Jacob Christensen

According to reports, the number of Danish students using the Erasmus programme to spend between 3 and 12 months at a university in another EU country has fallen from 1674 to 1648 between 2007-08 and 2008-09. At the same time, the number of students taking international internships have risen by almost 50 percent even if the increase has been from a much lower level.

Some comments:

First, despite European aspirations Erasmus exchanges only stand for a part of the total number of exchanges. Students also go to the US and Australia – universities in the latter country in particular have turned exchange students into big business. It is perfectly possible that the total number of exchanges have risen while the numbers for Erasmus exchanges are effectively flat.

Second, there may be good reasons why students don’t choose to take one or two terms abroad. The main problem is if the academic value of the exchange courses is equal to that of courses at the home university. One problem here is that even though we have the ECTS system, courses for exchange students run separately from ordinary courses. Another issue is that even though politicians and bureaucrats like to think that abandoning national languages in favour of English in higher education increases the value of courses and programmes, research has frequently shown that teaching in English for non-native speakers lowers the value of information with some 20-30 percent compared with teaching in one’s native language. This leaves the social aspect as the main point of attraction for students.

Third, an international internship may offer more value for money for students than traditional courses. To a prospective employer, such an internship will be direct proof that the applicant will and can work in an international setting. The value of a term at an Australian university education factory is more questionable.

I do think there are some very good reasons why students should consider taking some part of their education outside of their home university – in short: you learn to think in different ways about your subject and how to organise teaching – but both students and universities would be well advised to consider the exact value of exchange programmes.

This is probably easier on the Masters level where programmes can be more specialised. It will make sense to try and attract students on a faculty basis on two to three main themes rather than trying to cover everything in more-or-less basic English language courses. This will of course demand cooperation between different departments in the planning of courses on the masters level.

I see some bigger challenges on the bachelor level where programmes are broader, even if exchanges generally take place in the fourth and fifth years.

Hoisted from Slate’s Culture Gabfest. Substitute “English” with relevant academic discipline:

One obvious point omitted from the neuro-lit discussion: Publish or perish. If you repeatedly tell professors their teaching adds literally little to no value to their own CV and will go all but unconsidered in their tenure hearing, then English professors will themselves devalue the teaching function of being an English professor –i.e., passing along literature to a new generation.

Link to episode (where the quote wasn’t said)

Unfortunately, the piece is not on the web, as far as I can see, but today’s (Sunday) “Politiken” has an interview with Jens Oddershede, the president of the University of Southern Denmark regarding the quality of higher education programmes.

As managementspeak goes, it is a piece of art. But excuse me: I have always known that most university candidates will not be looking for a career in research. And I’ve been around for a couple of years.

This story makes the rounds from time to time: Because of the way higher education in Denmark is financed, teachers are tempted – or even forced – to let students who should have received an F grade pass.

The reason? First, universities are financially pressed, so departments and faculties need all the money they can get (okay, this goes for just about all organisations) and, second, universities receive funding based on the number of students who pass exams. The more students who pass, the more money.

This is a nice, typical NPM way of doing things which works beautifully – as long as there is no goal displacement. Which is something pre-NPM organisational theorists knew about. So, for instance, if a NPM scheme puts emphasis on economic incentives as a means to achieve academic goals, the organisational goal may easily shift to attracting economic funding with academic standards becoming less important.

Another case in point: University professors discuss how many papers they have published, not what insights to the field of study they have contributed. This happens because the Orwellian named Ministry of Science wants to base university research funding on the number of publications.

In order to counteract this, NPM systems have to rely on extensive hierarchical and outside controls – which is why academia, like other parts of the public sector, is being flooded with evaluation agencies, layers and layers of managers and rules and regulations as if there was no tomorrow.

Anyway, I hear you ask, I taught at different Danish and Swedish universities between 1992 and 2008 and have I ever experienced a situation where superiors directly or indirectly “expected” me to pass students who did not live up to the standards formally described?

Actually, no. I cannot mention a case where there was a direct or indirect expectation that a certain part of the student group should pass (or fail) an exam – which is not to say that the drop-out rate was not a cause for concern in a number of cases when it came to PolSci (or, during my time in Sweden, PolMag) programmes. As it is, drop-out rates varied wildly – in Copenhagen something like 90 per cent of the students who started on “my” courses also passed the final exams with the rest disappearing along the way, in the first-year courses I gave in Sweden, something like 20-25 per cent received an F at the first exam.

So, never ever? Well, there was one case with a programme that seriously needed being taken care of. I and others discovered this when I had to fail almost half of the class – which was not particularly funny. I had to spend some time telling the powers that be that something was very wrong here and that professional standards had to be applied rigorously.

And the thing is: Students actually respect teachers who take professional standards seriously.

But in all of this, I can see a problem if a) the professional culture is underdeveloped or b) management gets too much power – or both. My point here is that managers who are not in line with the academic or vocational professional culture tend to look at indicators in the bottom line rather than at the hands-on experience of the quality of programmes and teaching.

In case anybody wondered, all parties survived Tuesday’s “Exam” quite well. I doubt if many votes were moved but it was a fun and well-attended arrangement. When people have the chance to meet a political leader, they will take it.

So, were there any surprises? Well, not really. As we concluded, Vestager is an intelligent politician, she’s very dedicated to her work and definitively generally well-prepared.¹ We should, however, also remember that she was playing on her home ground, i.e. in front of an audience of academics and others with a higher education. Even if they wouldn’t vote for the Social Liberals, the audience would still get what the party’s basic approach to politics is: A highly analytical one.

We might have stressed this aspect further and discussed the strengths and weaknesses of this approach as well as the possible conflict between the party’s very analytical stance on the one hand and its representation of the interests of a certain segment of the society (urban, highly educated, etc).

Okay, this was my first attempt at Being Jeremy Paxman, so a bit of training might do the trick.

1. This is not a royal “we” as I shared the honours with my colleague Lene Rimestad [↩]

No, nothing rhetorical or sarcastic here: It’s the real deal. On Tuesday, 1 December 2009, a distinguished team consisting of Lene Rimestad and yours truly will be cross-examining the political leader of the Social Liberal Party (aka Radikale Venstre) Margrethe Vestager between noon and 2 pm. in front of a no doubt enthusiastic audience of journalism and polsci students at SDU.

There’s even a Facebook page to celebrate the event.

Have you ever wondered about the real difference between law scholars and economists on the one hand and sociologists on the other? Let me put it this way: I cannot possibly imagine a law or an economics professor even asking this question.

Political scientists? Oh, we write text books. Well, some of us do.

Terence Kealey, chancellor of Buckingham University says that female students should be seen as a perk for (male) university lecturers. Comparing lecture halls to nightclubs adds an even more hilarious edge to the argument. The academic whorehouse, anybody?

Okay, I think we can understand a joke – and let me also note that beautiful women can in fact be intelligent. Potential female readers of this blog are welcome to inform me if handsome men can be equally intelligent.

But what about gay lecturers (I suspect that they should move into science and engineering), lesbians and, lest we forgot, ordinary heterosexual women (oh, wait: it’s science for them as well)? As they say on Facebook: It’s complicated.

I realised that the Autumn semester will be the first since 1995 where I do not have classes. Weird. But then I have deadlines on two major chapters and I also need to turn a conference paper into something like an article.

All in all something like 125 pages of empirical studies. Plus a bit of free-lance work.

Somehow this is a classic of early and mid-August: The admissions numbers and the grades needed to enter different programmes are announced and the yammering begins. Students who are not admitted to their #1 and only programme in Copenhagen complain (as they say: The distance from Odense to Copenhagen is shorter than the distance from Copenhagen to Odense) and discussion about admission quotas distorting applications take another round.

Now Danish Industry claims that the most sought after programmes (i.e. those with the highest quotas) also have the highest unemployment rates – okay, if DI had its way, there would only be law and engineering programmes at Danish universities and all humanities faculties should be shut immediately – but there is something strange about the published data as the three MD programmes as well as biomedicine are all on the list. As is “International Business”. We are always told that there is a shortage of doctors (and that Swedes take up places in Danish programmes) and that “life sciences” are a central growth sector, so something doesn’t add up here.

PS: No, that unemployment among PolSci/Public Administration candidates is higher than among economists and lawyers is nothing new. Economists and lawyers have a better defined labour market.