Universities

One of the funniest passages of writing I have read in the past few years appears within the pages of Richard Thaler’s memoir Misbehaving. He describes what happens when the University of Chicago economics faculty moves to a new location. The economists simply have to agree among themselves who will occupy each office in the new building. Now in theory, at any rate, this should be a breeze. You have a group of people who should be among the most rational in the world; their discipline, economics, defines itself as dedicated to the study of the ‘allocation of resources under conditions of scarcity’: here is a problem tailor-made for economists

Bright but poor kids have been failed for decades. Since the abolition of grammar school expansion some forty years ago, an educational bottleneck has been created, through which children from disadvantaged backgrounds cannot squeeze. State primary schools are banned from teaching how to pass the 11-Plus test, leading to the creation of an incredibly unfair system. Full disclosure; I live in Kent (grammar school territory) and both my kids were tutored and sat the test: one failed, one passed, no big deal either way as I too had failed the 11-Plus (and the world kept turning). A private tutor was essential if my kids were to stand a chance of understanding the

It is not a great advert for university when the universities minister says he is not especially bothered whether his own children go or not. ‘The days of degree or bust are long gone,’ Jo Johnson told the Sunday Times recently. ‘There are alternative ways into the workforce these days. Absolutely I would say to my own kids to consider them.’ But hasn’t he got it the wrong way round? Is it not the case that a degree is more essential now than ever? That the chances of getting a good job without one have greatly diminished since a generation ago, when East End barrow boys went straight into the

A vast cohort of bright young things have secured their university places with A-level success this week. But things are not so rosy at the universities they will set off to join: after 25 years of rapid expansion, the sector is drifting away from both the core principles of education and the world of work. A few figures illustrate the problem: 2.3 million students are in higher education; 47 per cent of young people are in university; 51 per cent of A–level students will begin undergraduate study aged 18. And almost three quarters of them will get a 2:1 or a first. What exact distinction does a university degree confer? True,

Now Donald Trump really has done it. He’s cutting nearly half the budget of the Fulbright programme, the fund that has paid for 12,000 Brits to travel to the US to study and for a corresponding number of Americans to come here. Given that the beneficiaries include people who’ve done terrifically well for themselves – alumni and alumnae include Bill Clinton, Yvette Cooper, Onora O’Neill, Liam Byrne MP, the philosopher, and, er, Sylvia Plath – there has been a corresponding fuss. Some of the beneficiaries have written to The Times to suggest that the cuts will “devastate the programme and damage irrevocably the most successful cultural diplomacy initiative in the

How tragic that the country – and indeed the world – is being dragged rightwards by a bunch of Neanderthal conservatives who relish ignorance and despise experts. That, in as many words, was the argument advanced here by Nick Cohen on Monday, as well as by many others on the Left. Nick wrote: ‘…in Britain and America one trend is clear: the better-educated you are the less likely you are to vote for the right. Like Mill, I am not arguing that educated people are always clever. Intellectuals have always included fanatics and cranks among their number. But I can say this: in a country where ever more people are going

A leading article appeared in Nature last week in defence of intelligence research. It lamented the fact that it is not included on the undergraduate psychology curricula of many leading US universities, and attributed this to its association in the minds of students and faculties with elitism and racism. That, in turn, is due to the misuse of intelligence research in the past by eugenicists and ‘race scientists’ to justify their poisonous beliefs. The article expressed the hope that this toxic baggage can be discarded and intelligence rehabilitated as an important strand of psychology. This optimism is often shared by academics who study the genetic basis of human differences; not

Universities up and down the land are clambering to recruit students in time for the start of the new academic year. International students – those from outside the EU – are the most lucrative market, not least because there are no legal restrictions on the fees that they can be charged; top universities, such as Oxford, can charge as much as £23,000 a year for some courses. But there are also sound academic reasons why we should recruit internationally. We want our campuses – which are places of education as well as training – to be centres of social, religious and ethnic diversity. We also want, of course, to recruit the