Bishop Hill Is there any point to universities?
May 14, 2015 Academia Bjorn Lomborg's opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal looks at the hate campaign that saw his proposed thinktank at the University of Western Australia consigned to ashes.
The new center in Perth was to be a collaboration with a think tank I run, Copenhagen Consensus, which for a decade has conducted similar research. Working with more than 100 economists, including seven Nobel laureates, we have produced research that measures the social and economic benefits of a wide range of policies, such as fighting malaria, reducing malnutrition, cutting air pollution, improving education and tackling climate change.
Therein lay the problem. This kind of comparison can upset those who are committed to advocating less effective investments, particularly poor responses to climate change.
When you think about it, a university that doesn't want to be associated with a think tank that includes no fewer than seven Nobel laureates is probably on shaky ground when claiming to be a seat of learning. This failure of UWA in its primary role - to stimulate learning - is also a point alluded to by Lomborg.
What is the lesson for young academics? Avoid producing research that could produce politically difficult answers. Steer clear of results that others might find contentious. Consider where your study could take you, and don’t go there if it means upsetting the status quo.
Universities have always operated as a kind of filter for employers, weeding out those who lack the intellectual capabilities that are seen as imperative in order to thrive as top management in large organisations. However, now that half the population attends a university, that role is gone, or at least nearly gone.
Their other role was as centres of intellectual curiousity, where researchers would be able to thrive by asking and answering difficult questions on one subject or another. But what the crushing of Lomborg, and others before him shows is that this role has gone too (or, again, nearly so).
That being the case, what is the point of a university?
Reader Comments (89)
The answer is not a lot, from personal experience the teaching is often detached from reality, undertaken by people with little understanding of the world beyond their institution. I have come to regard the academic world as more like a benefit system for the literate.
Former students of University of Western Australia have just seen a fall in their future earnings/employment potential.
No climate alarmist could have foreseen this happening
Academia is now a devalued activity.
With my oldest child nearing university age I find myself scrutinizing these schools very closely. The brand of top universities doesn't cut it any more. So many of them intolerant, close minded and just downright ridiculous.
The liberal arts have been corrupted beyond recognition. Critical thinking a dying memory.
The best bet seems to be in a good engineering tech or hard science degree, with self-education of the humanities on one's own time.
I echo your sentiment in the concluding paragraph. Even a first today is so commonplace as to be meaningless in terms of marking you out today as anything special. This is not lost on the brighter graduates who quickly look to achieving a Master's in order to put some breathing space in terms of qualifications. Today, more than ever, it depends on where you have studied not the level of the degree. In some cases, the qualification certificate itself, could quite cheerfully be shredded, so little does it add to your life chances.Bizarrely, some qualifications such as PGCE have increased in perceived value owing to the increasingly onerous entry qualification, and similarly if you have attended a Russel Group institution, albeit some many decades ago you have suddenly earned some academic brownie points.
Many countries, Britain among them, are drifting towards the American model whereby pretty much anyone who can pay can do an undergraduate course; accordingly the courses are of a low intellectual standard and not much use to anyone, the real 'university education' comes at graduate school level. Most of the "50% of university educated" population are royally ripped off, getting nothing much for a lot of money; those who go on to grad school do get the 'university education' their forebears got, but between the ages of roughly 22 and 24 as against 18 and 21. Perhaps that doesn't matter. Anyway lots of people make lots of money and thats probably the bit that does matter.....
50 years ago academia was a place of knowledge and skill. Now it has poor quality reserch and activism, all paid for by the public!
Of course there is a role to universities. It's inane to say otherwise. Any alternative to them would be them with a different name.
This is not to say that there are no problems. There are many, deep, fundamental ones at the very structural level. I've been an academic for almost three decades at universities in four continents. I would torch entire departments and probably throw out at least half of all the faculty I've had dealings with. Furthermore, as a longtime author, reviewer, and editor, I am distraught by the low standards of many, many journals.
Yet, what worthy professionals cannot speak in similar terms about their own fields? Is nursing better off? Show me.
I think this was a legacy from New Labour that has travelled the world! The claim that we need a better educated workforce to deal with the global chanllengesd of the future, etc. It was their ambition to send ever more young people to university for the "experience" that fewer enjoyed before. They had acheived their objective. The trouble is, we have hundreds of thousands of students qualifying each year, & only 25,000 graduate qualifed jobs in the market! It makes no sense. We now have a severe shortage of artisans throughout the nation. We need carpenters, bricklayers, plumbers, electricians, engineers, architects, etc.
Fee them plenty of bananas whilst global warming still allows them to grow.
What is the opposite of diversity?
University!
NCC1701E, please go easy on the bananas. A world wide increase in demand could increase prices and shortages. The primates in climate science won't have a discarded skin to slip on.
The role of the university is to confer a credential -- the degree. In some cases it is also a useful for networking.
And then there are the parties.
Brute Is nursing better off? Show me.
No it isn't. They are puffed up idiots with Mickey Mouse degrees and are now running the NHS.
This girl has a nursing degree from UWS Paisley.
"Still is..I have a degree and I still don't understand the clocks going back/forward "
https://twitter.com/NicolePirie/status/526675919386451968
I told one of their lecturers I turned down a job teaching nurses (computing) because I saw the access course students. He said 'have a social conscience, do you ' ?
It's a race to the bottom.
Uwa being the place of Lew and the shrinking sheep of St Kilda, I'm amazed Lomborg wanted to be associated with it
I think it was Henry II who gave a charter to Oxford University as he needed educated men to run what would now be described as the civil service. When I went to uni, (1968), grants were available for those whose parents were of modest means, and as my mother was a widow, I got the maximum assistance, all my fees paid and the maximum living grant; I was lucky. (Praise be to the Manchester LEA). In the '60's, the university system as being expanded, as it was thought, probably correctly, that more young people could benefit from a university education, who could not access it at that time, and thereby, the state and industry would benefit. Somewhere along the line, the system was expanded, with the cynical objective, I believe, of keeping young people off the unemployment rolls. (I've been out of the UK since 1982, so I don't know the details) I read metallurgy, because I was inclined to the sciences, and I thought it would get me a good job in "the white heat of the technological revolution". sarc off. It paid off, but I don't understand why young people in the U.S.A, particularly, and Australia, and now the U.K. are paying for degrees that won't get them useful employment outside of a McDonalds.
I remember a statement by Rex Mottram, from Brideshead Revisited, about Oxford - "I was never here - it just means you start three years behind the other fellow" Seems more apposite now than then, I think.
Alan the Brit 12.52pm "25,000 graduate jobs when what we need are carpenters.............engineers.. etc"!!!!
For God's are we still repeating that old canard that engineering is a manual skill like bricklaying (no disrespect) and not a highly academic field with a practical application?
I have no sympathy.
Lomborg was an early jumper on the bandwagon, and has done his share of suppressing dissent when people pointed out that there were fundamental problems with the science.
Now he is bit by the same mindlessness that he displayed earlier. Fine. Just let him realize that he can't say:
"I'm not evil - I have a religious belief in climate change too - just a different approach to costing it!"
Academic freedom demands full freedom to consider all aspects of climate change - including the hypothesis that it might not be happening. Until Lomberg concedes this, his complaints will pass me by...
Correction. I was spluttering so much I got the time wrong 12.00 not 12.52
Manniac, @12.52, see you read Small Dead Animals, (http://smalldeadanimals.com) too. Highly recommended to anybody who hasn't found it yet.
@Anthony Hanwell: No. I am an engineer. I think many today are a lot wiser than they were in bringing engineering & Structural Engineering to the fore, & I & my local colleagues & my Institution, did much to raise our profile with schools, colleges, & the public, during our centenary celebrations, & believe it or not, daytime tv programmes have improved our lot yet further, as far as public understanding is concerned. Many no longer think "engineer" followed by "oily rag" I am delighted to say, although we still do not yet enjoy the standing that our European & North American colleagues enjoy! Unfortunately.
I have come to regard the academic world as more like a benefit system for the literate.
May 14, 2015 at 11:25 AM | Unregistered Commenter anon
...or an asylum for academics who cannot cope with real life outside their ivory towers.
Having read this , I can think of only one organisation that would employ a 'person' with an MA in such a useful subject as 'gender and media studies'. As one commenter noted "I blame Tony Blair for pretending these places are universities, I have to pay back thousands after going to a proper university and doing a proper course because selfish, nasty little people like her can piss taxpayer money up the wall being a lefty idiot pretending to be an academic."
The point of universities? To provide sheltered well rewarded employment for academics safe from harsh demands to produce useful outputs derived from observations of the real world rather than from political imperatives. And to perpetuate that system in the future for the benefit of academics yet unborn.
Academia is just a holding pen for defective cattle.
Alan the Brit says:
New Labour (and specifically Blair) created the 50% need to go to university nonsense. The argument he put (I remember very clearly wanting to throw something at the TV when he did his QT style interview) was that on average a graduate earns 20% (or some such) more over their lifetime than a non-graduate, so if more people go to university everyone will be better off. Of course, they didn't take the argument to its logical conclusion - what would happen to salaries if everyone went to university?
But the rot did not start with New Labour, it started with the Conservatives and the policy decision to effectively do away with polytechnics and rebrand them all as universities, hugely lowering the threshold for university entry and thereby lowering standards across the lot. Very few universities or departments resisted. I think this was under John Major.
I visited my old university department for a reunion dinner in 1994, some 10 years after I graduated. My old lecturers were already reporting grade creep downwards in A level standards (about a whole grade by then). My old department had trebled in size from 30 graduates per year to 100, but they admitted that probably only 30% would have graduated had they been there in 1984. And finally, the joint honours I took was equivalent to about 1.5 degrees, with about 2/3 in each of the majors (one from each of two departments). By 1994 you could get a degree on just the 3/4 from one department.
So Blair and New Labour were stage 2, John Major's government was stage 1.
Universities could do well to read this piece of economics that won a Nobel:
http://cowles.econ.yale.edu/P/cd/d03b/d0354.pdf
Undergraduate degrees are no longer worthwhile labels, according to Stiglitz Theory of Screening.
thinkingscientist
Correct. Around 1992/3, the Major government changed things for self aggrandising publicity reasons. Worse than that, they introduced cheating as a way of life in post school education. At the start of the rebranding, students weren't capable of doing university work.
When you add thug management, you have a situation where no one cares any more.
esmiff, you are ignoring New Labour's successful education policy, to get all students to think alike.
Somewhere along the line, there was confusion, about the rights and wrongs of Free Education, and Free Thinking, so today's students get the best of both worlds. Neither. The result being, that students are none the wiser, about their failing education, but are universally conditioned to believe they are betta than evah b4.
My wife is a UWA Alum and she got sent this from the Vice Chancellor:
http://www.news.uwa.edu.au/201505087564/message-vice-chancellor-australian-consensus-centre
How can he remain in place? Does this man have any integrity? To write these comments about what the Copenhagen Concensus project is and then still cave in to the pressure - and remain in his post as VC - shows such a lack of integrity that I am stunned. It is easy for us to say "stand up and be counted" when our jobs are not on the line, but for Paul Johnson to not resign over this has completely destroyed his credibility.
By the way, my wife has just removed herself from all connection with UWA.
Lots of grumpy old men talking about how things were much tougher when they went to school.
Reading the comments to this post, one can wonder what Monty Python would make of them -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOSAFXrTiME
Tag don't keep shouting the same things. When I find my reading glasses, I will be able to fit the new hearing aid batteries, and hear the doorbell, because the AA are coming round to fix the puncture in my motability scooter.
The local university students had tremendous excitement the other day, in 'show and tell', when one of them brought in a strange object, that none of them could identify. It was a pen. Then they all went to remedial classes in 'walking, without colliding with lamp posts' which most of them had not studied since they were 14, and had to wear hi-vis waistcoats.
The dog next door to me got a social science degree not long ago. He tried for an advanced degree but failed miserably. I asked him what the subject was. He replied 'Fetching a stick'.
Alan the Brit: "We need carpenters, bricklayers, plumbers, electricians, engineers, architects, etc.
I agree with your sentiments, but you've made the typically British mistake of assuming "engineers" are the same as plumbers, or carpenters. If you believe an engineer doesn't need to be educated to degree level and beyond you must be very nervous each time you board an aircraft, or cross a bridge. The same applies for architects, except, they rely totally on the engineers turning their ideas into viable structures.
esmiff, well what do you expect? How is a dog expected to know which end of a stick to pick up? If a stick is not clearly labelled, who knows what disasters might happen? Think of the damage that might occur, if an untrained dog tried to pick up a tree by branches 50metres in the air. The fact that a dog only tries to pee against the bit closest to the ground, is just an evolutionary fluke. Until climate scientists came along, it was just a fluke that any observations were about the weather.
Of course, with proper instructions, or Directives, Climate Scientists can tell us this year was hotter than last year, and next year will be hotter. It takes all the guesswork out of it. Like the dog confronted with a properly labelled stick.
golf charlie
Being a fervent warmist, I assumed he'd be au faux with hockey sticks. Apparently not.
The best bet seems to be in a good engineering tech or hard science degree, with self-education of the humanities on one's own time. Chip I couldn't agree more. We desperately need engineers, of all disciplines, that can think. Unfortunately, the thinking part is being removed by the present university system.
The role of the university is to confer a credential -- the degree. In some cases it is also a useful for networking.
May 14, 2015 at 1:12 PM | Speed
The only problem with that is the said degree is seldom worth the paper it is written on.
Those doing the teaching are so far removed from the real world conditions they are teaching as to be useless anywhere than in university. This is the reason that all the 'good ideas' regarding global warming/climate change/ whatever it is called today are totally impractical and will not work in the real world.
Until universities remove all the left leaning green hangers on and start to employ people that know the subject because they have work experience in the real world they will become more useless and irrelevant over time.
She-who-need-no-longer-be-obeyed did a Fine Arts degree (1997-2000) as a mature student. The concensus of her colleagues by the end was that they hadn't been taught the basic skills. I still suspect that the staff didn't have them to teach. Perhaps a better term for some places would be 'Nugatorium,' rather than University.
I never even contemplated going to University when I finally settled on a musical carreer. OK if your main study is church music or musicology(?). 46 years ago I went to the Royal Manchester College of Music, and was taught piano by one International Competition winner, and two former child prodigies. They really had the skills.
It was a lousy idea to drag academics out of their ivory towers. It just allows them to do more damage.
esmiff the problem for any man, dog or even God trying to pick up the Holy Hockey Stick, is knowing how many pieces it may fall into. The imaginary pieces are very difficult to find, and glue back together.
Allan M " ...... it just allows them to do more damage"
The reason many go to University now, is to WIN more damages. You don't even need to study law, if you can blame someone else.
May 14, 2015 at 3:10 PM | Rob
Given the way the UWA's VC handled the fallout from the Lew & Cook papers I'm not sure if he has any credibility left to lose.
There clearly is a point to universities, to provide basic research and to teach. And presently they confer certification of knowledge against certain standards - increasingly at a greater and greater cost to the student.
However, the discussion has veered into public policy with respect to access, cost and value of the services they provide. The 50% target set by the old Labour government, you could argue, was set for two reasons: (1) for social mobilisation reasons - people with degrees generally earn more in later life than those without and it seemed unfair to exclude some people from the opportunity to get a degree; and (2) for economic growth reasons - there is an economic theory called endogenous growth theory which stipulates that a better educated workforce can produce more - and thus by sending more people to university the UK will have a more educated and productive workforce and hence be richer in the future.
Now clearly you can argue for and against points 1 and 2. For example, to achieve point 1, standards will have to be 'more flexible' to allow an increase in attendance, as clearly the standard in the past was so steep that less than 10% of the population was capable of attaining a degree, less any higher awards. Whether this is necessarily a bad thing depends on whether useful skills are attained whilst studying for a degree - which touches upon point 2. It is skills in combination with knowledge that drives wealth creation and innovation. Given the slowdown in UK productivity widely reported at the moment, there might be scant useful skills being learnt proficiently at university but the causes of this slowdown are undoubtedly far more complex (my pet hypothesis is that the slowdown is due to the proliferation of new technologies that provide little real benefit and just replicate old ways of doing things, but take time to master).
My personal gripe with the higher education sector at the moment though rests on their refusal to lower the costs of certification. Any individual could in theory embark on a careful study of a subject on their own, but could never receive certification of their knowledge against any standard, without first forking out £30,000 for tuition fees. But the innovation that is needed to start bringing these certification costs down won't happen whilst 18 year olds continue to attend and pay the fees. I don't see any change in the system for at least 10 years, or until when those who didn't benefit from attending university start making political gripes forcing the hand of a government to provide incentives for universities to innovate and cut the costs of certification.
I don't know Australia, but if it was the UK I'd read it as a huge political faux pas by UWA. Who, in the public sector, would turn down cash and a recommended appointee from the Prime Minister's Office? Senior politicians don't like to have their noses rubbed in the dirt by public servants. However, they do seem to take sadistic delight from a long slow revenge against minions who cross them.
I was thinking something similar, Antman. It might lead some politicians to wonder if there is any more government money the university doesn't need.
One blogger who vehemently opposed the funding of a Consensus Center said:-
Economics is about the recognition that resources are scarce, so to achieve the best possible policy outcomes you need to prioritize. When I challenged said blogger (who was also a commentator at BH until recently) to come up with his superior economics to that of Nobel prize-winners he was a tad upset, and changed his line of attack.
the educational system as whole functions with near perfection to it's intended goal...
which is to maintain the social and economic status quo
as the 1% grows ever richer the university system will grow more essential to their power base as academia produces even more already hilarious attempts to convince us to believe in their superiority
and ordinary people will slowly stop seeing education as a realistic path to social mobility
... I must leave now 'cause the guy with the newly minted Masters degree says my espresso is ready
Dumbing down school exams risks 'catastrophe', warns Royal Society of Chemistry
The dumbing down of school science exams risks creating a "catastrophic" shortage of skilled workers, experts have warned.
Scientists said a lack of rigour in GCSEs - fuelled by a culture of "teaching to the test" - was destroying teenagers' problem-solving and thinking skills.
It came as research suggested standards demanded by schools have dramatically declined in the last 50 years.
In a study, 1,300 of the brightest 16-year-olds were presented with questions from old O-level and GCSE papers.
An average of one-in-seven questions from tests taken in the 60s and 70s were answered correctly. Even pupils awarded elite A* grades in corresponding GCSEs this summer struggled with traditional questions.
The Royal Society of Chemistry said the report provided "first hard evidence of catastrophic slippage in school science standards".
It insisted that Government boasts of rising standards were an "illusion" fuelled by easier tests and better exam preparation. The RSC has now launched a Downing Street petition calling for GCSEs to be dramatically toughened up amid fears ministers are "failing an entire generation".
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/3526199/Dumbing-down-school-exams-risks-catastrophe-warns-Royal-Society-of-Chemistry.html
esmith: In the sixties, I had a great maths teacher in my senior school and, along with most of the class, the final external exams were a piece of cake and we all got a wee bit cocky.
He pricked our bubble by giving us tripos questions from the 19th, or early 20th, Century and, so, I feel a bit of sympathy for the 1300 above.