Britannia waives the rules. Again. And continues its slide into miserable mediocrity. Colleges move closer to 'new university' status
From the 'Guardian' story: The Standing Conference of Principals (Scop) said that allowing institutions to become universities on the basis of having taught degree-awarding powers would raise the status of teaching. At present a college must have been granted the power to award research degrees as well as having a minimum of 4,000 full-time equivalent students on higher education programmes, of which at least 3,000 are studying to degree level. The colleges are also pressing Charles Clarke, the education secretary, to lower the numbers limit and drop the requirement that a university must teach a range of five subject areas, this permitting the creation of smaller specialist universities. Personally, I think that the British system might be inefficient and wasting money because it seems to expect that every university in the land model itself after what in California would be a University of California campus. In order to offer degrees at all, a school has to be a full-service research university. Unfortunately, these schools are difficult to develop and probably have a higher per-pupil cost than is really necessary. Multiplying research universities thins out scarce research and education funding that might be better spent adaquately funding a smaller number of institutions. And using a research university model exclusively probably distorts priorities away from undergraduate teaching. California, with 36 million people, only has 9 (soon to be 10) UC's. Even with the state's current budget crisis, I'd guess that these are much better funded than most British unversities. That's partly because most of the state's other colleges and universities don't try to replicate that big-time research function. If every higher education institution is research intensive, then you are probably going to have trouble producing enough graduates at the bachelors level. If you multiply research universities to the point where there are enough undergraduate places, then you will probably be producing way too many unemployable Ph.D.s. I suppose that these unfortunates can "brain drain" their way over here to America, but that doesn't do Britain very much good. It's kind of sobering to realize that American schools like Cal Tech, Rockefeller University, the Scripps Institute or Rand (too small), the California State University system, Amherst or Annapolis (not doctoral research intensive), Juilliard, the American Film Institute, the Webb Institute of Naval Architecture or the Art Institute of Chicago (too specialized) probably couldn't exist in the UK except in some subordinate fashion. Perhaps there's an argument to be made for why a wider variety of higher education institutions might be advantageous.
