Higher Education Finance in the UK*

The introduction of top‐up fees for home‐domiciled undergraduate tuition in England from 2006–07 – and their planned increase in 2012–13 – raises important issues for university funding in Scotland, since it abolished tuition fees for Scottish and EU students in 2000–01. This paper focuses on what the increase in resources directed at English universities arising from top‐up fees means for the relative funding of English and Scottish undergraduates. Widely‐used funding‐per‐head figures do not provide an accurate picture of home‐ and EU‐domiciled undergraduate funding, as they include funding for research, postgraduate degrees and overseas students. The empirical work of this paper focuses on creating a consistent series of funding per full‐time equivalent undergraduate over time for England and for Scotland, stripping out funding for research, non‐EU students and postgraduate degrees to create a more accurate picture of the funding gap between the two countries. It also takes into account the different composition of undergraduate degree subjects taken in England and Scotland. The findings indicate that the apparent historical advantage in funding per head in Scottish institutions compared with English ones has been largely driven by compositional differences: Scotland has a high proportion of medical, science and engineering undergraduates – subjects that command greater funding due to their relative complexity to teach. The top‐up fee introduced in 2006–07 brought funding per head in England to a level similar to that experienced in Scotland, and the future increase will result in funding per head in England outstripping that in Scotland by some magnitude. This suggests that the funding of Scottish students will fall significantly behind that of English students unless additional new sources of public or private funding for nScottish universities are found.     

Women's higher education in the 21st century: From ‘women friendly' towards women's universities

This article is based on the idea that gender issues are crucial when discussing the future of the university. They determine the way we situate and contextualise this important institution and the very idea of the university. In this context traditional and alternative ideas of the university, including feminist and women's alternatives, are assessed. The article also explores current transformations of the universities and how they will influence women.     

Can universities be good corporate citizens?

As universities respond to a prolonged period of economic rationalism there appears to be resignation, for the most part, that the role of a university is not what it once was. By adopting the operational strictures of economy, efficiency and performance, many universities are behaving like and being run as though they were a business. The term ‘corporate university’ now carries much meaning and has been the subject of significant discourse over the last decade. Resource limitations, political influences and competitive pressures are commonplace with implications for the way in which a university can fulfil a role in society, however that is defined. In this paper we consider the notion of corporate citizenship and ask whether this concept is relevant to the role of a university in Australia and New Zealand. In these countries universities are substantially (although progressively less so) funded by the government and are public service entities. The application of corporate citizenship to universities serves to highlight the duality of these institutions, which operate like corporations, and yet have more obvious historically based obligations to society. The comparison also suggests that as corporations are becoming more aware of the long-term benefits of a societal role for business entities that universities appear to be moving in the opposite direction. With a few exceptions academics have been reluctant to engage in public debates. They have progressively lost control of their working environment. The risk is that the public interest will have no place in the corporatised university of the 21st century unless academics increase their critic and conscience activities.     

A Case of Academic Misconduct: Does Self‐Interest Rule?*

Most analyses of academic misconduct focus on students’ integrity and what is taught at the universities. Surprisingly little attention is paid to the role of faculty members. This article presents an unusual case of academic misconduct that provides an opportunity to examine the actions and rationalizations of the students and faculty members involved in the event as well as the broader university context. The case is unusual in that the instructor initiated and facilitated the academic misconduct. The analysis of the misconduct and the subsequent events suggest that self‐interest rules and concerns for wider interests are all but silent. While the case presents a somewhat dismal view of the integrity of some accounting faculty members and future accountants, it provides interesting insight into self‐interest, rationalization, social context, and both students’ and faculty members’ integrity. The analysis discusses the mechanisms used to prevent and manage faculty member misconduct, along with limitations of self‐regulation and student reports as forms of control. The article also considers how accounting educators can encourage future accountants to act with integrity and concludes that in order to achieve that goal, accounting educators must serve as role models who act honestly.     

A-Level Subject Choice,Systematic Bias and University Performance in the UK: The Case of Accounting

British students from lower socio-economic backgrounds are more likely to attend non-selective state schools and are therefore more likely to take a wider variety of A-level subjects including applied disciplines such as Accounting. This is attributed to the performative pressure subjected by school league tables that incentivise schools to encourage students to select subjects that will yield the highest grades. However, many leading universities have restricted the chances of applicants holding particular combinations of A-level subjects that, in some cases, include Accounting. Interviews held within a large English university reveal that few students are aware of such restrictions, whilst corresponding quantitative data indicates that students who enter university with two or more restricted A-level subjects perform no differently on average than other students. Those entering university with an Accounting A-level, however, perform, better in their first year but exhibit lower degree performance, on average, by the end of their studies.     

Editorial to Introduce the Bloom and Webinger Forum

Abstract

Undergraduate accounting students in Australian universities are dissatisfied with the feedback that they currently receive. Recent evidence from the Course Experience Questionnaire (CEQ, a national survey of Australian university graduates) suggests that the accounting discipline ranks poorly on assessment feedback when compared to other disciplines. This finding aligns with the results of local university data, which also shows that students appear dissatisfied with feedback. Similar results can be found in other jurisdictions, as noted by the Higher Education Academy in the UK. Given the importance of feedback to enhancing students' learning, these results are of concern to accounting academics and other stakeholders, including professional accounting bodies and graduate employers. To date, few studies have sought to understand in a comprehensive manner the relatively poor performance in feedback scores in the discipline of accounting. This exploratory study seeks to address this gap by investigating the reasons underlying students' dissatisfaction. We report on students' perceptions obtained from a large survey of Australian undergraduate accounting students across 12 universities. Over 2600 students responded to the survey. Our findings indicate that accounting students value feedback that is individualised, detailed, constructive and timely, and that currently they are not receiving feedback with these attributes.     

One last chance: tapping indigenous knowledge to produce sustainable conservation policies

Sustainable development projects that were supposed to insure the future of the earth’s biological inheritance are currently being criticized for compromising biodiversity. Drawing on sixteen months of fieldwork with one of Papua New Guinea’s most remote societies, this paper argues that more productive conservation policies will emerge when indigenous activities are viewed as disturbance and not as vehicles for establishing equilibrium with the environment. This research demonstrates that although the Hewa play a significant role in shaping this environment, their traditions are not always compatible with biodiversity conservation. Finally, policy recommendations based on indigenous knowledge research are offered.     

Class Size at University

An effective higher education market should increase educational standards. For universities to fulfil this role, students need reliable information about the teaching on offer at different universities, but no such data are currently available. We define a measure of teaching that weights contact hours by their intensity and collect a new data set that allows comparison of teaching across universities and across three departments. No two universities offer identical teaching. There is large variation in contact hours and even larger variation in teaching intensity, across both universities and departments. We combine our data with existing data to investigate the relationship that teaching has with university and student characteristics. We find that how much teaching students receive is uncorrelated with tuition fee; that teaching has little predictive power in explaining student satisfaction; and that physics students consistently receive more teaching than either economics or history students.     

化解省属高校贷款债务政策研究

从对高校贷款债务的研究方式来看,现有的研究方式显得比较单一。研究方法多属于理论研究,缺乏实证研究,研究的成果往往不容易转化为实践。正因如此,进一步推动高校贷款的理论研究和实证研究的充分结合就显得十分必要。应该增加运用实证研究方法的比重,保证研究的客观性和规范性,本文试图从政府角度研究解决高校贷款问题提出具体的方案和对应的实施细则,对高校如何控制贷款的风险和多大程度上控制贷款风险提供可操作性的办法,更为国家和政府如何调整高校贷款政策、规范高校贷款行为提供必要的参考和借鉴。     

The State, university, and the construction of civil society in the Middle East

Education in the Middle East is a site of ongoing conflicts between the state and non-state forces. The state, in most countries of the region, has owned and run the educational system, and used it primarily as a means of state-building and nation-building. Non-state actors have generally been excluded from the creation of higher educational institutions; and when such initiatives are allowed, the institutions are politically and academically controlled by the state. The universities have, however, led a very complex life. They have been hotbeds of struggle for democracy, independence and socialism. Since these conflicts are continuing, the universities, the students and faculty, will be actively involved in changing the status quo. A condition for the rise of civil society in the region is the civilising of the state, and the universities will pose a serious challenge to the status quo. The future trend, as far as the students are concerned, is to a large extent a struggle for democratisation of social and political life in each country, and the autonomy of the university from the power of the state and the market.     

A three-pronged approach to transforming African universities: Inherited knowledge, received knowledge and quartiary education

In the course of reappraising the future of the African university, this article focuses on the role and place of inherited knowledge; the significance of domesticating and enriching received knowledge; and the need for a quartiary level to be fully built into African universities. To do so, African universities must tap on all forms of their endogenous societal resources.     

Academic practices of virtual learning by interaction

The way that the academic practice in higher education universities responds to the influence of computer networks and technology will be central to the definition of their future role. The traditional metaphor of university as self-contained village is challenged as knowledge becomes widely available on the Internet and teacher-student and student-student dialogues are not bound by spatial boundaries. The paper presents four metaphoric spaces that virtual dialogues can take place in. Each of these appears to fail the criteria of creating space where knowledge that a particular individual has can be shared, recreated, and amplified through interactions with others in academic contexts. We consider the effect of three driving forces that could create alternative teacher and student roles and dialogues between them. A technology-driven shaping of virtual learning may result in auto-responsive ‘robosapiens’, a relativist societal-driven shaping of virtual learning may result in socially isolated ‘nerds’. An environment in which technology is shaped by ethical evaluation with respect to higher level (e.g. meta-conceptual) learning is desired to raise the standards of intellectual and technological talents. Such an environment is considerably different from the norms of present-day universities and the every-day roles of teachers and students.     

The corporatization of research in Australian higher education

The recent public policy trend emphasising markets and economic logic among public sector institutions, including universities, has led to the introduction of greater managerialism and formal demonstrations of efficiency and effectiveness. Such moves require a definition of inputs, outputs and outcomes as a means to rendering these activities visible and measurable.In Australian universities, recent changes to higher education policy (particularly research and science policy) have tightened control by Federal Government over academic professional activities and increased the drive to render professional activities calculable (simple, standardized) for the allocation of scarce resources. This paper focuses on the narrowing of definitions in two particular areas, namely, research publication and the funding of postgraduate research degree completions. The paper argues that such policy strategies reinforce selectivity of styles of research, types of research problems undertaken, and favour the research approaches of some disciplines over others (that is, “big" science over “small" science and science over humanities and social science). A further consequence is tighter central control over both higher education institutions and academic professionals. Academics experience a drive to define their activity as either teaching or research, as opposed to teaching and research. This policy drive leads to a narrowing of professional activity into discreet categories. A further consequence of this drive on the part of the Federal Government may be the definition of higher education institutions into one of three categories, as either “teaching" or “research" universities, with a third group predominately “teaching" but undertaking some “research". As with other performance-based funding mechanisms, this may lead to a significant re-allocation of resources and standing amongst Universities in Australia.     

Is international accounting education delivering pedagogical value?

This paper examines whether universities are delivering pedagogical value to international accounting students commensurate with the costs of studying abroad. The paper uses survey and interview methods to explore the extent to which Chinese Learners (CLs) in an Australian postgraduate accounting subject have distinct learning needs. The paper then reviews universities’ responses to these needs, especially in light of funding and resource pressures. The paper reinforces findings that CLs have different learning approaches to local students, but not inferior or ‘shallow’ approaches. However, since CLs face distinctive financial and social pressures to achieve high results, their learning practices may be more sensitive to changes in teaching and assessment, such that cost constraints on educational resources might disproportionately affect their learning. This suggests that a paradoxical result of the funding pressures on many universities may be to encourage large international student cohorts while constraining available resources to meet their learning needs.     

Emergent complex systems

Complex systems are becoming the focus of important innovative research and application in many areas, reflecting the progressive displacement of classical physics and the emergence of a new and creative role for mathematics. This article makes a distinction between ordinary and emergent complexity and argues that a full analysis requires dialectical thinking. In so doing the authors aim to provide a philosophical foundation for post-normal science. The exploratory analysis developed here is complementary to those conducted with a more formal, mathematical approach, and begins to articulate what lies on the other side of that somewhat indistinct divide, the conceptual space called emergent complexity.     

高校教学档案的教育功能及管理策略析议

高校档案具有教育功能,主要表现:一是教育内容生动多样。档案不仅记述了高校的优良传统,有着丰富的爱国荣校的教育内容,档案还凝结了高校的良好校风,是进行德育教育的模范读本,档案汇集了高校教学、科研的最新成果,是师生学习知识的鲜活教材;二是教育形式丰富多彩。档案在现实中展现历史。教学档案管理工作是高校工作重要组成部分。因此,应注重管理策略,提高教学档案管理人员素质与水平;做好教学档案收集、整理工作;克服"重藏轻用"思想,使教学档案发挥应有作用。     

CLASS REPRODUCTION IN PROFESSIONAL RECRUITMENT: EXAMINING THE ACCOUNTING PROFESSION

This paper argues that the application forms of the ‘big-five’ accounting firms discriminate against applicants from working-class communities. While issues of discrimination in relation to race and gender have been considered in the accounting literature, discrimination and class in a contemporary setting is relatively under-explored. A historical analysis of the formation of the accounting profession in Scotland serves to illustrate the historical importance of class in controlling entry to the profession. During this period professions such as accounting came to play an increasingly important role in the reproduction of class from one generation to the next. However, in a contemporary setting processes of class reproduction are subtler. Initially access to university education was a key way of controlling access to professions. However, with the growth of a mass education system other strategies of reproduction have emerged. These are commonly based on an emphasis of charismatic qualities, also known as generic or transferable skills. This paper presents an analysis of the application forms of the big-five accounting firms and argues that the selection of future employees on the basis of these forms will favour applicants from the middle-class.     

对金融专业新生研讨课的思考

文章分析了新生研讨课的内涵,金融专业新生研讨课的设计类型和重要意义,在此基础上给出了金融专业新生研讨课的案例。对于金融专业的新生研讨课,文章认为应充分结合金融学科的专业特点,设计适应性、导论性和学术性的课程,以帮助新生适应大学学习,并规划金融专业的学习框架,激发新生对专业学习的兴趣。     

从性价比视角论高校学费定价

学费是高校办学水平和专业前景的价格反映。目前,我国高等教育各层次之间、各高校之间的学费标准差别不大,学费定价不能体现求学价格与教育服务质量、专业前景的正比例关系。本文从性价比视角来谈高校学费定价问题,目的是改进学费定价模式,实现学生读书的性价比基本相同。物价部门定期测定基准学费标准。基于性价比相同原则,依据学费听证会成果和基准学费标准,物价部门再测定各高校（专业）学费标准。在测定学费标准的过程中,要科学核算办学成本、合理划定国家和学生对办学成本的承担比例、统一学费性价比的考核口径。     

PDCA管理循环法在高校教学管理中应用

随着高等教育大众化时代的到来,高等教育的质量问题越来越被政府和社会大众所关注。而随着我国经济社会的发展,对人才质量的要求在提高,同时受国家人口政策的影响,考生数量在下降。高校为了提升学校的整体办学水平,扩大学校的影响力,开展教学法研究和改革,并已取得了一定成绩,本文将就在企业管理界著名的PDCA管理循环理论应用于高校教学管理中的一些问题进行研究。