The Times Higher education awards are out and the winner for ‘best student experience’ is Loughborough; that means that their students rated the lecturers, the courses, the social life and the student union higher than any other place in the UK. Last years winner was Swansea.
It seems that the extra ciriclua activities and the social life is what won it, that in combination with high levels of satisfaction for academic standards. Cambridge came second in student satisfaction, followed by third place St Andrews.

Apparently some new universities also put in a good performance, with the universities of Chester, Portsmouth and Central Lancashire coming in the top 30.

What does the university of the 21st Century look like? Virtual perhaps, with virtual tutors, video conferencing, and ‘distance learning’ students, all working harmoniously via broadband connections? Well, no actually!

That despite many proclaiming that it would be on the back of the IT revolution. But this forgets a crucial element, that for most of us this virtual interaction is not very rewarding when compared to ‘meat space’.

When one of Harvard universities senior administrators, J Summers, talks about constructing a truly 21st century university, his emphasis is not on the virtual, far from it. Rather it is to provide the most nuanced and direct education to their students, and this means increasing the faculty and changing the culture within those faculties to encourage interaction with students - this is what will provide a cuting edge education, the coming together of these two in real space, where the pedigree of an idea, in all its nuanced forms, can be explored, wrestled over and debated. This cut and thrust of debate, reasoning, reflecting and thinking, all in real time, is at the heart of a quality education.

What it is not is some new ‘distance learning’ course, with a reading list and a so called ‘on-line tutor’ to email whilst awaiting your essay grade. Harvard University know this, and whilst many of our new universities resolutely don’t, in the very least prospective students need to.

It may well be the fact that my new local secondary school has got a better ratio of teaching staff to students than does my local new university. I wonder how many students actually realise this?

This is principally because UK universities have seen big increases in productivity from staff, over the past 10 years full time staff totals have fallen from 111,000 to 107,000 when at the same time annual numbers of graduates climbed from 286,000 to 444,000, an increase of almost 50%! Resulting staff student ratios soared from 1:9 up to 1:20/1:25 (depending on who you read) all of which puts some new universities behind some secondary schools in the all important teachers to students stakes.

Pretty impressive eh? But what gets me is why does nobody start complaining … any students out there care to comment … or is everything really totally fine down there on campus?

Yes, Oxbridge and the Ivy League do keep an eye on each other, and Harvard says it can learn from Oxbridge .. and the lesson is ‘face time’.

The international university league table puts Cambridge - the English one - ahead of Harvard for teaching quality, and Harvard is listening up. Their recommending smaller classes and providing more, and substantially greater, inducement for faculty and students to spend time together.

But this should be no surprise, after all people pay hansomely for face time. A seat at dinner with someone like Blair will cost £1000 or more, a seat at his table, a hundred times that. But the rewards can be great, your there with the main man, the big cheese, the big whahoobah, and you can have your moment to influence and to learn. So why isn’t face time a bigger deal at univeristies? How come people aren’t demanding more of it? And why don’t the government start measuring it (they measure everything else!).

Oxbridge and Harvard aren’t wrong - face time with your professor/tutor is an excellent educational quality indicator, and only political expediency prevents its adoption. After all, how many British Universities would look bad if even Harvard are improving their act?

The hard sciences have been going through a bit of a hard time of late, departments have been closing in physics, chemistry and engineering up and down the country like nobodies buisness. Why you ask? Well science subjects are just plain expensive to teach (around £8000 per student) and added to that, demand from students just keeps dropping - a double whamy! Nevertheless, the underlying problem is that the hard sciences just aren’t sexy enough to get the right number of bums on seats.

In response, increasing numbers of universities have been saying they just can’t afford to keep departments open, and in what is now a market system, where money relentlessly follows the student, they seem to have a point.

It doesen’t take a genuis to work out that this trend has dire consequences for the intellectual landscape of the country, after all, we only need so many media and criminology students.

HESA to the rescue, with an extra £1000 per sicence student in 2007. Although this is welcomed by the universities it only addresses one element of the problem, you still need to attract people to hard science. My own university achieves this through a cunning deception, chemistry becomes ‘forensic science’ .. and the students follow in droves. Of course, its still mostly all chemistry, but with a makeover al la CSI .. well you gotta start where students are at right!

You might think that the univerisity is a paragon of truth, after all don’t they live in ivory towers?

The reality is nothing could be further from the truth! For instance I noted the other day that the University of Huddersfield announces that it is ‘top’ for teaching quality among all the ‘new’ universities in the north of England and what’s more, is also the ‘top’ new university for customer satisfaction among its students .. wow! that sounds impressive, until that is you start thinking about it a little. Then it dawns on you that in actual fact this is a far more modest claim than it first appears.

Why pray tell? Well, the first is dispensed with by the relatively small number of new universities in the north, notwithstanding that it is a bit of a contrived category. The second ‘customer satisfaction rating’ is even more dubious. This because it suffeers from what researchers call the ‘inter-rater reliability problem’ - although this is no mere problem, its more of a show stopper!

The issue is you cannot be sure your comparing like with like. If a student at Cambridge rates say his ‘academic support’ as ‘fair’ and a student at Huddersfield feels his is ‘good’ what does that tell us? Well, not much actually. Not unless we know what they mean by ‘good’ and ‘fair’ because we would need to know their using the same measurable scales (like on a ruler for instance) if our goal is to compare institutions. Can we really assume that ‘fair’ at Cambridge is worse than ‘good’ at Huddersfield?

Of course all of these type of claims and the eagerness to make them is just a marketing exercise, and like all marketing, it is a half truth masquerading as a whole truth. One thing for sure is that the days are long gone when universities were ivory towers .. and this bodes ill for the under researched and niavee prospective student.

You have been warned!