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About LinkBacksAs someone who has finally finished their undergraduate studies; I am just curious, am I the only one who feels the third level education system in this country is completely soul destroying?
As someone who has finally finished their undergraduate studies; I am just curious, am I the only one who feels the third level education system in this country is completely soul destroying?
"John Bull has got his hand down your pants and his fist around your bollox and you can't see it."
In what sense?
Are you just finished exams?Originally Posted by DOD
You are not encouraged to think. It seems to be just a conveyor belt for producing robots to perpetuate the status quo. Most modules I did in college were very restrictive.
"John Bull has got his hand down your pants and his fist around your bollox and you can't see it."
I find some lecturers to be of a particular political disposition, and if you express a view contrary to theirs, you're penalised in essays if you're not careful. Some departments have an ideological bias which is constrictive, particularly in the Humanities. But I don't think it affects all departments.
What do you mean by restrictive?
Admittedly I avoided lectures like the plague as an undergrad so I wouldn't be able to judge the merits of the syllabus.
I mean, modules aren't challenging. Apart fro one whih I had last semester, they are not based on questioning the way society is, they just go on the assumption that it is right. For example, I don't ever remember covering in public admin, that there were inherent flaws in terms of the exercise of administration. We were just given the structure of the system and our modules were based on that.What do you mean by restrictive?
Admittedly I avoided lectures like the plague as an undergrad so I wouldn't be able to judge the merits of the syllabus.
"John Bull has got his hand down your pants and his fist around your bollox and you can't see it."
There's a huge amount wrong with Ireland's third level system, and I would broadly agree with DOD when he suggests it is just like like a conveyer belt which isn't encouraging people to think.
I've spent last 6 years in the sector, and amongst the many problems I can see is:
- The socio-economic profile of those attending university is hugely skewed towards the well-off, and there has been very little done by government to attempt to remedy this (bar the well-intentioned but ultimately very insufficient step of bringing in free fees). The grants system is a joke.
- The funding system encourages academics to maximise pass-rates, minimise effort, and engage in grade inflation rather than maximising standards and quality. Academics who have higher failure rates are punished, and departments tend to receive lesser funding when they keep standards high. There are no effective mechanisms to evaluate the quality of lecturing and teaching. Once an academic achieves tenure, he has a job for life, whether he bothers to do it well or not, or to even put in the bare minimum of effort.
- There is next to no effective imposition of universal standards or cross-comparisons on third-level courses where standards vary significantly from institution to institution, and indeed, from year to year in a course as entry requirements vary. There is no proper means of benchmarking the quality of courses and engaging in comparisons, or even measuring consistency of standards over time. This ultimately undervalues every degree or diploma, because nobody know what it means.
- The key force for driving up standards and keeping all the above problems in check is competition between universities. As it stands, there is sfa competition between institutions (particularly outside Dublin) where geographical factors are the major consideration for most students. There is no incentive to compete with other universities for students (unlike research grants) as an institution's funding remains reasonably constant regardless of what students they take in.
- Furthermore the parsimony of the grants system or government-backed loans makes it very difficult for students who have to travel away from home to attend college. In the absence of parental subsidy, it is next to impossible to goto college away from home without clocking in a serious amount of part-time work during the college year, which majorly impacts on a student's ability to learn and make the most of the university experience. This is particularly true of students who come from rural areas where finding summer jobs at home can be difficult (thus limiting the amount of money which can be raised during the summer period by saving on rent).
- Governmental funding priorities are very very skewed. Hundreds of millions are spent on research grants of questionable merit, on bloated-adminsitrative systems, where basic problems such as inadequate library space and access to books and course notes remain as problems.
And don't get me started on postgraduate research. The government seems to think it can build the so-called knowledge economy by throwing millions at research projects. It doesn't work that simply, and such an approach is completely unsustainable. The basics and fundamentals need to be right to drive a culture of research - starting with high quality undergraduate courses feeding supply, and committed academics maintaining quality. What we have at the moment is nothing more than academic welfare where a huge amount of taxpayer's money on pretending we have a strong third-level research sector, when it's obvious to anyone in know that we don't.
Ich mag Steine!
A problem that universities here and in the UK (even Oxbridge) are increasingly coming up against is that the best lecturers, and the best postgrads, are being lured by the massively rich private colleges in the US. We can't really cope
yes, it is a skill shop for industry and commercial world- a most un-intellectual experience.
The net is the real university of our time!
yes, it strikes me as being a problem with the Humanities.
"Public opinion will be led to adopt, without knowing it, the proposals that we dare not present to them directly ...."
- V.Giscard D'Estaing, 14 June 2007
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