Interesting Links for 26-02-2025

[andrewducker]

1. How To Force Women Back Into the Kitchen In 5 Obvious Steps

(tags:politics usa patriarchy society )

2. States that passed no-fault divorce laws saw total female suicide decline by around 20 percent

(tags:divorce suicide law )

3. Edinburgh University to seek £140m in savings

(tags:Edinburgh university migration )

4. "They Live" meets the Trump Era

(tags:movies Technology )

5. FDA Approves Novel Non-Opioid Treatment for Moderate to Severe Acute Pain

(tags:pain medicine )

6. 'Consider Phlebas' Series Set At Amazon From Charles Yu & Chloé Zhao

(tags:IainBanks scifi TV Amazon )

7. Why EM Forster's writing tailed off

(tags:writing sex lgbt gay )

8. Seizafe - Epilepsy Alert for YouTube (Chrome extension)

(tags:YouTube safety chrome )

Comments

[greenwoodside]

3 Ouch. At this point, I'm wondering if the universities that haven't announced deficits and mass cuts are just sitting on the bad news or have royally screwed up their book-keeping.

[andrewducker]

Yeah. The UK going from "Worldwide centre of excellence, welcoming students from around the world." to "Absolute disaster area, constantly threatening foreigners." doesn't do wonders for our economy, does it?

[greenwoodside]

Nope, though even before Brexit happened and years of Tories playing the White Van Man's favourite tunes, there were problems with the HE funding model and marketisation.

In 2018, an ex, who was a lecturer at a low-tariff university (which was/is being squeezed by more prestigious institutions expanding and nicking all its students), showed me an undergraduate dissertation that he'd been instructed to give a passing mark to. Two thirds of it just weren't there. There was blank page after blank page. As a jaundiced but instinctive idealist, and as someone who works in a support capacity for universities, I've never quite recovered from seeing that.

The international bubble was inevitably going to burst. The pressure put on universities to be commercial and to sell their degrees as a product would, if unaltered (and no UK government has shown serious interest in relieving that pressure), have led to a point where the degrees became devalued and international students stopped wanting them. Brexit and the years of xenophobia and the stupid visa restrictions on dependents have made things much worse, and combined with the increase in national insurance plus inflation are smashing budgets left and right, but the whole 'cash for degrees' model needs rethinking.

Actually, in light of Gen AI, absolutely everything in HE may need rethinking.

[mtbc]

Another issue at the more prestigious institutions is that they tend to have more research going on and it's also difficult to get research funded to the extent that it actually covers the institution's costs in performing it.

But, yeah, marketization is at the root of much of the rot.

[greenwoodside]

And I guess that getting research funded that doesn't look as if it'll have an obvious market value is even harder.