Do we need universities?

With the current hoo-hah in the UK surrounding the proposed tuition fees increase, I thought I’d explore the idea of whether we even need universities at all?

Information used to expensive and hard to come by, so it made sense to have institutions which could amass this information and dispense it to those who needed to learn it. Information is now somewhere between cheap and free, so what is the role of the university? It no longer has a monopoly on information, so its roles are:

• A place to engage with others who are learning and teaching
• An assessor, to validate the learning you have done

Contact time can be pretty crap. I didn’t find many lectures any more useful than sitting down with a textbook and some articles (and the usefulness declined as the number of lecturers using Powerpoint increased, so this is definitely trending in the wrong direction). Seminars were sometimes good, but were a tiny proportion of the week. Contact time should be part of the enriching experience of going to university, but it often isn’t.

That leaves the role of a university as an assessor, which is pretty damn useful. But if that is all you really need, why not just cut it back to that? My template for low-cost degrees is as follows:

• The “university” publishes a syllabus of material that you will be examined on, along with example requirements and exam questions etc.
• The university examines you on it.

That’s it. Why pay £9000 a year for derisory contact time and bad lecturers droning on in front of cluttered Powerpoint slides? If you have the gumption to find material yourself and keep disciplined about learning, why not just pay for the validation at the end?

All generalised objections to this are irrelevant. Yes, some courses need expensive lab facilities – it’s not for those courses. Yes, some universities have excellent contact time – it’s not intended to replace those. Yes, some people still need to be led by the nose through their education – it’s not for them. Yes, some people really want the university experience – to which I say “Go forth to a normal university and have a great time!”. But some people don’t want or need those things, and some courses don’t require it either.

Let people choose. I could definitely have done my MSc like that – the material was close enough to what I had already done, all I really needed was the validation. It would have saved money and I could have carried on working and not moved to the other end of the country.

What do I wish I knew about the Real World before I started working?

This post is part of a blog series on Brazen Careerist being sponsored by JobSTART101.  They asked Brazen members to answer the question:  What do I wish I knew before I started working?  Here’s my response:

I have now started working in the Real World on three separate occasions. My first Real World job was straight after post-16 education. Then I went to university. Then I got a non-graduate job (although having a degree helped). Then I went to university again. Then I got a graduate job, and that’s the job I’m in today.

Each of those jobs was completely different, as was each job hunt.

The first job – chemistry analyst for a water company – I applied for almost on a whim. I had taken a year out before university and was doing casual work to keep me in beer. I saw the job advertised in the New Scientist and applied for it because it was the only job in there that didn’t require a degree.

The second job was as a research and information assistant for a local authority. I had graduated but for personal reasons could not move home for work, nor was commuting far an option. I had turned down a PhD because I wanted to get away from university for a while. I had reluctantly gone to the graduate careers fairs on campus, but was at a loss. I hadn’t got the idea of transferable skills into my head and looked at every stall thinking “why would they employ someone with an ecology degree?”. I always left thinking that it was only for lawyers and accountants.

My final job hunt was an entirely different affair. The masters course I studied was very industry-oriented so we had lots of companies come in and give presentations, and between Christmas and Easter the question was always “How many graduate schemes have you applied for?”. I approached this with gusto, pleased to finally be undertaking a focussed job hunt for an environmental consultancy role. Thing is, I didn’t need a masters degree to go for these jobs; it’s just that it never occurred to me that I should apply for jobs with engineering firms when I was job-hunting the previous time around.

So, all of my encounters with the Real World have been new and different. I haven’t yet moved directly from one Real World job to another, I always tend to do a degree in between which is not really a sustainable practice. If there is one thing to relate about the Real World it is that it is massive and varied, and you will probably never comprehend the existence of more than a fraction of it. I’ve seen three bits of it because I keep hopping in and out, but I was constrained each time by my limited knowledge of what the possibilities were. The Real World’s variety of landscape means that there are many opportunities, but you need to know to look. The danger of the Real World is that the soil is soft underfoot, and it is easy to get stuck in a rut that you have ploughed. From your rut, it can appear that the only way is forward in the line your rut follows. This is fine if you are ploughing in the direction you want to go, but if you aren’t then it can take a lot of effort and courage to look up and out and see what else is out there.

Paying the way to Mars

I’ve had an article published in The Mars Quarterly, the Mars Society magazine. You can find the preview version here which, you will be excited to know, includes my article.

Here is a taster:

We have the technical know-how to send humans to Mars if we choose. Where the whole endeavour fails, of course, is money.

The obvious source of money is government spending. This worked extremely well to get to the Moon. The goal was set in 1962 and achieved seven years later. That is a phenomenal achievement, but the

effort could not be sustained for long after the race was “won”.

That success makes the solution for Mars seem so simple: persuade the President, get money. But the space race was a product of the Cold War; a very different time to the present, which lacks the burning imperative to climb hard and fast toward the stars. Unless a new space race begins, such an imperative will continue to be absent.

I dumped an unedited first draft of this on the blog some time ago, here.

PS: That photo is a little old now – I no longer have a goatee, although the youthful good looks remain.

Incompetence as a sign of personal progress

At the beginning of our first lesson, our climbing instructor told us that there were four stages to learning a new skill.  These were unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, and unconscious competence.  I think it is the second stage that causes most problems, often leading to someone refusing even to try learning a new skill.  When you are looking at problems like adult illiteracy, this gets serious.

This is my understanding of the four stages:

• UNCONSCIOUS INCOMPETENCE.  This is where you are before you even start to learn to drive, climb or whatever.  You can’t do it and you don’t even know how to go about it.  This is a comfortable place to be.
• CONSCIOUS INCOMPETENCE.  This is the painful bit.  You know what you are supposed to be doing, but you are not skilled enough to do so.  You try, you fail. you try again, and fail again.  The car keeps stalling; you can’t reach that hand-hold that the climbing instructor assures you is within reach if you just straightened your leg and shifted your balance a bit.
• CONSCIOUS COMPETENCE.  Progress.  You can now do it, but you have to concentrate fiercely on not stalling.  That hand-hold, you can now reach it but you have to psyche yourself up to it and that one move is an achievement in itself.
• UNCONSCIOUS COMPETENCE.  Success!  The driving is becoming effortless, and you don’t even think about reaching those hand-holds any more, you just go for it and move on up.

The trouble with learning a new skill is that moving from stage 1 to stage 2 is entirely about becoming acutely aware of what you cannot do. This can make you feel awful about yourself.

Although I don’t go as often as I would like to, I still evangelise about climbing and am always keen to introduce people to it.  Unfortunately this can mean that you are introducing people to the dip of conscious incompetence.  I always try and describe how great the feeling of finally reaching those hand-holds is – of getting to the competence stages and seeing how far you have come.  I guess that good instructors make a point of focussing on your future successes rather than your current failures, which after all are just a means to an awesome end.

Soaring Expulsion Rate is a “Blip”

This weeks Birmingham Post has an article entitled “Soaring expulsion rate is ‘blip’”.  Apparently:

A huge increase in the number of children permanently expelled from Birmingham schools is an unexplainable one-off blip, education chiefs have insisted.  Just over 80 pupils were regarded as so disruptive that they were removed from mainstream education by city head teachers in a single term.  The figure, for Autumn 2009, represented a 40% increase on the same period in the previous year

By the standards of some reporting of statistics, this isn’t a bad article.  However, it still provides no context, without which we cannot make a judgement.  For example, what if the history of school expulsions in recent terms was like this?

Very little change, and then the rate shoots up.  This could be something serious.  However what if it was like this?

Suddenly, the jump is just part of a history of wide fluctuations.  Also, notice how in both graphs the penultimate data point is missing.  The article tells us that over 80 (I called it 81) pupils were expelled in Autumn 2009, a 40% increase “on the same period last year” i.e. Autumn 2008.  What was the figure for Spring 2009?  We have no idea, it could be anything.  For all we know it could be higher than 81, in which case the most recent figures are part of an encouraging trend.

Finally, what is the figure in percentage terms?  I couldn’t immediately find the school age population of the city so I crunched some numbers.  Wikipedia tells us that in the 2001 Census the population of Birmingham was 1,113,000.  Of these, 23.4% were under 16.  This calculates as 260,442.  If we assume that there are equal numbers in all of the year groups under 16 (obviously false, but I’m a busy guy), then we can say that 11/16ths of this figure are at school – about 180,000.  So, last term, about 0.045% of pupils were expelled, against 0.031% a year before.  Obviously these population figures are derived from figures that are nearly 10 years out of date, and have rounding errors and incorrect (but reasonable) assumptions thrown in.  Nevertheless, the figure is very very small.

When reading an article about figures, always ask yourself what you are NOT being told.  Not that you are being mislead, but what different backgrounds could actually cast the results in a different light, as we have done here?