University Clearing: Students, the world wants you - TheNewTopical.com - current events, politics, culture, ethics, economics discussion forum

Zichao · #1 (**permalink**) 21-08-10, 12:05 PM

University Clearing: Students, the world wants you - Telegraph

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Dawn broke horribly early on Thursday for the thousands of teenagers who logged onto computers to get their university entrance results. For many, the day got even blacker, with the news they’d been rejected.

But even as the sky fell in, and media prophets foretold a dearth of student places for decades to come, one ray of sunshine peeped through the clouds. And it came from an unlikely source, across the English Channel.

In a sort of reverse Dunkirk operation, universities from France, Holland and even Germany, sought to transmit the message that they were prepared to rescue students whose hopes of college entry lay beached and washed up on British shores.

Forget your ill-fated application to do animal husbandry and particle physics at the College of the North Circular, urged the University of Maastricht; come to our picturesque hillside town (population 120,000), where instead of snakebite and White Lightning, the student binge drink of choice is an elegant herbal gin, or jenever, mixed with an aromatic wheat beer, Wyckse Witte.

Why lament getting the cold shoulder from a windblown UK campus, asked Parisian universities, when you could be smoking Gauloises and discussing Sartre in an atmospheric student café on the Rue Mouffetard?

Traditionally when faced with such blatant overseas blandishments, British parents have told their offspring to take no notice, darling, and walk on. Now, though, in a departure from our normal refrain about foreigners coming over and taking our jobs, we are starting to talk in more upbeat, even grateful tones, about them coming over here and taking our students.

On Monday, representatives from the San Raffaele Medical School, in Milan, are setting up for a day at Imperial College, London, where they will be touting for students. On September 25, the Yanks are taking over Kensington Town Hall; 100 of the biggest and best US colleges will spend the day recruiting undergraduates. Then in February, University College London plays host to the QS Top Universities Tour, which involves the world’s academic powerhouses attempting to win over our most promising young minds. Not so much a milk run, as a creaming-off.

In the past, all this would have been unthinkable; back in the 1970s, the most exotic course a young Brit might contemplate was brewing at Heriot-Watt. Now, though, a panorama of possibilities is opening up.

And it’s not just a matter of choosing a foreign university based on fuzzy notions like Germany is good for engineering, or Sweden is good for sociology. Just as schools have league tables, so do universities. Consult the QS World University Rankings Guide (home | Top Universities), and you get data far harder and more penetrating than in any glossy prospectus.

Not only are the institutions graded overall, from No 1 (Harvard) and No 2 (Cambridge) to No 399 (University of Bremen), but they are given marks in respect of everything from speciality subjects to staff-pupil ratios, from their postgraduate research performance to the esteem (or otherwise) in which they are held by potential employers.

Suddenly, the choice of universities open to British pupils is no longer limited to red-brick or concrete-and-glass, but includes Dutch-gable, Alpine-log and even mud hut (if you’re doing anthropology).

Once upon a time, we would never have considered such a wide, and frighteningly foreign range of options. Two things, though, have changed. First, the national attitude towards university entrance has altered, in the space of just a few months, from All Shall Go to None Shall Pass. Second, the fees have gone up.

Also, while the cost of going to a British university is £3,000 and set to rise, the fees for many European universities have, amazingly, remained earthbound. An undergraduate year at Maastricht University (rated 116th in the world) costs £1,500 in fees, while at the Technical University of Munich, (rated 55th in the world), it’s just £845, and at the École Normale Supérieure, in Paris (rated 28), the annual bill is a jaw-dropping £160.

Astonishingly, these bargain-basement prices are available to us too. Thanks to the European Union and its newly created European Higher Education Area, degrees at many European universities not only synchronise with British qualifications (ie a BA in France is the same as a BA in England), but the cost to us is exactly the same as to the locals. Even Scottish students are afforded the same rate, despite their hardly generous policy on fees (non-Scots pay them, Scots don’t)

Sacrébleu, as they say in France. At long last, instead of telling us what fish we can catch and how bendy our bananas can be, the EU has introduced a ruling which might actually be of some benefit to us.

It gets even better: an increasing number of these courses are conducted in English, our language having had the good fortune to achieve world domination without us firing a shot. Not that continental universities are doing this to be nice to us, mind you; it’s just that if they want to appeal to an international clientele (and more and more do), then they have to put on courses in a language everyone will understand.

Of course, there are plenty of non-European universities which use English, too. And whereas in the past, American (£20,000 a year) and Australian fees (£10,000) have been prohibitively high, the differential may no longer be so large, should our rates go up (and everyone says they will).

The only downside, is that you can’t take out a student loan to pay overseas fees. On the plus side, though, the Australian and New Zealand academic year starts in February, so if you’ve missed out in the UK, you’ve got till October to submit your application to, say, the University of Canberra (rated 17) or Auckland (61).

Nor does the list of global options end there. The internationalisation process has led to some unlikely academic pairings: Bolton University is offering unsuccessful UK applicants a chance to go instead to its sister Ras Al Khaimah campus in Dubai.

Meanwhile, Nottingham University has sprouted two identical-twin institutions on the other side of the world: one at Kuala Lumpur, in Malaysia, the other at Ningbo, near Shanghai (all lessons in English, fees £9,000-£12,500 per year). Both offer bona fide Nottingham University degrees, plus genuine architectural echoes of the East Midlands.

Even more unconventionally, you could go to an international university, without leaving the country. The American InterContinental University in London offers degrees not in traditional academic disciplines, but in globally “portable” subjects that can convert into careers (fashion, business, interior design and visual communications).

However, the most appealing option must be the travel and tourism degree at the University of Central Florida. As well as providing undergraduates with what amounts to an apprenticeship in a growing industry, it includes a work experience secondment to Disneyworld in Orlando.

Time was, that would have been thought a Mickey Mouse degree. But not any more.

True enough, except that those university world rankings tables are a load of retarded, parochial BS.

Zichao · #2 (**permalink**) 21-08-10, 12:45 PM

A-level results: Top universities secretly list 'banned' subjects ? teachers | Education | The Guardian

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The country's top universities have been called on to come clean about an unofficial list or lists of "banned" A-level subjects that may have prevented tens of thousands of state school pupils getting on to degree courses.

Teachers suspect the Russell Group of universities – which includes Oxford and Cambridge – of rejecting outright pupils who take A-level subjects that appear on the unpublished lists.

The lists are said to contain subjects such as law, art and design, business studies, drama and theatre studies – non-traditional A-level subjects predominantly offered by comprehensives, rather than private schools.

The London School of Economics is thought to be the only top university to publish its own list of "non-preferred" subjects. Cambridge University did so until last year.

Teachers accused universities of putting comprehensive pupils at a disadvantage by refusing to publish their lists. Some claimed the lists were a filter that enabled the most prestigious universities to accept more private school pupils than state-educated ones.

Already private school pupils dominate entry to top universities and could do so more in future. A-level results published on Thursday showed that selective private schools continue to outperform comprehensives in terms of A and A* grades.

Private school pupils are three times more likely to score the highest grade than comprehensive pupils, achieving 30% of the total number of A* grades when their pupils accounted for just 14% of entries. Comprehensive schools achieve 30% of the A* grades on 43% of entries.

But even the brightest state school pupils, with a string of As and A*s, stand little chance of a place at a top university this year if they have taken one or more of the A-level subjects on the unofficial lists, the teachers said.

These students will join this year's unprecedented scramble for university places. An estimated 180,000 students are predicted to be turned away from every degree course starting this autumn because of record numbers of applications.

John Bangs, former head of education at the National Union of Teachers, said he strongly suspected that there was a single unofficial list of banned subjects. "The list is built on the assumption that these subjects are easier than others and not academic enough," he said. "This is just another sign of the Russell Group using a filter to stop people they don't want from getting into their universities. They have no concern about fairness. They should be far more transparent. If they have this list, let them publish it and show us the evidence that these subjects are easier."

Andy Gardner, of the Institute of Career Guidance, said he had confronted Russell Group universities about the alleged list in the past. "I think there is certainly an element of there being subjects that [the Russell Group] doesn't rate," Gardner, who advises state school pupils on their university choices, said. "Children in state schools are disadvantaged by this."

Mike Griffiths, headteacher of Northampton School for Boys and a council member of the Association of School and College Leaders, said he suspected universities of rejecting students who did drama A-level in particular. One of his pupils has three A*s but no place at university and he believes this may be because he took drama. "Universities need to be more honest about what criteria they are using [to select pupils]," he said. "I don't have a problem with universities having subjects that they consider to be less helpful, but they need to be upfront about it."

Geoff Lucas, secretary of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference, which represents headteachers of 250 independent schools, said universities must "come clean if there were unwritten rules" about so-called banned subjects. State school pupils were more likely to choose a subject in the unofficial list because independent schools mainly offer traditional subjects, Lucas said. "Students have the absolute right to see this list."

Wendy Piatt, director general of the Russell Group, said no Russell Group university barred any A-level subject.

"University websites typically include details on 'essential' and 'preferred' A-levels to help students maximise their chances of gaining entry to competitive degree courses," she said. "Most provide very clear and comprehensive information on required A-level subjects and which ones will not be considered when making admissions decisions. Students would be well advised to take very careful note of such requirements."

This week's A-level results showed that pupils were increasingly shunning so-called "soft" subjects in favour of science, economics and maths.

Law? That's harsh.