May as well have a thread about the A. C. Grayling New College of the Humanities thing

most colleges charge £9k; these fuckers charge £18k. academics are super upset [via whatever the freudian term is here]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/8562531/AC-Grayling-forced-to-flee-smoke-bomb-protest-at-Foyles-debate-on-private-university.html

morons get irate, news at 11

well yeah, but a lot of non-smoke-bomb-throwers are also very angry

the state system -- which i've worked in -- isn't any utopia, and the imposition of £9k fees is absurd and should lead to a complete change in higher education. it won't, but the idea of coming out of college with debts on that scale is crazy to me. at the very least i'd have thought it would lead to more people studying in their home town (i.e. while living with their parents) but who knows.

this is a whole other thing, really, kind of an interesting experiment, probably appealing most to international students -- and all universities are getting as many internationals as they can right now. it won't be a real university in that there won't be any research going on, but it's part of the university of london too, kinda. don't know how that will pan out.

Is this basically Scam College - For Poshos?

That's what Boris said: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/borisjohnson/8558621/At-last-an-Oxbridge-for-those-who-cant-get-into-Oxbridge.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/06/ac-graylings-new-private-univerity-is-odious

(terry eagleton)

'the imposition of 9k fees' is coming with a vast expansion of funds made available to prospective undergrads, right - ? whereas the only loans available for this will be at a private rate, presumably. (yes, scholarship places. eh.) ("How on earth are people going to afford it? He has a ready answer, in that he and his colleagues want to see 30 per cent of undergraduates receive some help with their fees, and a large proportion will have full scholarships, funded either charitably or from the fees of those who can afford to pay." -- one hundred percent of people going to actual oxbridge / any university get 'some help of their fees', thanks)

i'm not sure i understand by what authority they'll be able to issue degrees

eagleton and boris are both playing to type huh

protest outside st. antony's college this friday, apparently (via facebook)

okay, so i don't get this, at all. i assume that there's some sort of national accrediting body in the UK that validates/authorized degrees issued by this or that college under the auspices of this or that university. and if this new rich kid's school is properly accredited, that takes care of that.

so what's the objection to its being fabulously expensive? you probably have homes, cars and meals that one can pay vast sums for, right? and since this is a new school with no established reputation, who cares that it will only be accessible to the very wealthy? as an american observing from a distance, the furore baffles me...

uh, authorizes...

come back when your public sector isn't a hundred years out of date and we'll talk

also, americans are all obese and stupid and here are some funny jokes about it in a comedy representation of 'an' 'american' 'accent'

teehee

this is probably about the 46th most egregious thing happening to the british university system atm

TWO BRAINS will be thankful for the distraction

i get the vast differences in culture and economy, am by no means a defender of the invisible hand's benevolence, but remain sincerely curious about the nature of the objection here.

buckingham have been doing this for years, but you know, lol at the academics working there

http://www.buckingham.ac.uk/admissions/fees/undergraduate/home

not trolling, just looking for a beginner's manual...

i think the pragmatic concern is inflationary pressure on point-of-delivery fees for higher education

http://www.buckingham.ac.uk/wp-content/themes/bucks/images/school-backgrounds/swans.jpg

also the idea with the current system (or at least the system 15 years ago) is that the best universities should be available to the best students, regardless of ability to pay because, you know, it's the right thing to do (also good for the economy)

i'm not sure i understand by what authority they'll be able to issue degrees

same way as buckingham

Do Boris's disappointed multiple-A students who couldn't get into Oxbridge also get turned away from Warwick, Durham, the London universities, or wherever else gives offers in the Oxbridgish AAB/ABB range?

If they actually can get into somewhere first-rate but are still bemoaning their terrible rejection because they only ever wanted to be at Oxbridge, why would they want to go to some crank's moneyspinner college to be taught by, err, nobody actually knows, but Richard Dawkins has promised to teach a couple of hours per term, that's really good, right?

Oxbridge by the Thames

Err...

it looks like their degrees will be awarded via u. of london, who are a recognised body to do so. okay, that took me all of twenty seconds to actually look up

anyway: this is still a country where people find the idea that people should have to pay for undergraduate education at all to be a bad thing. our best universities are publicly funded (admittedly they're also incredibly rich) and still compete with harvard, MIT, etc. oxford and cambridge are messed up and imperfect in terms of class and money and access but it's still the case that fees are capped at £9k and the government will pay that for you.

or also the idea with the current system (or at least the system 15 years ago) is that the best universities should be available to the best students, regardless of ability to pay because, you know, it's the right thing to do (also good for the economy), yes, xposts etc

a lot of the anger at these chancers comes from the fact that they're capitalising in our impending crisis in education funding, that they're trying to represent themselves as in it for something other than the money.

they're also playing to the tedious resentment of the upper classes, the kind of people that johnson article sympathises-with-whilst-looking-down-on, the 'oh my kid had a perfect record and was captain of his rugger team and was passed over for someone from hull' type; this is also nagl

tbf in terms of international rep. oxbridge is more than one or two places above the other russell group universities; there's also a lot of social and networking guff involved with 'going to oxbridge' that isn't the case with going to warwick or york or wherever

also the idea with the current system (or at least the system 15 years ago) is that the best universities should be available to the best students, regardless of ability to pay because, you know, it's the right thing to do (also good for the economy)

― caek, Wednesday, 8 June 2011 11:38 (18 seconds ago) Bookmark

luckily this won't be one of the best universities.

buckingham's different, it has its own charter, awards its own degrees, does research. this is just offering university of london external degrees for an inflated price with a once-a-term celebrity lecture.

buckingham is a shitty university, but its major selling point is that its fees are now *less* than the russell group (and their BA takes 2 years because they don't take summer holidays, so they are quite a lot less)

didn't know about the U of London connection. how is that going over with UCL/Imperial/Kings?

ahaha not well

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/jun/06/ac-grayling-private-university-syllabus

( Grayling has said that New College students would receive University of London degrees, but the university has since made clear there is "no formal agreement between the University of London and the NCH concerning academic matters".)

additionally:

A new private university college founded by the philosopher AC Grayling and staffed by celebrity professors will teach exactly the same syllabuses as the University of London, which charges half the price, it has emerged.

Students of the New College of the Humanities will pay £18,000 a year to take courses in history, English literature and philosophy that are already on offer at Birkbeck, Goldsmiths and Royal Holloway for £9,000 or less.

Academics complained that syllabuses listed on the New College website appeared to have been copied from the University of London's own web pages in a move some said amounted to plagiarism. Grayling claimed it would help save humanities education from cuts by bringing together teachers including Richard Dawkins, Niall Ferguson and Stephen Pinker.

"Every university is worried about students plagiarising essays," said Justin Champion, a senior historian at Royal Holloway college, who spotted that the titles of modules he wrote were reproduced on the New College website.

"Here we have a whole degree programme being plagiarised. I feel quite insulted because I wrote a lot of the syllabus. If the University of London didn't exist and public money hadn't been used to draw up these syllabuses, they wouldn't have been able to do this, or they would have had to invest a lot of money."

they've also been nicking course materials from goldsmiths, 20 years late:

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=416422

gotcha. whereas here in the US, we've accepted the regressive idea that most of the best colleges & universities (the private & independent ones anyway) should be priced well out of reach of the common man. they're usually extremely well endowed (rimshot), which ostensibly allows them to assist qualified applicants who can't afford the ride, but when push comes to shove, wealth has its way. sounds like you've got a more egalitarian system that this new pricing scheme threatens to disrupt...

unsurprisingly, the same thing is going on over here with relatively inexpensive state-sponsored public universities. tuition caps are being lifted to make up for dwindling state funding in an era of relative austerity, and sweetheart programs that favored local students with significant tuition breaks are being phased out. because we're accustomed to these sorts of economic abuses, in fact expect them as expressions of nature's moral will, there's been little protest. :(

we don't really have private universities. buckingham was the first and only for a long time. the issue is that our nominally state-sponsored ones are now charging £9,000 a year.

xp, there is little culture of endowment in the UK, so any privately funded university would have to charge fees that are (a) large (b) rarely waived.

didn't realise that specious cunt Ferguson was on board. woo woo.

sounds like you've got a more egalitarian system

Who'd've thought it?

tbf in terms of international rep. oxbridge is more than one or two places above the other russell group universities; there's also a lot of social and networking guff involved with 'going to oxbridge' that isn't the case with going to warwick or york or wherever

Re networking, I suppose so, but I get the impression that said networking is largely available only to those who are already well-connected enough to have feet in doors regardless; international rep I grant you though, but that's not something Grayling's place is going to get immediately, even with a few big names signed up for a termly 101 class

(I realise I'm wasting my time in pretending that Boris's article was actually a serious declaration that a gap had been filled, rather than a serious of "what have these lefties done to our brilliant rich children" bonnet-bees attached in Boris's usual flippant who-cares manner to a convenient news story)

err series

this is why I don't have a degree! and took up a university place that could have been filled by a starving Etonian only to drop out! etc

Loving the fact that al these liberals/ Liberals are showing their true colours these days, so we never have to get fooled by the cunts ever again. I'm assuming Grayling is a Liberal, I know Dawkins is.

sorry for disrupting the thread w entry-level questions, but thanks to all who took the time to respond. as an american, accustomed to the dictates of the wheel, i'm often surprised by the lack of political apathy displayed by citizens of other lands.

lol free universal education

Make em fight for it imo kids these days get it all handed to em etc

don't worry, we have plenty of political apathy of our own

(if current social institutions are dismantled or made inaccessible, the UK now seems like it may never again have a government with the mandate, inclination and economy to build new ones - so this outrage at the current cuts and anti-public-service ideology may be a futile last shout. but maybe my pessimism is both misplaced and unusual)

yeah, i think the "you can't go home again" fear is well-placed

I don't really understand the fuss about this, surely it'll just be a fairly unremarkable university filled with braying Sloanes who can't get into Exeter or Bristol let alone Oxbridge and are stupid enough/have parents stupid enough to pay £18k a year to be educated by middle-ranking academics and have Richard Dawkins turn up once a year.

It'll be interesting to see who takes up the offer of paying eighteen grand a year for a degree that'll tell future employers that they weren't accepted into Oxford / Cambridge / LSE / UCL but weren't prepared to 'slum it' at a redbrick.

This might make some sort of sense if they were offering quantifiably superb education in a hard science (not that they ever could). It's ridiculous for humanities.

I mean, they are actually privatising arts degrees by stealth at the moment which is of far greater concern as far as I can see.

you dont think shiny new graduates from this place will walk into boardrooms?

have they talked about their admissions criteria?

i was expecting it to be mostly international students, like LSE gadaffi's slightly dim younger brother, whose parents refuse to send them to columbia/ucla to do film.

like somewhere for an oil sheikh who draws the line at an MFA to send a kid who doesn't want to think about international development

or guardian columns or publishing their witterings out of bloomsbury or whatever wellheeled arts grads currently do anyway?

This seems to be just a handy way to keep them seperated from the oiks for that troublesome 17-21 bracket

it makes no sense for them to look internationally for intake at 18k/year domestic fees, surely

nah i get the impression that this place is going for the a bit thick hardman LSE/reads the economist & monocle market rather than the truly dim sloan market

is there a 'posts impenetrable to our american cousins' thread because i feel like that belongs on one

So everyone who goes there will get a job as a Tory policy wonk and that's that?

lol caek

i'm not sure there's a big enough market within the UK, and international students (or at least the kind of international students with the initiative + family/financial support to apply to university in another country) generally have much stronger academic records.

obviously past performance no guide to future ... especially when you're dealing with public school kids, but for an institution that is looking to build a rep comparable to US universities and compete in the same market, the thing they need urgently is a first year with world-leading secondary school scores and ideally a high rejection rate of applicants, both of which are big selling points in the US higher ed market.

that was an xp to

it makes no sense for them to look internationally for intake at 18k/year domestic fees, surely

― thomp, Wednesday, June 8, 2011 12:48 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

a first year with world-leading secondary school scores

maximum possible score in UK a levels not considered world-leading btw

I mean, they are actually privatising arts degrees by stealth at the moment which is of far greater concern as far as I can see

Could you expand on this? sorry if this has been a big story, I have had my head in the sand for a while, and now feel the need to top up my outrage levels for the day

caek you are probably right! i don't know; a lot of the rhetoric around it is mentioning this supposed brain drain of smart (and incidentally rich) English students who end up going abroad. but that may be nine-tenths smokescreen, and I suspect you know more about the actualities of higher ed. in this country than I do.

i think the current brain-drain at 18 to the U.S. is tiny. it's basically that one girl that didn't get into magdalen and hermione grainger. but when fees go up to £9k it becomes a very different proposition.

the brain drain post undergrad and esp. post phd is cheaper to fix and potentially a much bigger problem imo.

oh lol euan blair got a scholarship to do international relations MA at yale with a 2:1 from bristol

It'll be interesting to see who takes up the offer of paying eighteen grand a year for a degree that'll tell future employers that they weren't accepted into Oxford / Cambridge / LSE / UCL but weren't prepared to 'slum it' at a redbrick.

the way i understood it from the website, the idea is that they'll get a University of London degree - they'll be under no obligation to identify that the teaching took place at NCHum. It is not a university, or a university college: it isn't registered as one.

basically it's easy to understand it as a crammer for people taking U of L international programme, which is usually offered as distance learning. NCHum enrols the students on the U of L external degree, provides teaching in tutorial style and a few lectures from big names - the actual exams/marking/name-on-certificate remains the U of L's.

http://www.londoninternational.ac.uk/media/press_releases/new_college_humanities.shtml

More than 70% of undergraduate students of the University of London International Programmes purchase tuition from Independent Teaching Institutions. These Independent Teaching Instuitions vary considerably in their scale and fees, this partly reflecting the level of local costs. The University of London International Programmes has a process for providing and re-confirming recognition to selected Independent Teaching Institutions around the world, the purposes being to indicate where good-quality support may be obtained and to facilitate co-operation to continuously improve the student experience. This does not preclude any institution from deciding to teach University of London International Programmes curricula and examinations without seeking recognition.

About the New College of the Humanities
The University is aware of the intention of the New College of the Humanities (NCH) to provide tuition to students of the University of London International Programmes. There is no formal agreement between the University of London and the NCH concerning academic matters. As with any other Independent Teaching Institution, a dialogue will be maintained about when to apply for recognition under the Institutions Policy Framework, but normally a track record is required. To avoid any confusion, it should be made clear that NCH is not, and will not be, a part of the University of London. Meanwhile it is legitimate for NCH, as an entirely independent institution, to provide tuition to students of University of London International Programmes as other institutions in London and around the world do. These students’ applications for registration for degrees would be made individually with the University of London International Programmes.

so this is basically one of those easter holiday a level revision classes on banbury road, but for degrees?

yup!

what it has above other crammers would be

- stringent entry requirements (sth ridiculous like AAA iirc)
- university-level teaching apparently, whoever the regular teachers are going to be.
- regular one-on-one tutorials

which should be expected to result in good marks. the celebrity lecturers are kind of a sideshow on the whole thing tbh.

lol that is a terrible idea for a business

from that press release:

"These students receive a service which includes a curriculum, printed and electronic learning materials, an on-line library and examinations. For most undergraduate awards this costs less than £1,500 per annum, on a full time basis"

so they've £16,500 per student to do whatever it is they're going to do.

i mean, theoretically.

the whole thing is still mind-boggling.

I don't really understand the fuss about this, surely it'll just be a fairly unremarkable university filled with braying Sloanes who can't get into Exeter or Bristol let alone Oxbridge and are stupid enough/have parents stupid enough to pay £18k a year to be educated by middle-ranking academics and have Richard Dawkins turn up once a year.

― Matt DC, Wednesday, June 8, 2011 12:38 PM (44 minutes ago) Bookmark

basically how i break it down

can't believe they won't have tariq ali teaching politics though

so if entrylev reqs are so high then what's the problem?

Two of the star academics signed up to AC Grayling's new £18,000-a-year private undergraduate college will only teach for an hour each in the first year, the Guardian has learned.

(drudge siren dot gif)

the fact that with just over a year until they open the u of london is making it so clear that they have no formal connection and they don't want to be associated with it, is interesting

ac grayling seems like one of those oxford academics who is very clever for a very narrow definition of "clever"

st anne's represent.

lol the actual course requirements are basically a GCSE in english and two A-level passes. they're clearly not that confident they're going to get too many straight-A applicants.

http://www.nchum.org/courses/minimum-entrance-requirements

i remember a.c. grayling showing up on some random blog in like '04 and having a hissyfit at the idea that someone with a BLOG who wasn't a PROFESSOR OF THE HUMANITIES at some AUGUST INSTITUTION LIKE OXFORD would dare to disagree with him, and then completely refused to engage with the guy's argument, and just repeated the line that they couldn't possibly have read his work, because they were some PEON with a BLOG and not a P. of the H. at an A.I. like O., etc., etc.

xp things like those are the "minimum requirements" in the constitution of at a lot of universities tbh, the actual minimum requirements tend to be a lot higher.

although if they expect to have higher requirements in practice then surely they would advertise that. maybe they really are going to be a dumping ground. lol.

What worries me: the college succeeds, other people/orgs/businesses set up private universities and gradually start attracting away the best talent in terms of both student and staff. End result: no improvement in educational standards or choice, but university becomes financially out of the reach of millions while lining the pockets of the corporations.

that's a concern, but i think the fraction of the population that can afford to pay direct fees that actually cover the cost of an "elite" higher education is so tiny that in practice there wouldn't be much of a drain (unless a culture of endowment develops, but that's something that would take decades/centuries)

i couldn't find the example of grayling being an asshole that i wanted to, but i did find this at the new humanist, which is headlined 'AC Grayling politely rebukes an attempt to reconcile religion and science'. the word 'politely' is being used in some newfangled sense that i don't actually understand, in that headline, i think.

http://blog.newhumanist.org.uk/2009/03/ac-grayling-politely-rebukes-attempt-to.html

if the end results are no greater choice nor standard, mark, what's the posited motivation for people to pay extra to attend these new institutions?

in the short term, if there are more institutions like this, then there is a worry that international students will leave the UK public system, which is already charging them new-college-type fees, and get their british degrees elsewhere, e.g. new college. i'm not sure of the amount those students contribute, but when 116% or whatever of the budget is already spoken for it all helps.

It's a potentially interesting business model, tbh. It's unlikely that the number of overseas students willing to pay 15-18k for a degree is going to dry up in the immediate future. There's a potential overspill from LSE / UCL for students who want the London 'experience' as much as they want a British degree and aren't willing to go to Birmingham or Warwick. If 95% of the students, a couple of years down the line aren't foreign, i'd be surprised. The more you charge, the higher the external prestige.

They're unlikely to attract the best students, they're not going to be active in research or the wider academic arena - will the 'best' staff want to work for them?

nrq, would you take a job there?

There's one thing I hope we can all agree on: Grayling's a wanker

oh indeed

nice choice of Hull as scum synecdoche up there thomp.

now I've got that chip off my shoulder, this bit of challops: I'm doing an OU degree at the moment. Materials and support are pretty good; it does make me wonder how much of the tuition fees are going towards all those red buildings, cheap booze, subsidised halls and all the other things that are about being "at uni" but nothing to do with the actual learning. If a lot of that was stripped away, would it matter? ( not actually advocating wholesale dismantlement in case anyone thinks I've gone raving neo-con but I'd have thought there is room with modern tech to be more... efficient? )

if your goal as a student (or the public's goal in subsidising them) is to cover syllabi and pass tests then yes, universities are spectacularly inefficient.

fuck yes, my goals as a student are to learn (handy if there is a syllabus to guide the learning) and to pass tests.

I think any other social/economic/artistic/intellectual ambitions are "goals as a person", not "goals as a student"

When I was at university my "goals as a person" were about 10 times as important TO ME as my "goals as a student".

Only 10?

other tom, i am sorry! i have no personal animus against the east riding i assure you

xxxp, institutions that serve that have a place, but that's not the only goal of most 18 year olds for themselves or most academics for their students. obviously while the public foot the majority of the bill they get a say too, but academia has been pretty successful in persuading the public of the economic and social merit of the "experience" and more abstract intellectual development (although probably more so in the US).

"only 10?"

I guess I cared a bit about learning stuff and getting good marks, and it did take up quite a lot of my time. So yeah, I reckon about 10.

i mean most people would agree that u.s. universities are (1) not very efficient knowledge transfer institutions (in terms of money and time spent), just like other universities, but (2) responsible for a pretty big share of the US's competitive advantage during the 20th C. so there must be more to it than just acquiring knowledge.

xp lol I know I was only kidding... we're proud of the fact that the rest of the country has the misapprehension that Hull's a shithole, it keeps the wankers out.

As a current student at UCL I am hoping this is a success. Opening a Jack Wills shop next door will also increase the number of twits it attracts, away from where I am.

xp caek, I don't know about US universities, but things have changed even since I first went to university in the mid-90s. Then, you needed to be near the giant! library to research, you had to have access to the computer lab to program, your assignments were marked by hand, you only had one (pay)phone per 10 people ( so no teleconf tutorials ) etc, you made sure you wandered past the dept noticeboard every day. Teh internets and all the rest of the last 12 years of tech mean this is all unneccessary now.

I work from home, I study from home, going to an office or a lecture hall feels strangely old-fashioned now (confessions of a rambling shut-in i know)

don't see what a student's personal goals for non-related activities have to do with it, tbh.

Having studied at a shit technical institute instead of a uni (or even a good institute tbh) i'd say the networking opportunities are more important than the educational content, in terms of having missed out.

that's a myth unless you're in the club in the first place- which, by and large, most students aren't

The OU's great for getting you to a stage where you can pass your exams but the social aspect of education shouldn't be underestimated. Online homework forums are not a replacement for the kind of debate and discussion you get in a good classroom.

xp tbh, it's not really. All of my friends from the same geographical area have used college contacts when either recruiting or jobseeking, and to good effect.

Grayling claimed it would help save humanities education from cuts by bringing together teachers including Richard Dawkins, Niall Ferguson and Stephen Pinker.

feel like its a good idea to bring these guys together but only if we can lock them in a box and throw it in the ocean

tom, my point is that even if it's now possible to do the knowledge transfer bit of university just as well over the internet or whatever (it's not, but let's say it is), the fact that the US (or the UK) are where it is in terms of knowledge economy and cultural and economic influence is due in large part to its universities. which we all agree are not very efficient at knowledge transfer, and do a lot of other stuff that is not directly related to syllabi (in a way they don't in, say, france or japan). so it seems reasonable to conclude that the other stuff universities do might be useful for the wider society.

that's a myth unless you're in the club in the first place- which, by and large, most students aren't

― sometimes all it takes is a healthy dose of continental indiepop (tomofthenest), Wednesday, June 8, 2011 2:35 PM (23 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

that's not true. and it's a good example of the another thing british universities do (inefficiently, perhaps, but much better than distance learning): promote social mobility.

what's the deal with stephen pinker? i thought he was one of the less assholey public intellectuals.

evolutionary psychologist

ohhhhhh

terrible hair, too

i've been informed he is Wrong About Linguistics but couldn't comment

i always get him confused with stephen jay gould who actually seems like a good dude

me too

terrible hair, too

AC's is worse

SJG would have been a lot more fun to hang out with, thats for sure. better writer, too.

but he claimed to be a yankees fan and a red sox fan at the same time, which is just...

"yankees and red sox are Non-overlapping magisteria"

i hope one of the entrance criteria for this place is that you self-identify as a "bright"

so if you go to this university are you automatically a Bright oh COME ON I JUST READ THE WHOLE THREAD XP

lol

God, I'm glad I didn't meet too many people at university who thought it was all about networking.

ts, 'networking' vs 'making friends while attending college', i suppose

Feel staff recruitment might not be such a problem for them - there must be hundreds of humanities PhDs graduating each year into a brutal job market, some of whom will be happy to take a teaching job to tide them over until they land that British Academy Fellowship.

As for students, their market has to be "rich people who want to study in London". If it succeeds, NCHum is going to be less an educational institution than a luxury brand.

yep, its a finishing school basically.

The real concern for state universities will be whether companies like the one i work for want to muscle in on the game - offering standardised, high-quality, brand-name education in London / Shanghai / Mumbai / wherever, undercutting fees and hoovering up staff with no requirement to provide unprofitable / niche courses.

Max's box, the ReTARDIS, has plenty of room for all these libertarian/conservative types who think this place is a good idea. FWIW, there are a few private universities in London (from the Architectural Association/Royal College of Art to that shitty US-accredited college in Marylebone) but they don't really have much of an impact on the larger system.

I explain it to Americans thusly: for a few generations, British people have been able to earn funded places at university - regardless of parental circumstances - so long as they earned high grades. The same high taxes underwriting the NHS also underwrite the university system, and for years the people got a lot for their money. They were encouraged to look at their achievement as earned, even if they were old Etonians with wealthy parents able to smooth all the rockiness out of getting to that point. Because fees were paid and you got a maintenance grant, there was some weight to the idea that being a student was your job for three years, a job you'd earned. It also leveled the playing field as much as possible and freed rich and poor parents alike from many of the now-mandatory obligations for parents to subsidize their kids. I find it bizarre that students in Britain seem no longer to think that they earn their places and parents who earned free educations think it's OK that their kids don't have the same opportunities as they did.

The best advice I can give someone who just misses getting into Oxbridge is to work hard on your BA, get a first or a 2.1, and do your MA at Oxford or Cambridge. That gets you the network with only one year's effort. I will totally cop to choosing the university with the best networking potential later - I was accepted at all the schools I applied to so the final choice depended on a) amount of financial aid offered and b) opportunities afterward - and because my college has a tangental relationship to Oxford I've never, in this country, felt excluded by people educated there.

BTW, it is not exceptional that Euan Blair got a partial scholarship to do an MA at Yale (or any other US school). People with worse degrees get scholarship wonga from many top US schools all the time.

for a few generations, British people have been able to earn funded places at university - regardless of parental circumstances - so long as they earned high grades. The same high taxes underwriting the NHS also underwrite the university system, and for years the people got a lot for their money. They were encouraged to look at their achievement as earned, even if they were old Etonians with wealthy parents able to smooth all the rockiness out of getting to that point. Because fees were paid and you got a maintenance grant, there was some weight to the idea that being a student was your job for three years, a job you'd earned. It also leveled the playing field as much as possible and freed rich and poor parents alike from many of the now-mandatory obligations for parents to subsidize their kids. I find it bizarre that students in Britain seem no longer to think that they earn their places and parents who earned free educations think it's OK that their kids don't have the same opportunities as they did.

well hang on. this bit would be valid until about 20 years ago. it's a lot different now. until about 20 years ago a small number of people got those funded university places, and other people, if they stayed at school went to polytechnics, which were not universities. there wasn't a level playing field: same as now, if you went to a private school or 'the better sort of state school', which is not unrelated to your parents' social class, which is a factor anyway [via cultural capital, via other stuff too], then you had a better chance of getting good grades and going to university.

n e ways, then the polytechnics got turned into universities, it wasn't possible to fund the increased number of university students as before, so in came the system of paying fees, i.e. going into debt aged 18 to go to university. there are way more university students now than twenty years. you might think the polytechnic system wasn't 'that bad' except that there was a degree (wordplay} of snobbery towards it, which changing their names hasn't actually altered that much. the last government wanted 50% of everyone to go to university, which is a lot. you don't need high grades to go.

the tories probably want fewer people to go to university, but don't say so.

I was accepted at all the schools I applied to so the final choice depended on a) amount of financial aid offered and b) opportunities afterward - and because my college has a tangental relationship to Oxford I've never, in this country, felt excluded by people educated there.

I may be v naive, but the thought of choosing a uni for "opportunities" never crossed my mind. I chose mine based on the city it was on, pretty much, and on the fact that it asked for better grades than the other offers I got. I was lucky enough to start in 1996, though, which meant I was one of the last years' intake not to have to pay fees.

HM, points taken but you're suggesting (inadvertently, I think) that poly students didn't get fees or grants paid. I still think whenever rich people emote about there being no money for whatever, that they are probably lying or don't want to spend it on people who aren't just like them.

My family's finances were pretty much set to 'skint' and I wanted to get the fuck out of Dodge. These things tend to sharpen the mind, as does growing up somewhere fairly egalitarian where you nevertheless discover how the world works versus how you'd like it to work. My dilemma was whether to do trad journalism at Northwestern (best course in the US for undergrads) or go to an art college with excellent fiction and expository writing courses. The college was near NYC, which I saw as the ultimate opportunity, so it won. It wasn't until I arrived there that I saw how starry it was or how the alumni were very good at looking after each other.

i couldn't find the example of grayling being an asshole that i wanted to, but i did find this at the new humanist, which is headlined 'AC Grayling politely rebukes an attempt to reconcile religion and science'. the word 'politely' is being used in some newfangled sense that i don't actually understand, in that headline, i think.

http://blog.newhumanist.org.uk/2009/03/ac-grayling-politely-rebukes-attempt-to.html

― thomp, Wednesday, 8 June 2011 13:37 (6 hours ago)

lol i remember that
http://blog.voyou.org/2006/11/25/curse-you-richard-dawkins/

http://versouk.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/cimg2348.jpg

o shi huge image. massive apologies to anyone whose browser didn't downsize it.

Grayling seems to me to epitomise a certain kind of academic/intellectual who is like a super-high functioning version of Steve Carell's character from Anchorman. They've somehow immersed themselves enough in the patterns and movements of a tiny culture to be pretty significantly successful in it, but whenever they overstep those narrow boundaries they're revealed to have an IQ of 58.

pfft, who knows. it's evidently open season on the guy; but it's 'richly amusing' to me that this whole thing has opened up another front in the war between the neo-god-bothering 'left' and #team_atheism.

Grayling doesn't seem so much like Brick as like those Doctor Hilary or Raj Persaud dudes who turn up on morning TV all the time i.e. maybe he is qualified to be a populariser but i'm not sure he's done any work ever that isn't just tabloid hackwork

also what's the god vs atheism angle? i missed that in the articles, except obv Dorkins' involvement. jesus our public "intellectuals" are lame, at least the French guys have the decency to take themselves difficult to understand

you guys had raymond williams

and dont forget jeremy clarkson

was william empson a public intellectual? he was the man

even I'm not old enough to remember if Williams or Empson had media profiles. our media was pretty different back then so it's quite possible. don't really think Grayling or Dorks are fit to be mentioned in the same breath.

also lol max

clarkson should start a university

University of Real Life, son

williams was fairly well known, empson not really. more of a specialist, not involved in any public causes. but not completely obscure.

also what's the god vs atheism angle?

oh eagleton (who made his name shitting on williams as it goes) is the most prominent hater so far.

yeah i picked that up in the Crazy Terry thread after i asked the question in here. also lol Marx not being total Whig History

also what's the god vs atheism angle? i missed that in the articles, except obv Dorkins' involvement.

grayling has been doing press lately for his new 'atheist's bible' (or whatever it's called) which compiles wisdom literature and i guess bits of philosophical reflection in a manner deliberately meant to mimic the bible, without being theistic (or supernatural, or something like that).

not like Grayling to publish a cut and paste job

Really Grayling should have got Toby Young on board, just before we shoot the lot of them into the sun.

Grayling seems to me to be similar to Alain de Botton, in the sense that his "philosophy" is along the lines of Rabbi Lionel Blair "that's like life" homilies, IMO.

Trying not to be drawn into this too much, but yeah, one thing that really strikes me is that I don't actually consider these people to be good draws as academics at all - they're mass-market paperback pulp pop humanities people. You'd get a much better class at a normal bloody university.

How about making attendance at NCH compulsory for anyone who goes to Young's "free school"?

Toby Young didn't come to any harm in Camden's state schools. Tosser.

i see that as an argument against Camden's state schools.

I don't actually consider these people to be good draws as academics at all - they're mass-market paperback pulp pop humanities people.

kinda groaning here. not even a big fan of colley or cannadine, but they're not what you just said.

yeah i think saying this guys don't have chops in a strictly academic sense is trying a bit hard

fucking philosophy anyway, what's the point of it?

Young draws on his own experience and offers Grayling the following advice: “Don’t give an inch. No compromise, no surrender.”

I'm sure he could fit in an hour a year to teach English Lit.

When it comes to "public intellectuals", Freddie Ayer stomps A.C. Grayling into a thousand million billon zillion particles

The real concern for state universities will be whether companies like the one i work for want to muscle in on the game - offering standardised, high-quality, brand-name education in London / Shanghai / Mumbai / wherever, undercutting fees and hoovering up staff with no requirement to provide unprofitable / niche courses.

― модный хипстер (ShariVari), Wednesday, 8 June 2011 15:56 (4 weeks ago) Bookmark

Four weeks ahead of the game!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-14011448

This is just the start. Much more significant a story than Grayling's finishing school.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2012/sep/18/ac-graylings-university-open-60-students

lol

yuk yuk yuk