If you’re an egalitarian, how come you’re trying to sell an undergraduate arts degree that costs more than an MBA?

They’re talking about recruiting 200 students in the first cohort, but at that price I would have thought that even those who could afford it would be pretty cautious. I’m not sure I’d want to pay fifty grand to a college which, as Daniel notes, is not promising that I’m going to get to really interact with the high-profile but probably very part-time professors who have signed up so far. And if I were thinking of graduate study elsewhere afterwards (it would have to be elsewhere; they’re not doing anything PG yet), I’d want to be very sure that my BA was going to be looked upon favourably, rather than looked at askance by people elsewhere in the profession who may be ill-disposed towards the project in the first place.

But yes, as Daniel notes, the real question is whether I’d want to study, or teach, at a university where eighty percent of the students were there because they were able to come up with such large sums of money upfront.

If you compare the courses detailed in the external system prospectus with those on the web-site (at least for history – I’ve not checked the others), then the degrees do seem to be ‘off the shelf’.

Just to say, this is the post I wish I had written on this issue.

Skimming through the docs on Companies House (with the IANAL disclaimer, but my job gives me familiarity with what this sort of thing looks like) kind of backs up the commercial nature of this. The articles are obsessed with drag along and tag along rights, calls, etc. – the kind of thing you’d see in a private equity-focussed SPV, basically, rather than an educational institution’s articles, which would be more focused on stability and transparency for its (gnargh) stakeholders.

AC Grayling’s middle name is Clifford, BTW.

And ajay: a similar “egalitarian” case could be made for providing poor East European prostitutes to wealthy City bankers, but no egalitarian is going to make it. Sometimes playing “devil’s advocate” just is trolling.

Can’t believe that you missed the other obvious LOL from a quick Companies House lookup of New College of the Humanities Ltd: the registered offices are 15 Glengall Road, London SE15 6NJ. The press guff is all about the wonders of academic Bloomsbury. But unless I’m misunderstanding my metropolitan geography, that address is actually Peckham – famously home to exciting get-rich-quick schemes.

So who would this appeal to? The answer “people with significantly more money than sense comes to mind”

I’d slightly amend that to “people with significantly more money than academic ability”. Otherwise you could get the Oxbridge cachet by … going to an actual Oxbridge college.

Chris> One of Kaupthing’s specialities in the UK (which I think came from the guys they acquired, whose name escapes me) was financing small scale PE deals of this sort of size[1]; it’s amusing in retrospect, true, but the background is a good fit.

[1] Not that £5-£10m is chicken feed absolutely, but relative to some of the sums floating about the place back until 2008…

So this is just a preparatory school for UoL exams with some extra goodies

While doing research, I came across this little number, which is really quite explicit about its status as a “back door” into UoL (and even the London School of Economics, which despite Satoshi Kanazawa and Saif Qaddafi, I still thought meant something) for people without the grades.

I’d slightly amend that to “people with significantly more money than academic ability”. Otherwise you could get the Oxbridge cachet by … going to an actual Oxbridge college.

You need a lot of luck and/or social capital as well as academic ability for ye Oxbridge. But you can certainly get the cachet of a for-profit feeder college of UoL for a lot cheaper than £54k.

This is an object lesson in how over-pricing will ruin your brand. Employers will look at Grayling Hall graduates and think “You’re dim. You paid £54k for an Oxbridge-style degree. If you were smart, you could have bought the real thing for “only” (ha) £27k. So I’m not going to hire you.”

Any half-savvy prospective student will figure out that that is how employers will react to GH alumni, so won’t apply. Grayling Hall’s pricing policy guarantees that only thickos will attend.

By the way, counter-example of Oberlin notwithstanding, this reasoning suggests why Ivy League universities have an incentive not to be too far out of line with one another in the fees they charge. (Not suggesting this is the only explanation, obviously).

@ MichaeMouse; trading address and registered business address don’t have to be the same.

Meanwhile, I note that Bloomsbury is a bit of a node for student activism in London and that the “Emergency meeting to oppose the New College of the Humanities” this evening has 200+ attendees listed on Facebook and has already had to shift to a bigger room.

Over on the THES I remarked on the superior academic and social credibility of Jamie’s Dream School, and pointed people towards this interesting discussion. The comment has now disappeared; I don’t know if they objected to the snark, or to someone promoting the competition…

Reminds me of the joke about the physics don trying to get funding: “You want £5 million of a high-voltage power source? Why can’t you be more like the mathematicians? All they ever ask me for is pencils, paper and wastepaper baskets! Or the philosophers? All they ever ask for is pencils and paper!”

Brian Weatherson pointed out to me on Twitter that Oberlin College in America has a schedule of fees that can rack up $200k (ie, the cost of slightly less than three world-class MBA courses) for an undergraduate tuition.

Just to note that in the context of American Liberal Arts colleges Oberlin is certainly not an outlier, most every LA college that considers itself “first tier” (very broadly construed) has basically the same fee structure (within =/- 10%). As does nearly every private research university (here’s CMU, for instance, ringing in at $57,520/yr for the coming year and a 2009-10 list showing about 150 schools between $45K & $55K ). Of course, who exactly pays what is a very different thing (whether via financial aid or “merit” scholarships) and varies quite a bit from place to place. Depending on how far into the “merit” scholarship game a place is and its ability to meet financial need, 40-80% of the undergrads will be getting some kind of help, with a fair chunk getting quite substantial aid (half or more of the costs). Not that it changes the basic point.

JP Stormcrow @25

Your basic point still holds, but the table you link to is “total cost of attendance” rather than “fees”, clicking through to the detailed info, they seem to be at around the $35k level.

The business model may have more to do with the thinking that “if we can attract a few basis points of the amount that ultra-rich foreigners spend on London property ….”

Once again Dworkin’s hypocrisy makes me laugh. How many £1000’s will he be getting per lecture to take home to his townhouse in Sloane Square? I’ more shocked by Singer. Blackburn/Grayling etc just as retirement age and wnat some extra cash no?

BTW, I think Chris’s point on conflict of interest is totally right – the admissions process is completely opaque and based on subjective interviews, the only hard academic limits are the UoL minimum admission criteria, and the admissions tutors have not been appointed. Having the academic and financial management intertwined like this looks like a predictable source of conflicts.

We don’t use the Clearing process, but we are open to applications until our places are full, so you can apply to us during Clearing. Clearing starts immediately after A-level results are released in mid-August. We run a course vacancy hotline and online enquiry system throughout the Clearing period so you can easily contact us.

That, presumably, is how they’re planning on picking up a load of last-minute business.

Ajay #18, you may have been joking, but it looks like Grayling is serious about counting “selling things to rich people” as redistribution, based on this quote:

By teaming up with some of the London University institutions, such as the library and perhaps Birkbeck, we’re channeling a bit of very-much-needed money into those institutions to help keep them going and viable. It would be the shortest-sighted policy imaginable to boycott redistribution of resources by this means just because it doesn’t come direct from Mr Willetts himself.

http://anticuts.com/2011/06/05/the-new-privatised-order-18k-and-a-lecture-from-niall-ferguson/

30 minutes from London you can do real-snow skiing?

Via Heathrow, yeah.

Oh c’mon squire, a quick geek around NCH’s website makes it clear it’s a class act.

“…offers education in excellence…”

and

“Your study will guide you to a wide range of writing as well as an appreciation of the questions raised by literature old and new. You will develop skills of writing, argument, analysis and persuasion.”

Persuaded of me.

Just two friendly amendments to the JP Stormcrow/DD point about emulating a US SLAC education.
1) in fact at the elite SLACs very few people pay the sticker price: for most tuition is discounted, and for many it is discounted heavily (simple example — kid I know who is smart and accomplished, highish income parents, but not admitted to any of the top tier schools she applied to had 4 offers from good but not great SLACs, each costing around what UW Madison would cost, around $18k a year tuition plus living expenses, despite each having sticker price in excess of $25k tuition alone). I see no prospect of Grayling Hall offering such discounts.

2) Are they trying to tap the “junior year abroad” american market? Regardless, this does not look like an attempt to enter the UK undergraduate market.

I’m old enough to have been at UofL when Grayling actually did teach there (Bedford, which closed down while I was there) and, annoyingly in the light of all this and other things we know about him, he was a spectacularly good lecturer (clear, accurate, unfussy, clearly capable of being charismatic but didn’t use that to impress, etc). He wasn’t ever my tutor, but those whom he did tutor spoke very highly of his attentiveness and feedback.

Regardless, this does not look like an attempt to enter the UK undergraduate market.

I think it is. I think the key to it is that they will be open with “I’m elite, me” places for ready cash, just as clearing opens up. So they get posh or upper-middle class kids who have in some way fucked their conditional offers. The more I look at this, the more I think that the totally opaque non-UCAS admissions process – which allows to advertise “Only The Best Is Good Enough” while delivering “Who Pays Enters” – is central to the business model. At the very least, Grayling has to decide which side of the church/state divide he is going to be on.

Grayling has resigned (been resigned?) from Birkbeck. I get the feeling they’re a bit annoyed with him.

Good for Birkbeck.

Looking at the website, I like how the bigshots are described as “The Professoriate”—I guess saying “The Staff” or “The Faculty” might be implying a little too much in the way of permanent employment, residency, etc.

Considering that the public universities are having their philosophy departments closed, isn’t this a good thing? “We will only take taxpayer money, no strings attached, no private money either” is a strange position to take. Oberlin is not perpetuating anything other than Oberlin, which isn’t so bad, many people are proud of attending Oberlin and getting a decent education.

_Considering that the public universities are having their philosophy departments closed_

A bit of a blanket statement. Philosophy provision at 2 post-92 institutions (Middlesex and Greenwich) has gone or is going, but threats to close (which may just have been negotiating stances) have been withdrawn at Liverpool and Keele. Of course no-one knows what the future holds,

for SLACs in the US, sticker price and actual price are two completely different things

they’re not two completely different things though, are they? For example, I would be very surprised if even half of Oberlin College’s undergraduates were paying less than the cost of a Harvard MBA (yours for $112,400)

@dsquared ‘The more I look at this, the more I think that the totally opaque non-UCAS admissions process – which allows to advertise “Only The Best Is Good Enough” while delivering “Who Pays Enters” – is central to the business model.’

Better hope not. If the students are studying the University of London degree in the UK, then they fall within the coverage of the HESA Student Record and UoL will have to return their entry qualification data to HESA who will then (suitably anonymised and for a small fee) provide those data to anyone who asks. Whilst for Overseas students these may not be easy to make much sense of, for UK students, a standard tariff calculation should be easy to do.

Don’t Liberal Arts colleges in the US usually offer pretty decent teaching, especially compared to what undergraduates can expect at some of the more elite research universities. Whereas this place is probably going to offer distinctly sub-par teaching.

If the students are studying the University of London degree in the UK, then they fall within the coverage of the HESA Student Record and UoL will have to return their entry qualification data to HESA who will then (suitably anonymised and for a small fee) provide those data to anyone who asks. Whilst for Overseas students these may not be easy to make much sense of, for UK students, a standard tariff calculation should be easy to do.

But the data will look OK – they’re going to be taking a posh, middle-class peer group who failed, but only by a bit, to get into top state universities. They’ll be comfortably in the middle of the table for University of London, to maybe even a little higher. Maybe a lot higher if they actually plough the fees into extra teaching rather than taking them as dividends. But also note Chris’s list of birth dates in #6 and reflect on the investment banker’s acronym, “IBGYBG”.

I get the impression Grayling was trying to come up with the closest approximation to the position of a consultant medic who takes on private patients as a sideline he could, but with the added twist of just borrowing the odd seminar room from BBK (or, great Cthulhu, use his office..). So when Thicko McRich doesn’t get in, he could say “Well, there are certain options…”

Since I’m in the mood for being entertained, I’m disappointed to find that ejh’s link gives me a 404 not found error.

they’re not two completely different things though, are they?

I believe that when I graduated in 2001 from a SLAC (not Oberlin), 60% of the students got need-based financial aid of more than 50% of tuition.

I wouldn’t be surprised if more than half the Oberlin undergraduates were paying less than that. SamChevre’s experience sounds typical to me (see Western Dave’s comment. I hadn’t heard that one. But I did hear of another SLAC that was advised to increase its tuition and offer everybody an athletics scholarship, which worked a treat). I can probably get semi-firm data on this if you want.

And yet, no-one erudite has yet mentioned the magic phrase “trahison des clercs”, which may have originated in a different context but which I find so appropriate.. Isn’t it treacherous to sell out a priest-like social position/standing for money?!

Poor Penn, can’t get credit for being in the Ivy League even when somebody is bashing on it.

I think the joke goes that U Penn undergrads insist the name of their school is “U Penn and Other Ivies”.

What was he buying?

And yet, no-one erudite has yet mentioned the magic phrase “trahison des clercs”, which may have originated in a different context but which I find so appropriate.. Isn’t it treacherous to sell out a priest-like social position/moralstanding for money?!! Why do Dawkins & Grayling think ppl listen to them, if it isn’t for their “independent”, intellectual doctors-of-the-new-church mystique? (BTW I certainly don’t come from academe, thought less of most of my uni lecturers than of my primary school teachers. But I certainly had Grayling pegged as loopy when he decided to write his own rival to the Bible! Delusions of grandeur..)

ejh@66: thanks!

@dsquared ‘they’re going to be taking a posh, middle-class peer group who failed, but only by a bit, to get into top state universities. They’ll be comfortably in the middle of the table for University of London, to maybe even a little higher.’

This I agree with. I thought you were saying that if they got caught doing this then it would be fatal to the enterprise. That I’m less sure about.

My view is that it will be difficult to establish an elite brand in what may be a narrow window before the current caps on expansion at existing elite and near-elite institutions are removed. Oxbridge probably aren’t going to offer any more places even when the cap comes off, but (e.g.) Reading might and for the concept to last in the longer term, it has to feel at least £27,000 more exclusive than places like Reading.

Had to look up IBGYBG.

Kieran H. @46 makes the point that US universities are, for the most part, non-profit institutions. Joe Cohen @60 replies that universities are more-or-less businesses, that the non-profit status simply means there are no shareholders receiving dividends.

Actually, the non-profit status means more than this. First, it means universities in the US don’t pay taxes. Second, it means they don’t have to make a profit: they have to make enough money to pay their faculty, meet expenses, undertake improvements etc, have an endowment (if they’re lucky), but they don’t have to have any “net income”. Admittedly, universities are more like businesses than in the past, and some spend millions of dollars on branding/marketing campaigns, desperate to attract larger applicant pools and thereby increase their rankings. But this, like price-discrimination in tuition, is driven partly by the baleful impact of the US News (and similar) rankings. My impression/guess is that if US universities became for-profit institutions these trends would all be much worse.

Btw, T. Eagleton on NCH here.

Can anybody think of appropriate Dylan lines to quote regarding Christopher Ricks’ involvement?

Eagleton here

Here too is the UoL press release. I only glanced, but doesn’t it make a couple of Eagleton’s claims wrong, at least about UoL? (Do professors of Lit Theory phone press offices to fact-check?) Anyway, details aside, the bulk of the kicking delivered is utterly deserved and excellent fun.

(My own favourite bit is pure Eagleton, though: where he slips a sly self-adoring boast into the second last sentence; about how he, Terry Eagleton, actually managed to get to Cambridge when so very much fewer working class students were admitted. “Paper bag in’t middle of road…” )

“identikit Islington man” — I assume that “bruschetta-munching” was subbed out as an overused cliche there…

Here’s Boris Johnson:

London’s mayor, Boris Johnson, backed Grayling’s idea, saying “it fully deserves to succeed and to be imitated”.

It prompted him, Johnson added, to recall his own idea of founding “Reject’s College, Oxbridge”, which would be “aimed squarely at the wrathful parents – many of them Oxbridge graduates – who simply could not understand how their own offspring could rack up three A-stars and grade 8 bassoon, and yet find themselves turned down”.

Shouldn’t a real egalitarian be against tuition fees in general?

This is a first, I’ve been lumped together with Boris Johnson!

I used to respect Christopher Ricks.

I did the calculation from a top-down rather than bottom-up perspective in Blood and Treasure comments and reached the same conclusion as Chris. Also note that in Chris’s version of the calculation, it’s £105,000 per teaching staff member, because £1500 per student goes straight out the door to University of London as the enrolment fee on the International Students program. This also looks very much like something that would be a VAT-able supply, and it’s not clear whether the quoted £18k is gross or net of that.

I used to respect Christopher Ricks.

He’s been on the academic equivalent of the executive entertainment circuit for a while. I don’t have much of a problem with semi-emeritus types doing that sort of thing: if you’re going to extract money from wealthy middle-aged people, do it with an accompaniment of overcooked chicken, and not under the auspices of educating their kids.

It all seems too small scale to capatalize on any future privatization. They don’t have their own buildings, they don’t even own their own courses (at least not yet) so there’s not going to be much there. Imagine if say the LSE went private in the future, how on earth would the NCH be able to compete with them?

Interesting that NCH will be offering a law degree.

I got my law degree from one of the established UofL colleges. Though I did not go into the legal profession in the end, I do know that barristers’ chambers and solicitors’ firms divide universities into fairly well-established tiers for recruitment purposes. The top tier comprises Oxbridge, LSE, UCL and King’s. The second, maybe Queen Mary, London and the top provincial places like Durham, Manchester, Warwick and Bristol. After that, the rest.

If you want a top job in the law, it pays to go to a top tier school. It has been like this for years, and there is no evidence that it will change any time soon (the law is a very conservative profession after all, and at the highest levels it is very conservative, and very snobbish, indeed). By going to NCH to study law, a student is decreasing the chance that he or she will land a job at a top firm, while paying a massively inflated fee for the privilege.

Sadly, it does seem that this institution is designed for those with more money than sense.

Student/faculty ratio is not the same thing as class size. If a full-time student load is defined as 5 courses (say), then each student sitting in a classroom is only one-fifth of a Full-Time Equivalent Student. If a faculty member teaches only 1 class, it would have 50 students in it to give a 10:1 student/faculty ratio. That is if you go by Full-Time Equivalent Faculty, and define a full-time teaching load as 1 class.

If a full-time teaching load were 5 classes per faculty member, then you would have a class size of 10. That is a very high teaching load. A realistic class size would be in between the extremes of 10 and 50.

On the other hand, if you go by head count and not FTEF, 5 part-time faculty at 20% FTEF each could teach 5 classes (one apiece) with 50 students in each class and there would be a student/faculty ratio of 10:1, but this would be a deceptive way to calculate.

Oliver @17> A 50k degree will show that you are not of “poor stock” at the very least. Believe it or not, that counts when you’re going for a lot of jobs. You don’t think that it would be an asset in getting that junior position in several Tier-2 finance, law or consulting firms? It might also tip the balance of a grad school admissions decision for a marginal student. It might ultimately be a better option than going to a ho-hum, run-of-the-mill public institution. I concede that it might be less helpful in getting you into a big-shot doctoral program, but I’m quite confident that it will gain purchase in plenty of jobs that undergraduates want.

LFC @83. Non-profit status confers tax benefits but does not relieve the need of net income. Any organizations whose expenditures consistently exceed receipts will have to cut back at some point. Most colleges are strongly dominated by a class of senior executives who earn salaries that would be embarrassing thirty years ago. My impression is that virtually all universities that are not sitting massive endowments or iron-clad guarantees of government support are out there hustling a buck. (Why have an athletics program or develop a resort-like campus?)

On the issue of “Reject’s College, Oxbridge” (quoted by Harry @91) – there are plenty of Reject’s Colleges doing good business. Really, doesn’t every student who pays $30,000 a year for a degree that is not known by virtually every well-educated person on earth a member of a “reject’s college” of sorts? It doesn’t mean that their education is necessarily bad. In some cases, their educational experience might even be better than the universities that are supposedly nobody’s “reject”. (BTW, from one Canadian’s perspective, there are two schools of this type in the UK, and somewhere around 5 or 10 of them in the US).

The million dollar question with the university is whether it is going to be something special beyond its initial, well-financed roll-out, or whether it is going to be the first of a more bottom-feeding type of hyper-expensive institution. When we think of $30,000 a year universities, we think about Ivy Leagues or other more prestigious US schools. This market is WAY bigger than these elite institutions. Off the top of my head, I can think of 10 such universities in CUNY’s local market. I’m guessing that most people from outside the city only know of two. I just moved to Northern New Jersey, and there’s a bunch of them here too.

What’s sad is that it seems like Britain is taking one step away from the kind of system that I remember leaving in Canada (in the 1990s – frankly, I don’t know what is going on now), and toward the US system in which I work now. Soon enough, large pieces of the upper-middle class will be paying their less stellar offsprings’ way into “selective” colleges, which will produce better grads because the students probably came from better secondary schools, didn’t have to work while in college, have better family, neighborhood or community contacts, etc. Then, they’ll start thinking of public education as a waste of money. And so on.

Leederick – I’m not getting this – they keep on talking about Oxbridge tutorial models, which would be a class size of between 1 and 3.

Offering University of London International degrees is a clever move. You or I could set up an education institution tomorrow and offer to teach for this with no special licence. The students register to take the examination with the University of London and can prepare on their own, or with any form of paid help. It used to be called the ‘External Degree’ and at least in Philosophy was based on the now defunct University of London Federal Internal degree programme. It is a traditional finals degree system with eight exam papers in the final year, or at least this is how it has been until very recently. But offering this is a smart move administratively as you do not need your own examination administrators and in fact the teaching staff will not do any of the finals marking unless they happen, independently, to have signed up as a grader for the International Programme.

However, there are also disadvantages. Those teaching for the International Programme have no control over the examination syllabus, which is probably why NCH has to offer a separate ‘Diploma’ to cover the extra elements. (Birkbeck leads for the International Programme in Philosophy and makes quite a lot of money out of it, so there will be an informal relation at least.)

Until the expansion of the university sector in the 1960s most universities in the UK used to examine their students this way: that is by offering University of London external degrees. It is only in the last few decades that individual universities have been granted their own degree awarding powers.

The veteran of industry standards wars within me foresees that if Birkbeck is a) the lead for the International Programme in Philosophy and b) very very pissed off with AC Grayling, then there will quite likely be a major change to the syllabus at the last minute before the start of NCH’s first year. Readers may wish to prepare for that.

The question really is whether Grayling has enough friends inside the gates, in the form of UoL managers who can see an upside for them. If not, the cost-multiplying monster that is FEC is just waiting to be let out.

Yes, but if Willetts wants Grayling Towers to succeed (as he certainly does), he surely has ways of making UoL see that their interests are best served by being compliant.

I also find it more than surprising that apparently Ronald Dworkin (on the ‘professoriate’ for Law I presume) will be “teaching” on a law degree where the jurisprudence course is described as follows:

***”Jurisprudence and legal theory
In Jurisprudence, you will consider some legal basics: what it is, how it fits into and regulates society, and its institutional and moral role beyond a mere list of rules. The module includes a review of legal theory, past and present, critical legal studies (including critical race theory) and feminist jurisprudence. Unlike other parts of the law curriculum, this is a subjective area with few hard-and-fast answers.”***

Hard to see what ‘direct input’ the professoriate have had into the education of the prospective students when this seems to go against absolutely everything RD has ever stood for in legal theory….

Draw your own conclusions…..

The “Professoriate” are apparently contracted to do 100 hours of teaching between them, i.e. an average of 7 and a bit each. Dworkin is going to be “teaching on” the Law degree in very much the same sense that Martin Amis was “teaching on” the English degree at Manchester.

Strip off the SHINY THING! represented by all those big names, and what you’ve got is an operation using other people’s distance learning materials to teach other people’s syllabi, so as to prepare students for other people’s exams. And charging big money for the privilege… which makes me wonder what that privilege really is, & suspect that Boris may have let the cat out of the bag with the “Reject’s College” line (although clearly it’s “Reject’s College, University of London”).

Also, the emphasis on distance learning & the marked lack of emphasis on physical buildings makes me wonder how – and where – they’re planning to deliver the vaunted one-to-one sessions – Skype? iChat? Second Life?

haha, OK, busted! But if I “unbalance” the sentence, my question becomes “Everyone everywhere has always agreed with me that ACG is a puffed-up twerp with foolish hair, so none of this comes as a surprise, does it?”

Yet plenty of people seem quite surprised, and I sincerely doubt everyone has always agreed with me about him. So I am assuming he does have a congregation of support of some non-negligible kind — and wondering how they are currently feeling.

The Guardian has an amusing article about the increasing shambles that is higher education policy today. It appears “goes skiing in Milton Keynes” Grayling was expecting to get government subsidies of 6k a student (or at least, his “backers” were), but the government has said that won’t happen. But at the same time the government is also having to discuss rationing access to university because of the huge increase in costs caused by their raising of the funding cap to 9k.

So hilarious that their free market solution is going to end in old-fashioned 70s rationing. And how happy will British industry be with the Tories 5 years from now, when they suffer a sudden loss of graduates, at the same time as a Tory immigration cap…

Grayling has just become President of the British Humanist Association, so I qualify as a member of his congregation in a remarkably literal sense. I am currently feeling: ‘somewhat miffed’.

The directors of New College of Humanities Ltd are:

Mr Matthew Nicholas Edward Batstone (46)
Roy William Brown (73)
Jeremy Stephen Gibbs (53)
Professor Anthony Clifford Grayling (62)
Charles Basil Lucas Watson (49)

Source: http://www.hlevelbusiness.com/doc/company/uk/07317195

good point ajay, but still… this means that the course will actually cost 18k up front, rather than 12k, which surely has rendered their target audience a more elite (and a little thicker) than they were planning on…

Does anyone know whether they have applied for an ac.uk domain? ‘Privately-funded organisations/institutions’ are ineligible (see Section 1.3 of http://www.ja.net/services/domain-name-registration/register.ac.uk/eligibility-ac.html).

Buckingham is private, but it has an .ac.uk domain – perhaps because it’s got its own Royal Charter. This whole fiasco has made me see Buckingham in a rather better light. It is not, at least, attempting to get rich quick while free-riding on the asset base of the public sector. I have myself considered the prospect of just selling knowledge to the punters face to face, without accreditation. But that’s not what the CHUMs are doing. And, of course, one of the reasons that I know so much (about so little, but let that pass) is that I’ve had several hundred thousand pounds of taxpayers’ money to live off while I learned it.

What you’ve got is an operation using other people’s distance learning materials to teach other people’s syllabi, so as to prepare students for other people’s exams.

This would, in my opinion, be a good model for much of higher education: pass UofXYZ exams for courseEc and you get a UofXYZ course credit for courseEc, regardless of whether you sat at home with a computer or paid $20K a year at a good college to prepare for those exams.

(As a US actuarial student, I may be somewhat biased–that’s how the actuarial exam system works.)

Teaching rooms in the LSE are remarkably cheap to hire of a weekend. Perhaps if the CHUMs start block-booking them, the price may go up, which is another reason for me not to like it. Mind you, perhaps the reason they are cheap is that it’s the weekend. CHUMs’ll be skiing in Milton Keynes at the weekend.

And I really can’t imagine that the sort of international student who spends £18k a year on fees – plus living expenses for London – is going to be tempted by the prospect of taking the Birmingham train on Friday evening for a bit of apres-ski by the pistes of Milton Keynes.

Personally I never much liked the tutorial system. It was significantly harder to fail to turn up than it ever was for lectures.

1st week of the course; students will learn how to manipulate the media into giving lots of coverage to a completely flawed business plan.

2nd week. Students will learn how to make up for the mistakes of week 1 by lobbying the government for a large subsidy to cover the incompetence.

3rd week. Work experience in one of britain’s top financial institutions. No relation to week 2.

4th week. Essay question: explain, in your own words, how the global recession of 2008 to 2011 was caused by Gordon Brown.

5th week. Students will drop out and found a social networking website that sucks in lost of venture capital and creates another bubble.

#147: How long before NCH features on _The Apprentice_.

(Actually, I want to see Grayling on _Celebrity Apprentice_ ).

152 comments in two days! Not sure how that could be bettered – although I did hear that Grayling will be particularly upset if the College doesn’t go ahead, as he was thinking of sending his child Storm there…

Also note that Oxbridge colleges have endowments (or receive something from them, at least in Cambridge), and tend to have additional revenues in the form of conferences, summer schools, etc.

#156: In its advance publicity, Grayling Hall have occasionally made a bit of a deal out of their attention to pay above the going rate for UK academics. So I don’t think it’s the calculations that are wrong – it’s the business plan that they’re describing. And if they’re attempting to replicate the Oxbridge system, it’s more like twenty tutorials per term. The cost of the tutorial system isn’t an incentive to the academics – you just need massively more headcount to run class sizes of 2 or 3.

the claims currently being made are that the NCH will employ it teaching staff on terms significantly better than regular academics get.

If your concern is “legally accurate” and “misleading” isn’t a problem, it would probably be possible to argue that post-doc/temporary/adjunct academics are the “regular” academics. (I think in the US there are more non-tenure-track than tenure-track academic PhDs).

142:

You are correct.

All the while he was a key Middlesex player through season after season, his name having gone down early in cricket’s social folklore when, in days when a sensitive division between amateurs and professionals prevailed, a loudspeaker announcement at Lord’s informed the purchasers of scorecards that they should amend one entry: “For FJ Titmus please read Titmus, FJ.”

(http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2011/mar/23/fred-titmus-obituary)

“falling asleep while lecturing to 250+ students”

Prof Michael Cox, now of the LSE and occasional channel 5 appearances, being pissed and alleging BDSM sexual relations between Gen Pinochet and Thatcher was probably more entertaining.

ERRATUM ALERT!

I’ve just found out (from David Wallace, on the Leiter Report comments, and my thanks go out to him for not being nasty about it) that the calculation in #140 is utterly tonto, because the college fee was phased out and abolished in 2008, so the £6k state subsidy is not there.

However … (sigh of relief) bright sparks will notice that the tutorial system still exists, and this is because I massively underestimated quite how huge Oxford and Cambridge’s own resources are for funding these things, particularly when supplemented by the massive fundraising campaigns they launched to preserve the tutorial system. The Vice-Chancellor of Oxford estimated that in 2010 they spent £16,500 on educating each undergraduate student, or which about £8,500 came from tuition fees and state subsidy (note that this is per student, not per EU humanities student so the comparison is not exact). The University and its colleges in aggregate had a small financial surplus that year, so the £16,500 figure did not represent a totally unsustainable running-down-capital situation, although I bet that they would have liked to have had more or spent less.

Therefore the broad brush conclusion is about right – post the fee rise and the cut in teaching grants, Oxford and Cambridge are still going to be spending somewhat more per humanities undergrad than the £13,400 I identify as the amount available to NCH from a post-VAT £18k fee. So if Grayling is correct to claim that the humanities are being throttled by the current funding environment and can’t survive, then his college can’t survive either, unless it has some source of significant donation or non-academic income. Which since it’s a profit-making company with no alumni, I am disposed to doubt.

NCH is not likely to have a good sense of the size (or, for that matter, the subject area preferences) of its entering class until well into clearing.

Oooh, very good point, Jim

There will, too, be some degree of attrition between the freshman and second years.

Oooh, another very good point. Particularly since this non-university doesn’t control access to the exams – the kids are registered as individuals – so if Mum and Dad decide that a different tutorial college is offering a better deal (or indeed, if the tutor decides to quit NCH but keep on giving tutorials and pocket Grayling Hall’s profit himself) there is very little that can be done to stop them.

In my dad’s case he would have known that any aspiration to be an amateur was unrealistic.

Well, this all looks like an exorbitant price being put upon long distance learning a la Phoenix university – or various of the Kaplan tribe. The workers – to make the proposition pay – will be the usual academic proles.
I myself am thinking starting a university in a similar vein. I will offer semi-exclusive access to Youtube videos of Lectures by Very Important Thinkers, plus, for an extra thousand dollars, hotdogs.

I expect this enterprise to go down in very comic flames, hopefully taking Grayling’s bank account with it. Wasn’t there a similar attempt, in the Thatcher years, to start Conservative Universities on the same profit basis?

I can see a profitable return on the investment for the right student.

Observe that the Grayling student is going to be (1) of rich parents and (2) not bright enough to get into a regular established university.

That sounds like a good starting point for gold-diggers and fortune hunters of both sexes. All they need to do is to go into the program with the objective of finding a marriage partner with inheritance prospects considerably better than their own and concentrate on heirs/heiresses as their defacto major.

makes sense to me. So if (big if), NCH can get its admin and premises for the same rates as Oxford and we assume that the stuff about paying above-market salaries isn’t true, then it’s ballpark spending about the same amount. Ish.

The dark side of the brights….

I am glad to see that at least one person is already receiving an expensive education from NCH.

ditto Chris @172, NCH is at least contributing to the lulz

It seems everyone’s suspicions have been confirmed – from the above Guardian article we have Professor Colley telling us:

David Cannadine and myself offered support to the New College because higher education in the UK needs more diversity and this enterprise – if it takes off – should create new posts for junior lecturers at a time when they are very badly needed

But is it wise to advertise the fact that teaching at your 18k a year elite college will actually mostly be done by junior lecturers?