Saturday, April 30, 2016

Has the library outlived its usefulness in the age of Internet? You’d be surprised - disinformation

disinformation
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U.S. institutions of higher education and U.S. local governments are under extraordinary pressure to cut costs and eliminate from institutional or governmental ledgers any expenses whose absence would cause little or no...

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Tuesday, April 19, 2016

What the great degree rip-off means for graduates: low pay and high debt | Aditya Chakrabortty - The Guardian

The Guardian
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I warned that students were being misled and was rebuked but it was true. Ministers owe them and me an apology

A few years back, I got my knuckles rapped by a government minister. In public. It was 2010: David Cameron had just come to power, and he was about to thrust university students into a new regime of higher tuition fees and debt.

Against that backdrop, I’d written a column criticising the way in which both Labour and Conservative governments marketed degrees as being some kind of social-mobility jetpack, zooming their wearers to more money and high-powered jobs. It was no such guarantee, I said, citing among other things Whitehall’s own plunging estimates of how much more graduates earn over a lifetime. Graduates, I said, would “probably end up doing similar work to their school-leaver parents – only with a debilitatingly large debt around their necks”.

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Thursday, April 7, 2016

Students for Sale | Foundation for Economic Education

Students for Sale | Foundation for Economic Education:



“You know,” Ben interjects, “we may be looking at this all wrong. Based on this current business model, maybe students and parents are not the actual customers of your services.”



Silence.



He continues, but the sudden weight of the air in the room seems to pull his words to the floor before they reach my peers sitting nearby. The uncomfortable truth he spoke is so repulsive to everyone, as educators, that the very laws of nature seem to resist. There are even a couple of audible gasps as some of the teachers realize that “customer” is really some kind of entrepreneur’s code word for “people whose opinions you should value.”



Here we were, professional educators, having relegated ourselves to a career of self-sacrifice and meager pay for the greater good, and this capitalist had the gall to imply that our mantra of “doing it for the children” was hollow!



...But it was true. Under the current model, our students aren’t our customers. Bizarrely, they are the products being sold.



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