Latest news with #lecturers
Telegraph
27-07-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
The decline of our once-great universities is nothing to celebrate
Thirty years ago this summer, I was making a decision. Go to university to study politics, or accept a job selling computers at the then-princely salary of £13,000? For a boy from the Northumbrian countryside with a healthy fear of debt, it wasn't a simple choice. I chose university, because I guessed it was a better path to my long-term goals. And, to be honest, because I preferred reading books and sleeping late to plunging straight into the 9-to-5. Would I make the same choice today? In the decades since my decision, for a large number of school-leavers the answer is and has been Yes. Even though Higher Education (HE) is now both more expensive and less enjoyable than when I became a student, the pull of 'uni' is strong. Fees and debt; limited teaching by demoralised lecturers; worries about mental health – none has reduced the annual flow towards higher education. More than 40 per cent of 18-year-olds apply to university. Will that flow of students – and therefore money – continue over the next few decades? Britain is gambling a lot on the assumption that school-leavers will remain keen to spend their time and money on a three-year undergraduate degree. If that proves incorrect – and there are growing reasons to suspect it will – the consequences will be felt beyond our struggling universities. The latest official forecast is that 40 per cent of universities will run financial deficits this year. Talk of collapse and merger is commonplace. This has a simple cause: money out exceeds money in. It costs more to teach a British student for a year than that student pays in tuition fees. A £9,250 annual fee can feel huge to students and parents, but it's been frozen since 2017 so its real value has fallen by a third. Meanwhile, costs have risen. Science degrees can cost more than £11,000 a year to teach. For years, universities bridged this gap with foreign students, who can and will pay much higher fees. They now account for more than half of tuition income at many Russell Group universities. This was never a resilient business model and it recently collided with political reality. Labour, under pressure from Reform, has restricted visa rules for foreign graduates and plans a levy on universities' international fee income. Applications are already falling from countries such as Nigeria, and vice-chancellors are eyeing the big earners India and China nervously. The pros and cons of international students have been debated endlessly elsewhere, so I'll leave that to others. My interest here is in the bigger question of how many people will go to UK universities in the years ahead. For we have inadvertently built an HE system reliant on high and growing numbers of young students; without those numbers, there is trouble ahead. The UK is nearing the end of a demographic upswing in university applications – we had a small post-millennium baby-boom that peaked around 2012. But what happens after that wave peaks at the end of this decade? Even gloomy official forecasts for the future of the HE sector imply that student numbers will go on rising, powered by an apparently unshakeable appetite for the university experience among the young. HE policy sometimes feels like it is based on the idea that the next 30 years will look a lot like the last 30. The Government's Office for Students and the independent Institute for Fiscal Studies both see rising domestic and international enrolments as essential to keeping the system solvent into the 2030s. The admissions service Ucas confidently expects continued growth in applicants. It wouldn't take much deviation from the optimistic model to deliver disaster. A five per cent fall in 18-year-old applications or a 15 per cent drop in international recruitment could push dozens of universities into a full-blown crisis. Both are perfectly plausible, and not in the distant future. These icebergs could hit in the next parliament. Here, some readers might shrug: too many graduates, too many universities, too woke. But losing universities would have grave economic effects both local and national. These are major employers, export-earners and generators of high-productivity workers, engines of R&D and incubators of start-ups. The UK economy isn't so strong that we can afford to throw away a strategically important sector for cultural reasons. But readers cynical of the value of a modern degree do have a point, which is why our national bet on future 18-year-olds' behaviour is risky. For decades, graduates enjoyed a solid and persistent 'wage premium' over other workers but it is waning. In 2000, the typical graduate earned twice as much as a worker on the minimum wage. Now, the difference is barely 30 per cent. The gap later in life is narrowing too. And all that is before we know the full impact of AI on the job market. After all, 18-year-olds don't just go to uni for fun. They want graduate jobs and careers. So what happens if those jobs start to disappear? From finance to technology, firms that were big recruiters of graduates are cutting back, partly because a smart machine is quicker and cheaper than a smart 23-year-old. Many say demonstrable skills are more important than the generic credential of a degree. Adzuna, a job site, reckons graduate recruitment ads are down around a third since 2022. Can HE avoid the icebergs ahead? Only if it can change to fix a national failure that is scarcely discussed by politicians who prefer shallow cultural rows about universities. This failure is the collapse in adult learner numbers. Between 2010 and 2019, mature student numbers fell 22 per cent. Universities that used to educate people of all ages have been pushed by funding policies to become finishing schools for under-25s. That makes no sense in a time of 100-year lifespans and 60-year careers. Two of the biggest forces of this era are demographics – fewer young people, more old ones – and AI. Britain's university sector is not responding to either of them. Instead of betting the house on teenagers, institutions should be incentivised to become centres of lifelong learning: flexible, modular and open to people at every stage of their career. I'm glad I chose university 30 years ago: you wouldn't be reading this if I hadn't. Now, approaching 50 with maybe 20 years of work ahead of me, I hope I get another chance to make that choice.
Malay Mail
13-07-2025
- Malay Mail
Should lecturers use AI to grade papers?
JULY 13 — More and more educators are saying yes (albeit perhaps not out loud). I'm going to try to explain why it's not a problem ethically. But first of all, some clarification is in order. Setting aside the question of lecturers 'cheating' if they use AI to grade, not every form of assessment can be practically handled with AI. If your assignments or exams are hand-written you very likely aren't going to be using ChatGPT. Not unless you scan the papers one by one and upload them all to the system, which is hardly impossible but if you're expected to include marks or notes at the side this isn't going to be feasible. Also, if the assessment is multiple-choice (amazingly, this format still exists in undergrad studies) you'd probably be better off getting your assistant or family member or an optical mark recognition (OCR) system to perform the grading for you. More reliable and less hassle on your part. Setting aside the question of lecturers 'cheating' if they use AI to grade, not every form of assessment can be practically handled with AI. — Reuters pic What about soft-copy assignments? Sure, in that case CoPilot may help. But what about the grading rubrics? You're going to have to inform the AI regarding what counts as a Distinction, Pass and so on. And are you confident of the nuances the system picks up? You know, often the difference between one assignment getting two or three marks more than another is the way the student explained something. Would AI share your appreciation of these subtleties? This is also assuming the AI grades accurately and there are none of those nasty mistakes which we all know are made on more than a few occasions. Another issue arises if students later ask you why they received only this or that (usually low) grade. How are you going to explain the grade variations if AI read their papers on your behalf? So, am I suggesting there's no value in using AI to grade papers? Not at all. I think AI can be very helpful if you're required to read and give feedback on a 100-page post-graduate dissertation. I honestly cannot see the harm of running the paper through Grok, getting some instant criticism and commendations, before running your own human eyes through the paper. If you've attended the average Proposal Defence or Viva Voce session, you'll notice that most of the issues raised sound the same anyway. Eg, insufficient evidence when making an assertion, faulty research methodology, lack of citations on theory or history or what-not, glaring biases, the numerous spelling and grammar mistakes, and so on. These are all valid issues and can all be picked up by the likes of Gemini and, frankly, I can't see an ethical problem if an examiner is helped along the way by AI, especially if he or she is required to read and review half a dozen 100-pagers within a month. One could argue that by 'freeing' the professor from having to note down all these nitty-gritty errors and shortcomings, AI could thus enable him or her to provide 'deeper' and more profound theoretical criticisms and/or feedback. So, to go back to the original question, my answer is 'Yes, sorta'. Lecturers should be able to use AI to help them grade (some!) papers the way graphic designers use Adobe Illustrator to beautify their work or how Grab drivers use Waze to help get them to a destination faster. It gets less practical if your class has a hundred students but it can't hurt if your students are fewer and the work submitted is 'bigger'. Just gotta get the right balance, I suppose? * This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
Malay Mail
21-05-2025
- Malay Mail
‘Paradigm return' in academia — Mohammad Tariqur Rahman
MAY 21 — A growing adolescent dreams of finishing his/her university education to have a decent job/profession and a decent living. Some cherish their dreams to become doctors, and others an engineer, an educator, or an administrator. Not everyone will find their dreams come true. Yet, completing a university degree is seen as a regular path to a decent job and a decent living. Will university education in the future be seen in the same way as it is today? The history of higher education's evolution from Lyceum to modern-day university compels us to believe that changes in academia are inevitable. Thirty years ago, when I joined as a lecturer at a university, language quality was a part of evaluating assignments, reports, or theses. One of the assessment rubrics was to evaluate a student's writing skills. Later, MS Word grammar and spell checker became popular, followed by the use of language editors. We stopped evaluating writing skills for grammar. Having writing assistance like Grammarly made the job easier for both sides. Albeit things have changed. More advanced tools are in our hands. The whole assignment, report, or thesis can be composed by chatbots. Students can prepare possible questions and answers using chatbots, helping them during the open-book examinations. Not to mention, lecturers also find chatbots helpful to prepare lecture notes and questions, as well as to mark students' assignments. It is just a matter of time before universities will (be forced to) accept the widespread and uncontrolled use of chatbots, like we did not bother using Grammarly. That reveals the first puzzle: Should universities change the methods of assessment? The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly replacing the human workforce with 'inferior' skills to their 'counterbots'. A good number of professions, namely but not limited to entry-level bookkeeping and accounting roles, graphic designers, financial analysis, and manufacturing jobs (machine operation, product handling, testing, packaging, testing, etc.) are expected to be completely replaced by AI. At the same time, registered nurses, choreographers, paramedics, mental health specialists and counsellors, teachers (from K-12 and further, higher education teachers), instructors, professors, civil engineers, surgeons, and journalists will heavily depend on AI assistance for their jobs. Nevertheless, how many of us, irrespective of our university degree, will lose a so-called decent job because of AI integration in the future is unpredictable. That reality manifests the second puzzle: Should universities rethink, revamp, and renew the courses they offer as well as the contents of the courses? While AI integration in industries is growing, Gen Z and the younger generations seem to have less and less interest in the traditional job opportunities that require university degrees. Besides, these younger generations tend to learn many of the skills they need for their jobs using AI. Hence, they might not want to go to university for learning, which otherwise adds a burden of education loans to complete their university degrees. Eventually, a lower demand for university education is expected in the future. Furthermore, the ongoing debate on the growing demand for skilled labour and small entrepreneurs versus university graduates tends to favour the former groups as an economic force in the future. Skilled labour and small entrepreneurs can easily escape from any potential job insecurity and steadily contribute to economic growth with stability. On that account, at the verge of a lesser demand for university degrees, the third puzzle appears: Should universities aim for a reduced (or highly selective) enrolment and reduced tuition fees? Words reading "Artificial intelligence AI" are seen in this illustration taken December 14, 2023. — Reuters pic Dependency and reliance on technology and advanced technical skills become increasingly inevitable. Simply put, designing, building, and repairing a house was simpler in the past compared to today. Unlike in the past, from plumber, architect, civil engineer to urban planner, a wide range of expertise and skills at different levels and categories are essential today. Similar to housing, all forms of products and services involve a chain of tasks from development to delivery. In the near future, AI integration will automate most of the tasks within the chain of development and delivery of most, if not all, products and services. As much as specific skills are needed for each task, a holistic understanding of the total chain is imperative, especially when AI integration is inevitable for an organization providing the product or service. That will implore universities to focus on producing graduates with different levels of skills, one with more creative skills and others with more specific technical skills (similar to technical or vocational training). Will universities then envisage the fourth puzzle: Should universities adopt a different approach to design the curriculum to produce two streams of graduates? More and more universities are aiming to offer enrolment with a credit waiver without any formal training, such as self learning. Those who will be able to prove their knowledge and skills may not need to go through the regular path of a Bachelor's or Master's degree. That brings forth the possibility of the fifth puzzle: Should there be a need for universities to offer a four-year bachelor's degree program? None of the above puzzles, I.e., the 'should' questions, are entirely fictitious. In some universities, the anticipated changes are already in place. Diving deeper into those questions might make one wonder if the current format of higher education, focusing on producing skilled labourers, will continue to exist in the near future. Rather, it will intrigue one to ponder the deeper meaning of higher education, which was primarily meant to explore the philosophy of knowledge, dealing with epistemology, ontology, and axiology. Indeed, the selection of the content, format of assessments, disciplines, and above all, the guru had a different paradigm than what we have today. Now, the final question is: Should we, or how soon, should we embrace the 'paradigm return' in academia? * Prof Mohammad is the Deputy Executive Director (Development, Research & Innovation) at International Institute of Public Policy and Management (INPUMA), Universiti Malaya, and can be reached at [email protected] ** This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.
BBC News
19-05-2025
- Business
- BBC News
Further education lecturers in Northern Ireland strike pay deal
Unions have accepted a pay offer for further education lecturers, the Department for the Economy has Minister Caoimhe Archibald said the University College Union (UCU) and NASUWT, the teachers' union, had agreed to an offer of 5.5% for 2024/25.A 3% pay increase offer has been accepted for 2025/ this month, the UCU had said the offer of 5.5% "fell short" of pay parity with teachers. Archibald said she was pleased the offer had now been accepted."I commend the further education colleges and trade union representatives for their constructive engagement to bring about this multi-year pay deal," she said."This brings an end to industrial action, benefiting staff and students alike."
BBC News
08-05-2025
- Business
- BBC News
Further education lecturer pay offer 'falls short', says union
A pay offer of 5.5% for Further education (FE) lecturers "falls short" of pay parity with is according to the University and College Union (UCU), one of the main unions representing FE lecturers in Northern have been offered a 5.5% rise for 2024/25 and a 3% rise in 2025/ Economy Minister Caoimhe Archibald said the offer provided "a further step towards parity with teachers".In a statement she said that FE was "a critical part of our economic infrastructure". "The expertise of our further education lecturers is key to supporting people achieve their potential and providing the skills needed for our economy," she statement said that it was hoped the offer would be the two main unions in FE already have a mandate from their members to take strike action over UCU and NASUWT members have previously voted in favour of strike action and action short of the UCU's Northern Ireland official Katharine Clarke said full pay parity with teachers had not been delivered. A potential strike by teachers was averted in April after unions accepted a revised pay offer of 5.5% for 2024/25."Even with this current offer, lecturer pay will remain £2,200 lower per annum than schoolteachers," Ms Clarke told BBC News NI."The offer made by the employers falls short on the promise of achieving pay parity with schoolteachers, a commitment made by the previous Minister for the Economy, Conor Murphy.""The UCU is pleased the employers have reaffirmed their desire to achieving pay parity, but the reality is unless Minister Archibald allocates budgets to colleges enabling them to plug the education pay gap, lecturer salaries will continue to lag behind that of schoolteachers and university lecturers.""Negotiations are ongoing but UCU is clear that the employers' hands have been tied, and the offer represents broken promises at ministerial level."There are six FE colleges in Northern Ireland with more than 63,000 teach a large range of vocational and academic subjects to a wide variety of students, and are a major part of the education system.
