It is highly likely that higher education will change permanently after the pandemic ends, along the lines described by the article – a “boutique” experience in prestigious institutions for the few, online courses for the many. That does not necessarily mean that students opting for the latter would miss out on personal growth – university experience is character forming, but there is no reason to believe that other environments experienced at young age are not.
University today presumes that one leaves family and early friends behind, often for good. There is a thrill in the ability to remake onself that comes with this, but also a loss of connection that may stay for life. If this is not the only option for development, that is a change for the better.
The way university blocks students’ time and temporarily shelters them from life’s demands is its biggest advantage. But it comes with restrictions of its own – students are forced to hang around lecture halls for several years, with dire consequences for their ability to live lives of respectability if they don’t. I am sure other possibilities will open up, which will be welcomed by those with stronger ties to their local communities, as well as those who do not fit well the relative conformity of student lives. The changes to higher education might be beneficial overall. Rather than something being lost, new ways of growing up and discovering the world may appear.
I wonder if we’ll see way more part-time courses being offered (or canny employers screwing down the Uni’s to give massive discounts if employers send employees on a PT basis).
David Stanley
3 years ago
In my experience, university wasn’t close to being a great leveler. It more resembled a middle class holiday camp. I had a great time there and got the opportunity to mix with people from exactly the same socioeconomic background as myself. There were also very few arguments or debates as everything was taught from a left wing perspective and dissent was often frowned upon.
Mark Corby
3 years ago
Ever since the perfectly lovely, but utterly useless John Major, PM, turned the Polys into Universities at the stroke of a pen, it was obvious to many that a national catastrophe would unfold. What did surprise many contemporaries, was this happened under a Conservative, rather than a Blairite/Labour government. Dilution of academic standards on such a gargantuan scale, was hubris in the extreme! Fortunately Nemesis is at hand, and there will be much ‘weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth’ before this is resolved. However before we get hopelessly lost in a miasma of grief it is worth recalling how little, if anything Oxbridge and others contributed to the greatest event in human history, namely the Industrial Revolution. The ‘revolutionaries’, all self made men, some barely literate, irreversibly changed the course of human history, through sheer, practical genius, of a kind not seen before. Thomas Newcommen’s Beam Engine, operating at the Wheal Vor Mine, Cornwall from at least 1710 owed nothing to Oxbridge, yet in a little over a century, the world was well on its way to the greatest transformation in History. Consummatum est!
However, many of the medical and scientific discoveries that have improved our living standards in the last century were made by university-based researchers. A vaccine against this damn virus may be the next one!
Yep…Uni. types doin’ ‘science’…but using products made in the real world….the finest steel for scalpels and needles, the best optics….
…science without Engineering is mere speculation…
…as mathematicians wibbled about whether Engima could be cracked quickly, let alone Tunny…..Engineers built the machines that made it possible to crack ’em faster and more accurately than ever before…the ‘boffins’ chatted and theorised….Tommy Flowers and his ilk made sure the machines were made….
Yes, but none of those last century medical and scientific discoveries would have been remotely possible, without the previous explosion of the correctly named Industrial Revolution in the18th and 19th centuries. Had it not been for the astonishing work of Newcommen, Watt, Bolton, Brindley and Abraham Darby to name but a few, from that kaleidoscope of talent, Oxbridge would have remained an ossified Priest Factory, churning out Anglican vicars on industrial scale, if you will forgive the pun? If fact not only Oxbridge, but even such august institutions as Eton College did their very best to thwart the march of progress. Fortunately for the world, they failed abjectly.
Well, I think the jury’s still out. If the world perishes through nuclear war, environmental degradation or runaway climate change, we may end up regretting that we pursued the dynamic industrial path in preference to a few placid millennia of regular evensong and occasional Grand Tours.
Yes, there is a lot to be said for that! Xenophon in the Oeconomicus describes science as “the arts that we call vulgar ” and then goes on to explain that scientific (labour saving) advances, produce, idle, feckless men etc. Somewhat later Suetonius tells us that when Vespasian was presented with a (mechanical ) device for transporting columns he rewarded the inventor handsomely, but never used the device/machine, saying that if he did use it “how would he employ the/his poor?” Perhaps these fragments explain why the Pax Roman lasted so long and generally benignly. However after ‘the re-boot’ of the so called Renaissance it was a very different matter. Sic Gloria transit Mundi.
This ‘rite of passage’ for western youth has long become a racket. it needs to go. Science and technology will go on under some other system, and be better for it.
Dougie Undersub
3 years ago
Blair initiated the downfall of the universities with his reckless expansion and the universities themselves are rapidly finishing the job with their bums on seats avarice. University of the Highlands and Islands? Well, I suppose so, just about. University of Huddersfield? Give me a break. We need a radical reduction in the number of universities, together with a marked improvement in the quality of those who remain. A marked reduction in their dependence on overseas students, particularly from China, should be part of the plan. This must be counterbalanced with a return of the polytechnics and technical colleges, providing high quality vocational training. And while we’re at it, the public sector needs to reverse its obsession with making vocational occupations into graduate only jobs – nursing, social work, policing, even teaching at some levels.
Obviously secondary-school teachers should have a degree in the subject that they teach. Basic minimum requirement, surely.
cft-rlucas
3 years ago
This article demonstrates all the reasons why universities will now have to get into the 21st Century, where Degree Apprenticeships will be the norm to ensure employability skills and knowledge of a workplace provide future employees with the right work attitude and training in order to kick start an economy fit for the future. These qualifications will prevent that long wait after graduation to find a job, avoid high debts of studying something not always of interest until it is too late to change. The young, graduates as well as Year 12s and/or 13s might also enter into some voluntary work or low paid work that would help many aspiring to politics and economics, just how difficult it is to exist on even the living wage, let alone afford rents or mortgages. It could become like a reflection, looking back 60 or 70 years when more working class families studied in the evenings and in some cases, women who had to go out to work to support their family even managed to do part time degrees when they got married and had children – even working in the evenings when the husband came home. I do believe it will be the making of many of the young to have to make do a bit and do a job to obtain an income – if we all require fresh food in the future, the agricultural sectors are aleady crying out for workers and what better gap year could there be than working in the open air, with friends and having fun, not much pay but no debt to worry about. Universities, like schools and colleges will have to embrace the age of on-line distance learning – not much different doing a zoom webinar to a 300 lecture theatre really. And what independent learners these graduates will be and have time to work in their community as many have done already. A new world is in the making, Let’s hope that those youngsters, many of whom have such hopes for a better future for everyone, when talking to them at interviews, and eventually ‘govern’ have more experience, project and logisitics management, together with a caring politics that puts people before profit and ensure that new economic models involve putting back as much as is taken out!
“Universities, like schools and colleges will have to embrace the age of on-line distance learning.” Universities may have do this temporarily, but hopefully they’ll be a backlash when it is realised how inferior the experience of online learning is to the experience of face-to-face classroom interaction. Hopefully once the virus is sorted we might begin to think of turning universities and schools into internet-free zones; people should switch off their phones when they arrive on campus as they would when they enter a theatre. After all, the thing that is really lacking in the modern world is the ability to concentrate uninterruptedly on one thing, and that’s what our universities need to teach.
David Gould
3 years ago
Sis in law did open university for several years whilst working , every now & then there’d be a long week end away & a summer meet up session for things that could not be done on the TV & by paper.
She passed the business management with honours , eventually became the senior manager of a large group of hospital services organisation .. yet she started out as the illegitimate child of a factory worker , was adopted , left school with no qualifications went on to work as a gal serving sandwiches & tea to the troops in Germany. It was in later life at 40 yrs old she became a dish washer at one of the hospital kitchens & decided to return to study to get herself & my disabled brother out the predicament they found themselves in ..
Running away to a university for most is just an extension of school but with more alcohol & drugs added to the mix so my nephew & niece say .. They took computer sciences , got distinctions .Both became self employed and were able to retire as a result of hard work & money at the age of 50 . Both said that they did most of the work on their own & rarely ever saw their tutors. The first university that puts decent on line learning up for their students and takes the form of the OU is going to be a real winner , the old holiday camp crap is in the past as it is expensive & wasteful of peoples lives
Fraser Bailey
3 years ago
If C-19 destroys our rampant and repugnant universities at least some good will have come of it.
Jeff H
3 years ago
The article focuses on the Humanities where at least online teaching provides a viable but very poor alternative and only in the short term. Not that anyone is going to pay the present level of fees for such an impoverished experience.
Most sciences will be imposible online as laboratories, workshops, field trips etcc are essential. Likewise Fine Art and Applied Arts (Design, Fashion etc..), Nursing, Medicine, Education arent possible without access to the ‘real world’ and hands on experience. Drama without a studio and physical presence with other students is beyond ridiculous.
If I were about to be entering Higher Education it would be a no brainer to defer for at least a year. Maybe in that time I would realise I dont need a degree at all.
First step in making universities useful preparation for entering the world of work has to be the abolition of tuition fees. Why? Because the existence of fees encourages students to see themselves as “customers” paying for a degree. Thus, lecturers are pressured into compromising standards and awarding better marks than students actually deserve – after all, if they get bad marks, they will complain they haven’t got what they paid for.
As soon as tuition fees are abolished, and especially if a small maintenance grant is provided, then the relationship between teacher and student will become much more like that between employer and employee. The lecturer, like an employer, will set the student tasks which the student, like an employee, will be obliged to fulfill. Completing a degree, like holding down a job, will depend on completing those tasks satisfactorily. Diligence and hard work will be rewarded; lazy or slapdash work will be penalised.
(In fairness to students, I should say that many of them don’t buy in to the debased consumerist model of higher education in the first place, and reject the utilitarian notion that the value of a degree is defined by its mere market value. When I was an undergraduate in the 1990s, virtually all students thought they were doing something that was worthwhile for its own sake. It’s a great relief that some of them still do).
I disagree when you say lab work , workshops field trips would not be possible if it was on line uni , have you not hear of the OU ? Learn the basics from home whilst you work and earn money , socialise & grow up in the real world not an extension of childcare . Do it in three or four weekly stints then b****r off and do the practical’s at the uni in weekly blocks like all manner of apprentices doing City & Guilds , HNC & HND used to do .
Even the medical & scientific professions could do it, it just take the will & mind set to get there . Another benefit should prove to be less suicides & snowflakes who cant live away from home .. at least they might have the strength of a loving family around them as they grow up rather than endless empty drunken fumbles in uni accommodation with other immature kids .
Basil Chamberlain
3 years ago
This post seems to have got lost in another version of this page (the one reached when you click on the feed from your Email account, which has a different address). I’m thus copying it over. UnHerd really needs to fix this bug.
Despite sky-high tuition fees, universities were already in financial trouble before the virus hit. The obvious reason is that enormous amounts of money have been wasted on paying a caste of overpaid, over-numerous managers, and on building snazzy new buildings which look great but which are often not fit for academic purpose. Money is also wasted on unhelpful bureaucratic initiatives like the REF and the TEF, which demand that scholars and teachers jump through statistical hoops rather than doing their jobs.
While Conservative and Blairite administrations preached the virtues of deregulation in the private sector, they have imposed a Stalinist level of centralised control over higher education institutions that were once independent and self-governing. Our university system, when it was run properly by the academics who taught and researched in it, was the finest in the world. How have the mighty fallen!
The colleague cited above comments that “One of the biggest learning curves I’ve found is embracing change as a set of new perspectives rather than a series of threats.” But we must ask why academics have come to feel that change equates to threat in the first place. It is surely because almost every change that they have endured in recent years has been a change for the worse.
Fortunately there is a straightforward solution. It is to change things, as far as possible, back to the way they were.
ralph bell
3 years ago
Once students don’t attend an institution in person, then the identity will be diminished and drawing power. Online courses will dramatically change the University experience, some for the better such as more applied apprenticeship courses. I don’t think you can just turn back the clock after the virus threat retreats. What I don’t understand is that when the risk of corona virus(From the evidence of cases) to students in general is tiny and insignificant as it is to the majority of staff. Why don’t those with high-end risk be provided with alternatives but the vast majority should be back in college attending lectures tutorials and getting drunk…What has happened to peoples sense of perspective about making everyday risk decisions.
bulleid1002
3 years ago
Too many frivolous mickey mouse courses…
Diarmuid Ó Sé
3 years ago
This is a very good article. I am still teaching third level, and I recognize the points he makes. We were really lucky that this struck in March. Switching to online teaching for the last few weeks of term was difficult, but if untrained and inexperienced staff of all ages had had to adapt to that in January it would have been a lot worse, and perhaps a fiasco. I am also pleased to see more and more comments appearing on the foolishness of fetishising research. Another problem is the preoccupation of so many senior staff with mostly futile meetings. Some years back an Irish minister for education said that he wanted to see those senior academics who teach very little getting back to the classroom, but he got nowhere on that. A particular blow for students has been the widespread (and maybe general) suspension of exchange programmes such as Erasmus. If recurrences of this virus lead to long-term online teaching the damage to universities and to students will be difficult to repair. Some so-called academic leaders will be only too pleased to push the Open University model for everyone. I mean no disrespect to the very fine OU and its achievements, but a non-attendance model will lose too much of what most students and academics regard as essential.
Peter Boreham
3 years ago
The upside is that in the long term we might go back to being more thoughtful about how we educate and train school leavers. To me it’s doubtful that sending forty something percent on a three-year university course is the right answer. However, with the likelihood of a VERY weak jobs market for a year or two the transition may be difficult to pull off…
Allan Dawson
3 years ago
Quite brutally…should ‘Drama’ even be a degree subject?
It is highly likely that higher education will change permanently after the pandemic ends, along the lines described by the article – a “boutique” experience in prestigious institutions for the few, online courses for the many. That does not necessarily mean that students opting for the latter would miss out on personal growth – university experience is character forming, but there is no reason to believe that other environments experienced at young age are not.
University today presumes that one leaves family and early friends behind, often for good. There is a thrill in the ability to remake onself that comes with this, but also a loss of connection that may stay for life. If this is not the only option for development, that is a change for the better.
The way university blocks students’ time and temporarily shelters them from life’s demands is its biggest advantage. But it comes with restrictions of its own – students are forced to hang around lecture halls for several years, with dire consequences for their ability to live lives of respectability if they don’t. I am sure other possibilities will open up, which will be welcomed by those with stronger ties to their local communities, as well as those who do not fit well the relative conformity of student lives. The changes to higher education might be beneficial overall. Rather than something being lost, new ways of growing up and discovering the world may appear.
I wonder if we’ll see way more part-time courses being offered (or canny employers screwing down the Uni’s to give massive discounts if employers send employees on a PT basis).
In my experience, university wasn’t close to being a great leveler. It more resembled a middle class holiday camp. I had a great time there and got the opportunity to mix with people from exactly the same socioeconomic background as myself. There were also very few arguments or debates as everything was taught from a left wing perspective and dissent was often frowned upon.
Ever since the perfectly lovely, but utterly useless John Major, PM, turned the Polys into Universities at the stroke of a pen, it was obvious to many that a national catastrophe would unfold.
What did surprise many contemporaries, was this happened under a Conservative, rather than a Blairite/Labour government.
Dilution of academic standards on such a gargantuan scale, was hubris in the extreme!
Fortunately Nemesis is at hand, and there will be much ‘weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth’ before this is resolved.
However before we get hopelessly lost in a miasma of grief it is worth recalling how little, if anything Oxbridge and others contributed to the greatest event in human history, namely the Industrial Revolution.
The ‘revolutionaries’, all self made men, some barely literate, irreversibly changed the course of human history, through sheer, practical genius, of a kind not seen before.
Thomas Newcommen’s Beam Engine, operating at the Wheal Vor Mine, Cornwall from at least 1710 owed nothing to Oxbridge, yet in a little over a century, the world was well on its way to the greatest transformation in History.
Consummatum est!
However, many of the medical and scientific discoveries that have improved our living standards in the last century were made by university-based researchers. A vaccine against this damn virus may be the next one!
Yep…Uni. types doin’ ‘science’…but using products made in the real world….the finest steel for scalpels and needles, the best optics….
…science without Engineering is mere speculation…
…as mathematicians wibbled about whether Engima could be cracked quickly, let alone Tunny…..Engineers built the machines that made it possible to crack ’em faster and more accurately than ever before…the ‘boffins’ chatted and theorised….Tommy Flowers and his ilk made sure the machines were made….
Engineering is also a common degree course…
Yes, but none of those last century medical and scientific discoveries would have been remotely possible, without the previous explosion of the correctly named Industrial Revolution in the18th and 19th centuries.
Had it not been for the astonishing work of Newcommen, Watt, Bolton, Brindley and Abraham Darby to name but a few, from that kaleidoscope of talent,
Oxbridge would have remained an ossified Priest Factory, churning out Anglican vicars on industrial scale, if you will forgive the pun?
If fact not only Oxbridge, but even such august institutions as Eton College did their very best to thwart the march of progress.
Fortunately for the world, they failed abjectly.
Well, I think the jury’s still out. If the world perishes through nuclear war, environmental degradation or runaway climate change, we may end up regretting that we pursued the dynamic industrial path in preference to a few placid millennia of regular evensong and occasional Grand Tours.
Yes, there is a lot to be said for that!
Xenophon in the Oeconomicus describes science as “the arts that we call vulgar ” and then goes on to explain that scientific (labour saving) advances, produce, idle, feckless men etc.
Somewhat later Suetonius tells us that when Vespasian was presented with a (mechanical ) device for transporting columns he rewarded the inventor handsomely, but never used the device/machine, saying that if he did use it “how would he employ the/his poor?”
Perhaps these fragments explain why the Pax Roman lasted so long and generally benignly.
However after ‘the re-boot’ of the so called Renaissance it was a very different matter.
Sic Gloria transit Mundi.
The mighty Iron Masters as well… 🙂
This ‘rite of passage’ for western youth has long become a racket. it needs to go. Science and technology will go on under some other system, and be better for it.
Blair initiated the downfall of the universities with his reckless expansion and the universities themselves are rapidly finishing the job with their bums on seats avarice.
University of the Highlands and Islands? Well, I suppose so, just about. University of Huddersfield? Give me a break.
We need a radical reduction in the number of universities, together with a marked improvement in the quality of those who remain. A marked reduction in their dependence on overseas students, particularly from China, should be part of the plan.
This must be counterbalanced with a return of the polytechnics and technical colleges, providing high quality vocational training.
And while we’re at it, the public sector needs to reverse its obsession with making vocational occupations into graduate only jobs – nursing, social work, policing, even teaching at some levels.
Obviously secondary-school teachers should have a degree in the subject that they teach. Basic minimum requirement, surely.
This article demonstrates all the reasons why universities will now have to get into the 21st Century, where Degree Apprenticeships will be the norm to ensure employability skills and knowledge of a workplace provide future employees with the right work attitude and training in order to kick start an economy fit for the future.
These qualifications will prevent that long wait after graduation to find a job, avoid high debts of studying something not always of interest until it is too late to change.
The young, graduates as well as Year 12s and/or 13s might also enter into some voluntary work or low paid work that would help many aspiring to politics and economics, just how difficult it is to exist on even the living wage, let alone afford rents or mortgages.
It could become like a reflection, looking back 60 or 70 years when more working class families studied in the evenings and in some cases, women who had to go out to work to support their family even managed to do part time degrees when they got married and had children – even working in the evenings when the husband came home.
I do believe it will be the making of many of the young to have to make do a bit and do a job to obtain an income – if we all require fresh food in the future, the agricultural sectors are aleady crying out for workers and what better gap year could there be than working in the open air, with friends and having fun, not much pay but no debt to worry about.
Universities, like schools and colleges will have to embrace the age of on-line distance learning – not much different doing a zoom webinar to a 300 lecture theatre really. And what independent learners these graduates will be and have time to work in their community as many have done already.
A new world is in the making, Let’s hope that those youngsters, many of whom have such hopes for a better future for everyone, when talking to them at interviews, and eventually ‘govern’ have more experience, project and logisitics management, together with a caring politics that puts people before profit and ensure that new economic models involve putting back as much as is taken out!
Proper Degree Apprenticeships are rather than rocking horse s78t.
“Universities, like schools and colleges will have to embrace the age of on-line distance learning.” Universities may have do this temporarily, but hopefully they’ll be a backlash when it is realised how inferior the experience of online learning is to the experience of face-to-face classroom interaction. Hopefully once the virus is sorted we might begin to think of turning universities and schools into internet-free zones; people should switch off their phones when they arrive on campus as they would when they enter a theatre. After all, the thing that is really lacking in the modern world is the ability to concentrate uninterruptedly on one thing, and that’s what our universities need to teach.
Sis in law did open university for several years whilst working , every now & then there’d be a long week end away & a summer meet up session for things that could not be done on the TV & by paper.
She passed the business management with honours , eventually became the senior manager of a large group of hospital services organisation .. yet she started out as the illegitimate child of a factory worker , was adopted , left school with no qualifications went on to work as a gal serving sandwiches & tea to the troops in Germany. It was in later life at 40 yrs old she became a dish washer at one of the hospital kitchens & decided to return to study to get herself & my disabled brother out the predicament they found themselves in ..
Running away to a university for most is just an extension of school but with more alcohol & drugs added to the mix so my nephew & niece say .. They took computer sciences , got distinctions .Both became self employed and were able to retire as a result of hard work & money at the age of 50 . Both said that they did most of the work on their own & rarely ever saw their tutors.
The first university that puts decent on line learning up for their students and takes the form of the OU is going to be a real winner , the old holiday camp crap is in the past as it is expensive & wasteful of peoples lives
If C-19 destroys our rampant and repugnant universities at least some good will have come of it.
The article focuses on the Humanities where at least online teaching provides a viable but very poor alternative and only in the short term. Not that anyone is going to pay the present level of fees for such an impoverished experience.
Most sciences will be imposible online as laboratories, workshops, field trips etcc are essential. Likewise Fine Art and Applied Arts (Design, Fashion etc..), Nursing, Medicine, Education arent possible without access to the ‘real world’ and hands on experience. Drama without a studio and physical presence with other students is beyond ridiculous.
If I were about to be entering Higher Education it would be a no brainer to defer for at least a year. Maybe in that time I would realise I dont need a degree at all.
Or only go to a top tier Uni. to do a course that has real value in the jobs market…
First step in making universities useful preparation for entering the world of work has to be the abolition of tuition fees. Why? Because the existence of fees encourages students to see themselves as “customers” paying for a degree. Thus, lecturers are pressured into compromising standards and awarding better marks than students actually deserve – after all, if they get bad marks, they will complain they haven’t got what they paid for.
As soon as tuition fees are abolished, and especially if a small maintenance grant is provided, then the relationship between teacher and student will become much more like that between employer and employee. The lecturer, like an employer, will set the student tasks which the student, like an employee, will be obliged to fulfill. Completing a degree, like holding down a job, will depend on completing those tasks satisfactorily. Diligence and hard work will be rewarded; lazy or slapdash work will be penalised.
(In fairness to students, I should say that many of them don’t buy in to the debased consumerist model of higher education in the first place, and reject the utilitarian notion that the value of a degree is defined by its mere market value. When I was an undergraduate in the 1990s, virtually all students thought they were doing something that was worthwhile for its own sake. It’s a great relief that some of them still do).
I disagree when you say lab work , workshops field trips would not be possible if it was on line uni , have you not hear of the OU ?
Learn the basics from home whilst you work and earn money , socialise & grow up in the real world not an extension of childcare . Do it in three or four weekly stints then b****r off and do the practical’s at the uni in weekly blocks like all manner of apprentices doing City & Guilds , HNC & HND used to do .
Even the medical & scientific professions could do it, it just take the will & mind set to get there .
Another benefit should prove to be less suicides & snowflakes who cant live away from home .. at least they might have the strength of a loving family around them as they grow up rather than endless empty drunken fumbles in uni accommodation with other immature kids .
This post seems to have got lost in another version of this page (the one reached when you click on the feed from your Email account, which has a different address). I’m thus copying it over. UnHerd really needs to fix this bug.
Despite sky-high tuition fees, universities were already in financial trouble before the virus hit. The obvious reason is that enormous amounts of money have been wasted on paying a caste of overpaid, over-numerous managers, and on building snazzy new buildings which look great but which are often not fit for academic purpose. Money is also wasted on unhelpful bureaucratic initiatives like the REF and the TEF, which demand that scholars and teachers jump through statistical hoops rather than doing their jobs.
While Conservative and Blairite administrations preached the virtues of deregulation in the private sector, they have imposed a Stalinist level of centralised control over higher education institutions that were once independent and self-governing. Our university system, when it was run properly by the academics who taught and researched in it, was the finest in the world. How have the mighty fallen!
The colleague cited above comments that “One of the biggest learning curves I’ve found is embracing change as a set of new perspectives rather than a series of threats.” But we must ask why academics have come to feel that change equates to threat in the first place. It is surely because almost every change that they have endured in recent years has been a change for the worse.
Fortunately there is a straightforward solution. It is to change things, as far as possible, back to the way they were.
Once students don’t attend an institution in person, then the identity will be diminished and drawing power. Online courses will dramatically change the University experience, some for the better such as more applied apprenticeship courses. I don’t think you can just turn back the clock after the virus threat retreats.
What I don’t understand is that when the risk of corona virus(From the evidence of cases) to students in general is tiny and insignificant as it is to the majority of staff. Why don’t those with high-end risk be provided with alternatives but the vast majority should be back in college attending lectures tutorials and getting drunk…What has happened to peoples sense of perspective about making everyday risk decisions.
Too many frivolous mickey mouse courses…
This is a very good article. I am still teaching third level, and I recognize the points he makes. We were really lucky that this struck in March. Switching to online teaching for the last few weeks of term was difficult, but if untrained and inexperienced staff of all ages had had to adapt to that in January it would have been a lot worse, and perhaps a fiasco. I am also pleased to see more and more comments appearing on the foolishness of fetishising research. Another problem is the preoccupation of so many senior staff with mostly futile meetings. Some years back an Irish minister for education said that he wanted to see those senior academics who teach very little getting back to the classroom, but he got nowhere on that. A particular blow for students has been the widespread (and maybe general) suspension of exchange programmes such as Erasmus. If recurrences of this virus lead to long-term online teaching the damage to universities and to students will be difficult to repair. Some so-called academic leaders will be only too pleased to push the Open University model for everyone. I mean no disrespect to the very fine OU and its achievements, but a non-attendance model will lose too much of what most students and academics regard as essential.
The upside is that in the long term we might go back to being more thoughtful about how we educate and train school leavers. To me it’s doubtful that sending forty something percent on a three-year university course is the right answer. However, with the likelihood of a VERY weak jobs market for a year or two the transition may be difficult to pull off…
Quite brutally…should ‘Drama’ even be a degree subject?