has education funding increased?

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Allo V Psycho
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Re: has education funding increased?

Post by Allo V Psycho » Mon Feb 17, 2020 4:20 pm

plodder wrote:
Mon Feb 17, 2020 3:18 pm
Allo V Psycho wrote:
Mon Feb 17, 2020 2:30 pm
But there is a bind here, where Government forces Universities to behave like commercial institutions, then they are castigated for behaving like commercial institutions.
Which commercial institutions would cut quality whilst trying to keep hold of the customer's money? The only way that could work is if a) the contract is biased horribly against the customer, or b) they were a monopoly.
The sentence you quoted was a general reflection, rather than a summary of what I'd written before.

What I was specifically trying to explain is that something like overflow video lectures if student numbers surge unexpectedly, as described in the Guardian article, is not an active choice at all*. If there are more students than places in the lecture theatre, then more lecture theatres or staff cannot be magicked out of the air at short notice. And lectures split between one live site and remote sites are an entirely normal part of current and 'traditional' (i.e. since I were a lad) University teaching, not a scam of some kind. In fact, I'm now required to record my lectures, so students can choose not to attend, and this is a common situation. Nor are lectures the most expensive part of University education - on the contrary, lectures are relatively inexpensive, compared to labs, tutorials, student support, and student assessment, etc., and all these things have still to be provided to the increased number.

Can we genuinely try to identify what we agree on?

(1) I think some Universities are engaging in practices which in some cases are borderline unethical, and in some cases are just outright unethical.

(2) But the situation described in the Guardian article is not obviously one of them.

Do we agree on (1)? I think we might.
Have I persuaded you on (2)?

(3) In some cases, the unethical behaviour is driven by the consideration that if they do not behave unethically, they will go out of business
How do you feel about this one?

(4) In general, I think, in those cases, they are wrong: and that ethical behaviour would be a better long term financial strategy
Is this one where we would agree too?

(5) But commercial organisations often make this kind of error. My bank has just cut my interest rate by 50%. They are holding on to my money, while cutting the quality the account provided. Is that the kind of example you were looking for?

*As a technical comment, Universities can indeed attempt to overcome the offer contract. One university I know offered students a cash inducement to defer for a year, and some students chose to accept it. But that money came out of the current budget, so it negatively impacted on the students who didn't agree to defer in that year. From a Jeremy Bentham Utilitarian perspective, I think it came out about the same as admitting a larger than normal year would have done.

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