Top Of The League?
"York comes top for teaching", "York consolidates… [its] reputation among the very best"; just some of the glowing praise which has recently been focussed in the University’s direction, following the recent publication of the University League tables. It has entitled the VC, Brian Cantor, to unabashedly state, "York is the top Northern university – end of message." Now, am I alone in thinking what’s the point? And more pertinently what do the league tables really mean?
Fair enough it’s nice to wake up in the morning and, over a bowl of cornflakes, look, in smug contemplation, at the results in the morning papers. Patting yourself on the back for being at one of the country’s leading higher education institutions. And yet I can’t help feeling that where York comes in the league tables is a bit academic.
After all League tables can only ever be a crude snapshot, an arbitrary measure of the performance of any institution. In the same way that school league tables, based on SATs and GCSE results, inevitably fail to adequately capture true performance (often serving only to highlight the effectiveness of schools in coaching pupils to pass exams) so their university counterparts are similarly affected.
For God’s sake, York coming top for teaching is scary. Have these so-called inspectors ever been to an economics tutorial or lecture? More disturbingly if they have: what must the standard of ‘teaching’ be like in lecture halls the length and breadth of the country? No wonder the FTSE and the economy are down in the doldrums at the moment if the University’s Economics department is the gold standard by which to judge excellence in teaching nationwide.
I just can’t help but feel that rather than York promoting excellence in teaching, the University excels in hoodwinking inspectors, with a well-drilled task-force preparing departments for inspection.
Whilst this is welcome it does beg the question; why, time and time again, does the university fail to get the fundamentals right? Despite recent efforts IT facilities are still inadequate, vast swathes of the campus remain a building site, with project after project running weeks, if not months behind schedule. All the time the things that really matter to students: adequate sporting facilities; more new books in the library and a central venue remain a pipe dream, ostensibly a feature of the dim future, in the brave new world of ‘Campus Three’.
Ultimately then if the League tables fail to pick up such matters on one campus how can they be an accurate guide for the whole country’s Higher education establishments? Certainly League Tables may be useful as a point of reference but ultimately, like a blind man at the cinema, they miss half the point.
P.S the writer is a former Economics student.
Loading ...