Imagine you’re an undergraduate first year student that chose the university you’ve enrolled at on the basis of a set of pathways characterised by a large range of optional modules. You have just carefully chosen your options for next academic year. You were allocated four of your first choices - along with one of your second choices and three of your third choices - because of “capacity restrictions”.

Students won't get involved, students won't volunteer, we have to do things for students, etc etc a long train journey thread Earlier in the week I met up with one of those student experience types that universities seem to be installing into departments these days

Let's imagine you're an international PGT student who applied in 2022-23. The Home Office told you that you'd need £9,207 to live on outside of London - so you budgeted for that.

I don't think it's unfair to suggest that students paying fees have the right to the teaching and services promised, to have their work assessed fairly and robustly, and to graduate on time. Whatever else there is to say about industrial action, the various hotpotch of regulatory bodies around the UK designed to either secure those rights or hear students' arguments that they've not been met, and the baffling silence from most of them on the MAB in particular...

Here's where I think we're at with G-AI and essays etc Right now a mixture of hopium (aha! I saw a hallucination) and muttered acceptance that unless student has been really stupid and just copied/pasted GPT output, academic misconduct can't be proved

OfS on uni finances today - One aspect not picked up by much of the media is the stuff we get in the report on projections Includes the revelation that providers are predicting total postgraduate student numbers (FTEs) to increase by just under 30 per cent (130,000 FTEs), the majority of which are expected to be international.

Nasty bit of oped over thew ongoing Oxford Union, Oxford SU, Stock row in the Telegraph today First your classic harking back to a golden age

Now... The "story" here is that more than 40 academics have written a letter in support of a planned appearance at the Oxford Union by Prof Kathleen Stock, a leading feminist, in a letter to The Telegraph.

If you asked me what emotion I feel about funding the massification of UK HE by sucking family wealth out of the global south, "pride" is not the first word that comes to mind. Big proportion of economic "benefit" is rent - having often taken out onerous commercial loans to get here, £££ go into topping up pension pots of those whose longer retirements are unsustainable without yields generated by the bedspaces students work long hours to afford.

Interesting test for the university's student protection plan here... ueasu.org/officers/offic… This is quite a commitment - hard to see how it's reconcilable with a significsnt number of redundancies

Those with Plan 2 student loans, staring at your statement is a massive waste of time. Assume you'll pay 9% above threshold for 30 years. Only purpose of balance/interest confection is to work out which lucky (largely rich men) will get to stop paying grad tax in their late 40s. The whole point of the 30 year off is that it represents a subsidy for those who don't do as well. It's a feature that you'll never pay it off, not a bug.

OK by popular demand, England's undergraduate fee system. Eyes down, look in. It's a bit like a tax (9% of earnings over a threshold) and a bit like a loan (there's a principal debt account and interest accrues)

Astonishing levels of complacency and naivety on offer here.

https://twitter.com/roshabra/status/1653053083172085763

Yes there are some students that are daft/desperate enough to take text outputs from GPT-3 and copy and paste them into submitted work. Bang to rights, well done Sherlock, etc

OK folks let's do a bit of crowdsourcing on how universities might help reduce students' costs this coming year. All ideas - big and small - welcome. Let's get this thread to 100 policy ideas. I'll kick off with - everyone that runs a service on campus that charges students is mandated to have a range of options, one of which is a budget option (budget coffee, budget gym slots)

Somewhere up the "top" of the tables, there's students rammed in on massive modules, where the personal tutor system is more of an ambition than a reality. And at the other end, the redundancy programmes pick up pace 🧵 It's miserable for students and academics. You can make a case (not one I simplistically agree with) that demand should drive HE supply - but not at this pace. Because it takes time to expand or contract in a way that doesn't damage the student experience.

There's going to be a lot of this 🧵

https://twitter.com/BBCNews/status/1526241101610471424

The most up to date version of the Student Protection Plan. Naturally the commitment in a course closure situation is "teach out". wlv.ac.uk/media/departme…

I've been up in space, man this weekend in Turin for the Eurovision, but now I'm home I'm catching up on the weekend's HE press and though I'd make a thread of it. Eyes down, look in 🧵 On Friday evening DfE press released its "package of measures" on disengagement with @nusuk amid antisemitism allegations gov.uk/government/new…

Right. Not done of these for a while, but time for an HE in the weekend papers 🧵 Yesterday the Telegraph went with "Tell new students how much teaching is done online, universities warned", a story hauntingly familiar to one in the Tomes a few weeks back. telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/02/1…

Just noticed that the water company has sent us the annual letter telling us we have to get a water meter. At some point in the next couple of weeks someone will arrive to fit it, only to discover that lots of the pipes that would usually be seperate are shared with next door.

Had a fascinating discussion today with a group of uni managers on free speech, cancel culture, etc etc 🧵 Lots of the cancel culture stuff is made up - but one thing that's real is that it's true that students are reaching for "authority" and formal procedures to fix disagreements over behaviour that they regard as unacceptable.

Moving teaching online during January is one thing. But an assumption that moving assessment online is a strategy that will work is faulty, I think, with the level of absences being seen across the sector already today. If you're due a major period of assessment over the next couple of weeks and you end up with a substantial % of your staff and students off sick on a given day that's a hell of a lot of people chucking mit circs in all at once.