Sagging admission standards at British universities

Universities must end unconditional offers being used to bribe students, the education secretary has said.

In his first major speech, Gavin Williamson urged higher education institutions to "get their house in order" and stop handing out places to school leavers which come with strings attached.

Speaking at the Universities UK (UUK) annual conference in Birmingham, he said: "I am delighted that some universities have already scrapped making so called conditional unconditional offers. "I hope and I expect that the rest are going to follow suit."

The number of unconditional offers has risen sharply in recent years, with students now 30 times more likely to receive one than five years ago.

Fierce competition between universities to attract students has seen sixth form pupils increasingly offered places regardless of their exam results.

Some institutions hand out incentivised offers - known as "conditional unconditional" offers - where they tell students that their offer will be unconditional but only if they accept it as their first choice university.

The universities watchdog has previously warned that applying "psychological pressure" or "creating an impression of urgency" in decision making could be a potential breach of consumer protection law.

The Office for Students (OfS) published a report in January that examined the impact of unconditional offers on students’ decision making. It found that applicants who accept an unconditional offer are more likely to miss their predicted A-level grades by two or more grades.

Mr Williamson said there is "nothing to justify" the "explosion in numbers" of unconditional offers.

He said that universities should consider setting a minimum predicted grade threshold for students when making unconditional offers to ensure that they are only used for the brightest students those who are on track to get top A-levels.

He also suggested that universities could agree a maximum proportion of students who they make unconditional offers to, as a way of cutting down on the practise.

Mr Williamson used his speech to warn over degree class inflation, telling vice-Chancellors: "Grade inflation has become more entrenched. "When I was at university you could count the number of students on my course who got a first on one hand. I am sad to report I wasn’t one of them.

"In 1997 when I graduated 50 per cent of students gained a first or a 2.1. Last year 80 per cent of students did so."

He told university chiefs that while he respects the autonomy of the sector, he also needs to protect its reputation. "I want you to know that I will always speak up for your autonomy, I know that it is what helps foster the brilliance of our teaching and our research," he said.

"But I also need to safeguard our reputation so that everyone knows that they can trust the system, so we need to work together on some of these issues.

"If we don't tackle them, your hard-worn reputation for excellence will be undermined, worse still there is a risk that employers will begin to lose faith in grades and foreign students will think twice about investing their time and money in studying here."

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The Mess of Federal Funds Is Changing the University

The modern American university has changed almost beyond recognition from the form it had even 100 years ago. It is larger, more “diverse,” more of a business, and more industrialized with relatively fewer teachers and more bureaucrats than ever before. Those changes have led to new problems. Higher education, if not broken, is at least seriously injured. Some critics feel the damage is fatal and the whole system should essentially be abolished.

I want to focus on just one cause and a few of its effects. The cause is the involvement of the federal government via the money which is now directly and indirectly funneled into universities, public as well as private.

Even public universities depend to some degree on external funds: The University of California-Berkeley was only 13 percent state-funded in 2014-2015; North Carolina State University received 26 percent of its 2013-2014 budget from the state and 35 percent from “gifts and contracts.”

The effects of this increased reliance on federal funds are loss of autonomy, altered priorities, tuition fees that increase faster than inflation, and a monstrous growth in employees who are neither teachers nor researchers.

But the variety of incoming money streams has naturally fostered a more (literally) business-like ethos. Many of the new entities I just described are market-driven—there is a demand for them—not knowledge-driven.

A business credential, for instance, is valuable—and money can be made for the institution. Similar pressures have led to foreign branches of U.S. institutions in places like China, Singapore, South Korea, and the United Arab Emirates.

Those changes have also affected the core of the university: natural and social science and humanities departments.

In a destructive turnabout, undergraduate students are now almost universally regarded as “customers” who, notoriously, are always right. They, in turn, no longer regard the university as a place to be respected with themselves as fortunate guests. Instead, as the hysterical Yale “co-ed of color” screamed at sociology professor Nicholas Christakis a couple of years ago: “This is my home and you came in here.”

Well, actually, no: No university, even Yale, is or aspires to be a student’s “home.” But that’s what happens when a university admits too many students who are, for one reason or another, unsuited to the rigors of a real university education.

What is to be Done?

The gusher of federal money has indeed had its desired effect: Many more young people now attend and graduate from college than was the case 20 or 30 years ago. But this very success has created its own set of problems. Americans seem to have difficulty understanding that a thing may be good, but more of it is not necessarily better. Every small town wants to grow. Yet few residents would want to, or be able to, live in Atlanta or New York. There is an optimum size for everything, and it is rarely at infinity.

The increase in federal research grants inevitably led to a change in perception. Getting a grant was at first a nice bonus; but after grant-getting became routine, not getting a grant became a penalty. The same thing has happened to college attendance, once a nice luxury for the few, now a “necessity” for the many.

Because so many people have one, a college degree is now available as a handy filter even for jobs for which a degree is completely unnecessary. College is now seen to be the only path to success in life. Now many young people sign up for cheap loans they probably can’t afford because they think that college is essential, and the future is far away and it will all be better then. Except that it won’t for very many of them and, unlike a mortgage, they can’t discharge their college loan through bankruptcy.

The system is, finally, beginning to crash; college enrollments are beginning to decline. To accelerate the process, pundit Tucker Carlson has suggested a couple of things: First, that colleges should also be on the hook for the loans that their students take out. Second, in the wake of Varsity Blues and growing resentment against “legacy” (children of alumni) and “donor-child” admits, colleges should be more open about their admissions process.

Tucker’s solutions might improve the current situation a bit. But neither will get the federal government out of higher education. Neither will reduce the ability of the government to intrude on what used to be private matters. As the Brits might say: The feds have them by the short and curlies! More decorously, we can say that universities have lost their autonomy, their freedom, for a mess of pottage thoughtlessly, accepted many decades ago.

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'Crazy political correctness': Australian teachers are ordered to meet bizarre 'praise targets' for good behaviour

Teachers are being ordered to reward a minimum number of students for good behaviour as part of a bizarre new 'praise quotas'. 

Queensland Teachers' Union president Kevin Bates said teachers are being instructed to record positive behaviour reports on a state-wide database.

The OneSchool database records cases of injury, bullying or truancy in students, but schools are now urging teachers to record a minimum of 20 positive behaviour reports per week.

Mr Bates said schools want teachers to spend an equal amount of time rewarding positive behaviour as they do correcting bad behaviour, Courier Mail reported.

He said: 'The notion is you get better behaviour from rewarding children for good behaviour than constantly focusing on the negatives.'

Mr Bates claims the initiative, which is part of the state's 'positive behaviour for learning' policy, is a 'ridiculous expectation' for teachers.

As teachers already have a full-on workload throughout the school day, they may be expected to spend time at home catching up.

Child psychologist Michael Carr-Gregg slammed the move as being 'political correctness gone crazy'.

Mr Carr-Gregg said rewarding children for 'good behaviour' that was otherwise considered normal would breed a generation of 'wusses'.

'It is a reward for behaving like a decent human being, and that is bizarre,' he said.

He also said that having to note down every time children do something right or wrong would put an unnecessary load on teachers who already struggle.

Mr Bates explained that teachers in Queensland have been directed to report even small incidents between children through OneSchool.

While he understands that bullying is a 'pervasive issue', he noted that 'one incident of someone behaving badly does not bullying make'.

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