WillIseemytutor has made front-page news in the Times Higher Education Supplement (THEd), the article headlined “Alarm at ratings website”. No prizes for guessing who are the ‘alarmed’ (the university establishment) that same constituency the Times Higher Ed ostensibly writes for.
This theme of alarm is later centre stage in their editorial (”if you can’t beat them, blog them”). Here we learn that the new internet media threaten the good name of universities, and most worryingly of all, resists effective ‘policing’ by the said same! So, what is to be done in this new nightmarish world? Apparently universities should also adopt tactics (like blogging) in the furtherance of their interests. What this analysis fails to convey is the assumption that given universities’ vested interests, everyone necessarily benefits from having a small elite controlling all messages. The great thing about online media - and I’m proving it as I write this blog [and yes, ignoring my typos] - is that it democratises what has previously been the province of a powerful few. This gives everyone a voice, and communicates messages which may otherwise go unheard.

No one should forget that universities are in the business of attracting students in what is now a marketplace. To do this they design and run marketing campaigns that sell a message (primarily through branding). Are we really expected to believe that these same institutions do not selectively portray themselves in the best possible light, in other words, are economical with the truth? If you were to gather together all the assorted glossy publicity efforts you would find no such a thing as a ‘mediocre university’, yet logic dictates they must exist, as ‘excellence’ (by definition) can not be the property of all. Everyone maybe ‘pursuing it’ ad nausea (i.e. trying to do better) but that is to say something quite different (and of little substance). Unlike our critics, we at willIseemytutor see our mission as championing the interests of the individual student, to enable them to better navigate all those competing claims and marketing babble in order to obtain the best education that is open to them.

What we do accept is the responsibility not to knowingly mislead anyone. Whilst our site is in its testing phase (alpha) we are continually reviewing data quality to ensure best information and welcome feedback from institutions.

One last point, our use of staff student ratios (SSR’s) has been criticised as a means of comparison as ’simplistic’ and ‘alarming’ - we beg to differ. We think it’s a ‘killer stat’ for reasons I won’t rehearse again here (please review this blog for the argument and see forthcoming FAQ’s).

What is a trifle confusing is the contrast between the lead stories on the front-page and the back-page of the THEd. The headline story on the back-page (”UCU set to sue over workload burdens” - apparently overworked academics are breaking the EU’s 48 hour working time directive). Why? Well, it turns out that 47% of surveyed staff cited rising staff-student-ratios as a cause. What this (inadvertently) shows is the importance of SSR’s in every dimension of higher education - our point exactly!

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!

I was watching the telly the other night and on came this ad for Edge Hill University, very professional, very slick (I even fancied going there myself it looked so good). But I also think its a bit surprising to suddenly be confronted by an advert for a university .. aren’t universities, well, kind of above that sort of thing?

Its also a bit paradoxical, because if you are a successful institution then surely you would not need to advertise in the first place. After all, there are only so many places to be filled, and this is dependent upon numbers of applicants wanting to go to your institution. If your popular you don’t need expensive TV adverts (you may well have more applicants than places).

As with all advertising, marketing is about turning a whole truth into a half truth and a half truth into a whole one; its what they don’t tell you at Edge Hill that you really should want to know about! And that is about resources available to the new intake, the staff-student ratio for instance is not mentioned .. now that would make an interesting ad!