The fourth part of our conversation on Omnium and academia is online at Notes on Design and we would really like to hear some comments from others about the issues we discussed. So head on over and let us know…

The Guardian has a piece today titled, Tuition fees favour the rich - new study. Did anyone really need a new study to work that out?

In Australia, of course, tuition fees are nothing new, but they are a recent development for local students in the UK. There are a number of knock-on effects of high tuition fees:

1. It deters many students from entering higher education - that one is pretty obvious.

2. It sets up a customer/service provider model:

Sometimes that isn’t bad because it keeps universities and staff on their toes, but it also sets up a dynamic where students feel they need technical skills in exchange for fees. Technical skills are important, but that knowledge is easy to come by. There are thousands of tutorials in the technical stuff online. Knowing what to do with those skills, creative thinking processes, etc. are the hard parts and that’s what a good teacher with experience can offer. But they are more abstract skills and the worth of them is often not realised until the student is a couple of years into being a professional.

If unis swing too far into the customer/service provider model they end up with a kind of Top 20 chart list of the popular subjects and lose their diversity and niche subjects. That’s something that online teaching can really help with - it can aggregate interested students from all over the world. It’s the longtail of education, if only the administration nonsense could be sorted out.

1. It makes a difference to the priorities of the students:

If you’re paying high fees and living in a capital city, you are likely to need to either have rich parents (see point 1) or have a job. Many of our students are working full-time as well as studying full-time and employers aren’t always that flexible or forgiving. It means that students necessarily have to prioritise their day job over their studies, although many lecturers believe that “shouldn’t be the case”. Wishing something was other or having an opinion that your subject is the most important doesn’t change the reality of the situation. So lecturers can either think about how to accommodate this or be constantly disappointed. I favour the former and it’s another reason why online teaching can work so well. Students can give their full attention in their own hours - I’d prefer that than students coming to lectures with an eye on the clock.

The other aspect of prioritising is that if universities cater towards the technical skills in exchange for fees and the Top 20 chart hits model in the belief they’re serving the students’ desires, the value of what they offer comes into question. If I were a fee-paying student I would start to ask myself if it was really worth the fees to be taught Photoshop (as opposed to studying the image, manipulation principles, etc.), when I can get an often better tutorial online.

It’s a real dilemma for institutions because often what students think they need (Photoshop skills) isn’t actually what they need (creative problem solving skills, because hundreds of other people can already use Photoshop badly).