A new ranking of the world’s universities has led to the usual trumpeting that Australian academia is “world class” — but this may come as cold comfort to students who feel they have been lured into paying top dollar for a second-rate education.
There are widespread rumblings from students and staff at Australia’s universities that the quest for high research rankings, and the lucrative deluge of international student dollars that follows, is masking substandard teaching and learning. Some staff report pressure to give students higher marks than they deserve, to keep the fees coming.
You won’t see all that reflected in the 2012 academic ranking of world universities, released today by the Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Australia has five universities in the top 100, making us the world’s third-best performer (the ranking is based largely on research-related factors such as academics’ prizes, articles and citations).
- 57: University of Melbourne
- 64: ANU
- 90: University of Queensland
- =93: University of Sydney
- =96: University of Western Australia
The University of Melbourne has raced up the ratings recently. Vice-chancellor Glyn Davis told The Australian he was “immensely thrilled” with the ARWU result. “We are well on our way to becoming a world-class system,” Davis said. The result fits in with the university’s cashed-up marketing strategy that it offers a “world-class education”, “world-class degrees”, “one of the world’s finest universities”. “Dream large,” runs one TV ad campaign.
“It’s nice we live in a country that can do so well in the Olympics and in university rankings. It says something nice about Australia,” Davis said.
But it’s not quite so nice if you look beyond the research strengths and focus on the student experience at Australia’s top universities.
At the University of Melbourne, students complain of underqualified tutors, poor or inconsistent lecturing, crowded tutorials, rote learning aimed at encouraging international students, and compulsory subjects that are of questionable value or standard. Students reported that in one masters-level business subject, they were encouraged to buy one textbook and learn it for the exam, much of which was multiple choice; they were not encouraged to read more widely.
Mark Kettle, president of the University of Melbourne Student Union, says research rankings are “not actually reflective of the student experience in the classroom”.
“The quality of education is lacking … we’re not getting what we paid for. It’s very inconsistent,” Kettle told Crikey.
He says behind the scenes some staff and students laughed at the university’s marketing that it was “world class” and enabled students to “dream large”. “It raises expectations to the level where they aren’t at,” Kettle said.
Many problems related to underqualified tutors; some were first-year PhD students who received a few training sessions and were handed the subject reader and expected to work it out. Tutorials were overcrowded; many had 20-25 students, and some had up to 35. There was a growing problem with complaints around marking by fledgling tutors; students were increasingly seeking re-marking from their lecturers.
Kettle said international students are less willing to complain, but when asked were sometimes scathing: “They definitely feel that they’re not getting what they paid for.”
While Kettle was at pains to point out that some teaching was good, he said a cycle had developed where the university chased high research results, to do well in international rankings, to insert into glossy marketing material, to appeal to international students and to circumvent a paucity of government funding for tertiary education. (The university has a shade under 10,000 full-time-equivalent international students.)
“What do they see as the main role of the university; research, or training students?” Kettle asked. “Focusing solely on the research outcomes … is actually to their detriment in the long term.”
There are also concerns about teaching standards at the ANU. While the uni says it is “ranked among the best in the world” and heavily promotes its academic credentials, some students who step outside the golden courses of law and medicine complain of uninspired lecturers and poor campus facilities.
As a former arts/science student told Crikey: “I once did a course where we just watched Clueless and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Some students speculate that pressure to pass international students has resulted in an artificial raising in marks.
Dallas Proctor, president of the ANU Students’ Association, defends teaching standards, saying most students found it to be good and consistent. However, he says research rankings should not be heavily relied upon as teaching is not generally to the same standard.
“I would say most researchers don’t teach,” Proctor told Crikey, pointing out that the ANU’s high research rankings therefore came in significant part from staff who had little contact with students. “[Teaching] has kind of been something that’s looked at as something that has to be done, so teaching has suffered.”
Teaching varied widely between disciplines, Proctor says. Students have particular concerns about business and economics, where many researchers are non-teaching, so the subject offering is limited. Law and science tutorials are overcrowded, with up to 25 students in a law tute. Some teaching staff are not fluent in English.
Meanwhile, some staff are not happy they had recently become subject to the student evaluation process, which is commonplace at other universities. But while the ANU has a healthy 4200 international students, Proctor says he does not believe marking standards have been in any way lowered to facilitate them.
This is hardly a well researched look at the quality of teaching at universities. I could provide an equally convincing alternative argument quoting positive anecdotes.
Whither Australian academia.
At least one of the large private higher education providers is now requiring that casual lecturers register with ASIC with an ACN. That way the college can contract the ‘company’, who then ’employs’ the lecturer and gets out of those pesky obligations like payroll tax, superannuation and anything else that looks after the employee.
If you think teachers are under-qualified now what until this move really scrapes the dregs from the bottom of the barrel, as only those desperate to fork out $4000pa to work will bother applying. Think it’s not relevant to the university sector? The college is already providing degrees accredited by TEQSA and private colleges do seem to be the laboratory for ‘innovation’ in education before roll-out across the higher education sector.
Having worked in US and UK I would say that those countries still treat higher education as academia, whilst Australia treats it as a business. Wait until the investments China and Brazil are making pay off – the Australian sector will be truly left for dead then.
I agree with Mark.
Some 80% of graduates responding to the 2010 course experience questionnaire responded that overall they were satisfied with their program. Data on the My University site shows that the University of Melbourne’s proportion of casual staff (20%) is less than the mean for all universities (22%) as with its student: staff ratio (18 cf 22). The U of M’s proportion of international students (25%) is also less than the national average (27%).
Kettle asked: “What do they see as the main role of the university; research, or training students?” Wrong question: universities shouldn’t be about training – at least not in undergraduate degrees.
Universities were primarily about education where students learn to analyse, discover the scientific method whether in the social or physical sciences, develop critical and creative faculties, expand their knowledge base, and broaden their options, but then I probably have old fashioned concerns about the purpose of universities.
When I went to university they were about those attributes but by the time I taught in them they had become degree factories where certification had become more important than knowlege, process more important than inspiration, orthodoxy stifling inventiveness, form-filling taking precedence over writing papers; where students became customers, courses a product, foreign students an export market, Vice-Chancellors CEOs, Professors managers, and the growth of administrative bodies and middle managers outstripped the academic staff. But I digress.
While academic staff work in a climate of bureaucratic intensification, many lecturers, ignoring the technocrats and meddlers, do manage to shrug off the managerial power games and the control freaks intruding into their lectures through technological innovation and attempted curriculum control. Their students complete their courses, inspired, knowledge-seeking, critically thinking, and looking for more. Not all students are capable of such a response and there are many cultural impediments and the distracting imperative for students to support themselves financially, for example. All the retention rate criteria, the citation measures, etc., mean nothing.
Yet, a week or so ago I was in a meeting with a number of young, politically active people –
mainly students, graduate and undergraduate – who were engaged and engaging, intelligent, critical, and inquiring. I left bouyed by the experience and encouraged that notwithstanding the capture of universities by the managerialists, many young people do graduate with their enthusiam intact as universities traditionally intended. And that takes good educaters to nurture.
I can only agree with the above comments. I suspect that the points made may have more than a grain of truth, but to back up suspicions with only anecdotal evidence (especially when as Gavin demonstrates, there is data available) is pretty poor. Even with the allegedly inflated marking I’d fail this one.