This site is all about the championing of students to enable them to get the best deal from all the competing universities out there, so we were dead chuffed when we heard about this little exercise by a team of consultants:

They posed as prospective students to test how good a customer service universities deliver in practice. The first victim was Sheffield University, who recieved a pretty poor grade all in all. The consultants headline findings were: 1 in 5 phone callers who asked for info recieved nothing, 1 in 3 callers leaving voice mail requesting a call back weren’t called while 30% of phone enquirers failed to get through after 3 attempts. Furthermore, 7 departments took more than a month to send requested material, with 1 department taking a staggering 3 months to reply.

In a response notable only for its obfuscation, deceit, and marketing babble, the Director of Student recruitment and marketing (thinly disguised propaganda to you and me) Jane Chafer stated that these results failed to highlight “the many areas of excellence within the university” and that she realised students expectations of the university were “changing” and that they wished to “continually improve and challenge themselves” to “enhance the service they offered” - all of which means their going to try better, but deny their crap.

What do these poor results show at Sheffield? We think they illustrate that staff-student ratios matter, and effect all areas of university life!

Edit: spelling (a pedant)

Well the dirt is out, staff bullying is rife at Sheffield Hallam University, it’s offical. Nearly a whopping 100 staff working there reported that they had been bullied ‘always’, ‘often’ or ’sometimes’.

And if your not being bullied, harrangued or belittled at Hallam, then your getting stressed out - the report also highlights the need for ‘urgent action’ over staff stress levels. All of this is hardly an advertisment to attract the academic cream to Hallam’s less than hallowed halls.

In fact, Sheffield Hallam must be pretty pissed off that their internal survey report got leaked, some disgruntled staff getting some payback on their managers no doubt. However, in a flourish of doublethink which would make Orwell proud, the VC Prof Green tried to make a virtue from a necessity by arguing the mere fact the survey was conducted proves how serious Sheffield Hallam takes the matter .. yeah right, wonder if they would have sanctioned it in hindsight. No doubt their trawling through the email system right now on a witch hunt for the whistle blower.

And of course, if it’s such a lousy place to work, what’s it like to study there?

Down at Oxford, points really do mean prizes, and not the old university either, but the new one! Oxford Brookes university is offering a £2000 per year discount in top up fees to top students with 3 grade A’s at ‘A Level’, making the offer worth a potential £8000 (its available every year, even if its a 4 year course). That adds up to a substantial saving if you can pull off those A grades.

What this demonstrates is the increasing competition among universities for good quality students. And, as with any market how long will it be before other competing institutions make similar announcements? Indeed, you could push this concept further, what about higher fees - above and beyond the current levy - for weaker students?

Hitting students where it hurts really would be an extra incentive to excell prior to entering university, being a bit of a slacker wouldn’t just mean relegation to clearing, it would also mean a larger overdraught - social engineering at its finest?

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.

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?

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!

There’s a debate raging at the moment, and its one sparked by the pre-eminence of the American Ivy league in the international university stakes. MIT (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for those who don’t know) in Cambridge, Boston, is a renowned world leader in science and technology research and teaching. So much so that over here in Europe we are apparently feeling the pinch.

In an attempt to keep up with such lofty institutions there is a proposal by José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European commission to create a ‘European MIT’ in an effort to “act as a pole of attraction for the very best minds, ideas and companies from around the world”.

All this sounds very nice, although the Vice-Chancellors aren’t too impressed by the idea (no surprise there then) citing duplication of existing partnerships in an effort to stave off this latest challenge to their own best interests.

However, the real subtext here is the spending gap between Europe and the US, and Japan (and increasingly China and India) on research and development, namely, you guessed it, were falling behind and the European MIT is one proposed attempt to close the gap.

You see we really do now live in a globalsied world and the competition between nations for those prized foriegn students is ever more keen. Furthermore, if we continue on the present course of reducing the student spend per head here in blightie, we can only ever fall further behind the likes of the Ivy League.

Like it or not but they set the bar regards academic excellence and research endeavour, and we in Europe are trying to keep up!

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!

This university promotes itself as having a low staff-student ratio. On its website it state that it has a 1 to 10 ratio, whereas the national average is 1 to 17.

It goes on to state that …

This ratio ensures that a high and continuous level of support is maintained, from an academic to a pastoral point of view. It allows a degree of interaction between staff and students rarely found in other universities

It also stressed the importance of small class sizes …

Our student:staff ratio and traditional Oxbridge-style teaching in small groups of around 6 means that teachers and staff will get to know you as an individual. You won’t get lost in a lecture class of 300 students, nor will you be 50th in line for borrowing a particular book from the library.

Full text at http://www.buckingham.ac.uk/standingout/ratio/