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.

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!