of $100 library fees, and was only allowed to keep the book a few days (long enough to make copies that I was, again, paying for) so I didn't often seek materials that way.
Many years ago, I was told that a student came to see the acting department head one day asking to have his money back for my course. Apparently, I wasn't sufficiently "helpful", which probably meant that I didn't do his work for him and award him with a high grade for it.
ReplyDelete