24 Feb 2014
A personal account to why Publicly-funded Universities is a very bad idea
The tutorial is about to start. Of the 15 students supposedly in this group, only 6-7 are present. The tutor shrugs and starts anyway. He briefly outlines the content of today's class and moves on to the first topics.
Oh, right. Some background. These tutorials have weekly excercises to be made in preparation of each tutorial. They're rather elementary tasks based on lectures as well as textbook. A few months into the semester, not to mention that the format didn't change during Christmas, even weak students should be rather aware of this by now.
An introductory question is launched at the group, only to strike dead silence. Today, I'm not answering all the questions, I decided in advance. Next question. I can't bear this silence anylonger, I'll do it. These bunch of caffeinated and regular-looking students, pens ready, doesn't seem to follow more than a few lines of thought at once.
15 minutes after the class starts, the first two latecomers rumble into the room. One of then instantly picks up a question, greatly to my delight, only to destroy that initial boost of happiness when the truth is revealed; she has no idea, answers diametrically opposed to what the tutor is asking. Cool enough.
5 more minutes, and the guy who most closely resembles the quarterback in some typical american movie bangs the door, drops his bag on the floor and takes a seat, staring at the tutor. Wait, striking resemblance to, erhm, elementary school.
Speaking for the remainer of the tutorial: the tutor, me or the girl who's basically got everything wrong.
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Now, let me ask a few questions. If you come to a tutorial, why don't you participate? If you don't do the tasks or know what they're about, why do you show up? If you intend not to speak/participate, why do you bother showing up 20 min late (on a bloody 50 min tutorial)? If you're not into studying, why are you even at a University to begin with?
Let me get to my point. This country, as does my native country, provides people with free-of-charge education. They allow and accept tons of students. What does this give us? It gives us people who don't want to be here, and shouldn't be here because 1) it's expected of them, 2) they have nowhere else to go, as socialist governments ruin their labour chances by minimum wage laws, restriction and interventions etc.
Also, basic ECON101, what happens to demand of a service when price is artificially held at 0*? Heavily increased. What kind of people? Those who wouldn't pay should there have been a price tag. That is, in econ talk, those who value the opportunity cost for giving up labour over the benefits of University. Now, with a 0-based price tag, their calculations change, sending lesser-motivated students into Universities.
Final remarks. Publicly-funded education may produce these events; students lacking motivation, students being used by governments as a labour market initiative. Oh, and most importantly, standards are reduced so that the general student population (now less able, less productive etc) can keep up.
That's amazing. I'm so glad tax-payers' money is used for completely silent tutorials. Lovely.
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* = ignoring the effects of certain elasticity levels etc.
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We are almost in the same shoes, regarding the tutorials. I suppose it was economics.
ReplyDeleteIt was indeed, my friend. Bothersome!
DeleteAs the girl who "answered diametrically opposed to what the tutor was asking" and "who's basically got everything wrong", I kind of feel the need to respond to this.
ReplyDelete(1) If you are referring to the question I think you are referring to, my answer wasn't actually wrong, as even the tutor said if you remember. I was just thinking of wages as the incomes of people who are potential consumers in an economy as opposed to labour as an input of production. And that I got everything wrong is not true, I sometimes give correct answers too, which I think is not too bad considering I haven't been to any economics lectures in a month or so.
(2) To explain the last part of point 1: Last semester I have skipped most lectures as I found that the second lecturer's voice put me to sleep more than once and he seemed to have not even looked at his own slides before the lecture, since he sometimes got very confused and said stuff like "I don't know why this is on the slide, it doesn't make sense". I still managed to get an A1 and an A5 for my assignments and successfully caught up on everything we covered over the course of one week before the exam and got an A3 for the exam, which is significantly above the course average as you can see on the statistics we got. Now, I have no reason to believe that this strategy won't work in the 2nd semester, especially because there'll be 3 weeks of holidays to prepare for exams, and considering that I find the lectures extremely boring and have taken an instant (and admittedly completely irrational, but what can you do, we're only humans, right?) dislike to the lecturer (his mere presence annoys me to a point where I can't listen to what he says, only think about how much he annoys me), you cannot really blame me for not attending them. Chances are that if I do what I did last time (reading through the textbook and answering the tutorial questions before the exam), I'll pass with quite a high grade again, without having wasted any time in boring lectures. Not my fault the course is so easy.
(3) Making mistakes is a vital part of learning. If we already knew everything, there would be no need to go to uni. Maybe people would talk more in tutorials if they weren't scared of getting something wrong and being secretly judged for it.
(to be continued)