I. Think of the best English Equivalent of:

Абитуриент, студент “из простых”, стипендия, пройти по конкурсу, связи, престижный ВУЗ, выложить $ 9000, менеджер с банковским уклоном, накануне, платный ВУЗ, собрать нужную сумму, высшее образование, снять деньги, отчаиваться, младшие/старшие школьники, бедствовать.

II. Say what you know about:

Yale, V.Lomonosov, MGIMO, Ordgonikidze.

III. Say how you would translate the following idioms into English. Comment on their implications.

Грызть границ науки, фирма гарантирует, поставить на себе крест.

IV. Comment on the case of allusion used in the headline.

V. Render the above article into English.

University Challenge

The masses are coming to higher education – and they are bringing the disciplines of the marketplace in their wake.

To judge by the end-of-term rituals, academic life is much as it has always been. Students celebrate the end of their final examinations by getting uproariously drunk. Examiners prepare for weeks of deciphering illegible handwriting. Their more fortunate colleagues wonder whether to spend the next two or three months dawdling over an article or touching the continent.

Appearances are deceptive. The universities are destined to change more in the next five years than they have done in the previous half-century. The government is determined to treble the number of university students by the end of this decade. This pell-mell expansion will soon require the universities to rethink everything, from how they teach to where they get their income.

The expansion is already well under way. Five years ago, one in seven 18-19-year-olds went into higher education; today the figure is one in five. Within a year or so it will be one in four. In the past five years the number of students in universities has risen by 40%. The number in polytechnics has risen even faster.

Or rather, the number in what used to be called polytechnics. From next term the old “binary line” between universities and polytechnics will be removed: every polytechnic will be free to dignify itself with the title of university. At a stroke, this wick increase the number of British universities from 51 to 85, and will double the number of university students to 566, 000. At the next election, John Major will be able to boast that he has transformed university education from a privilege for the Brideshead set to a right for the Brixton crowd.

Allowing polytechnics to call themselves universities is not just a matter of changing their names – though names matter in the educational marketplace, as in any other. From April 1993 the universities and the polytechnics will compete for money on an equal basis, too. But anyone who expects unitary funding to produce a unitary higher education system is going to be in for a surprise.

Higher education will become much more diverse as well as much larger. The reason for it is a cunning change in finance. The old formula treated all academics equally. Potential Nobel Prize winners and dutiful tutors were paid to do research as well as teaching. The result was a system in which academics competed to produce the same product. All universities enjoyed long vacations (for research, naturally) and low student-to-staff ratios.

The education department has now started to disentangle salaries for teaching from money for research. The University Funding Council (UFC) plans to allocate most of its additional money for teaching to the institutions which pack in the most students. At the same time the UFC is increasingly awarding research money on the basis of departmental research-ratings rather than student numbers. And government research-councils (which are by their nature are uninterested in teaching) are getting the bigger say in distributing the cash.

This means that universities will have to play their strengths in competing for money. Prestigious universities will be able to resist expansion and make up their income from research grants. Their weaker rivals will have to concentrate on attracting more students and sharpening up their teaching. No wonder cynics say the binary line is not so much being removed as being redrawn at a higher level.

The result will be rapid Americanization of British higher education. At the top will be an Ivy League of ten research-minded universities, led by Oxford, Cambridge, the London School of Economics and Imperial College. Another ten or so universities will be able to preserve their current mix of teaching and research. But most other universities will become teaching-led institutions. Next year, for example, Brunel University will receive a 13.8% in case of funding for teaching but a 3% real fall in funding for research. And at the bottom of the system will be a mass of vocational universities, little interested in research but desperate to increase their “throughput” students.

Read the questions carefully

Expansion is already pushing academia into rethinking some of its hallowed practices. Why cram teaching into three short terms? The American system of two-semester years (currently followed only at Stirling) makes for a more efficient use of resources. Why waste time putting on lectures? After all, in a sense they have been out of date since Caxton. Better use of video-tapes and computer-assisted learning could allow universities to pack in more students without losing the personal touch. And why should most students spend three years, neither more nor less, at university?

Potential Ivy League universities want to emulate the LSE and shift their attention from cramming undergraduates to training post-graduates. Imperial College hopes to stretch its undergraduate degree in engineering from three years to four. Other institutions want to graduate students in just two years – or else (through something called modulation) allow them to spend as long as it takes to amass enough credits for a degree.

Paying for the professors

The government insists that the rapid expansion of the universities can continue without quality plummeting or the Treasury revolting. The buzz-phrase in education department is “efficiency gains”. These there have certainly been. The expanded universities and polytechnics are actually awarding a higher of first- and second-class degrees that they did five years ago.

And much more remains to be squeezed out of the system. Universities could reduce unit costs by merging with other institutions, and not just adjacent polytechnics. The merger of Manchester University and its nearby Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST), for example, could well produce the first British mega-university. Or else they could contract out some of their more basic teaching to cheaper further-education colleges – a practice already pioneered by some polytechnics.

But the universities are not just engaging in special pleading when they say that quality will soon begin to suffer. The student-stuff raio has risen from 9.3:1 in 1979-80 to 12.5:1 in 1991-92. Academic salaries are low: junior lectures now have to scrape by on 12,860 ponds (23, 840 dollars) a year, and professors seldom earn more than 35,000 pounds. The creation of teaching-led universities could make the job unattractive, into the bargain. Even the Ivy League will not be immune. Research income will soon be squeezed as the Treasury, confronted by the bill for increased student numbers, tries to make cuts elsewhere.

This points to the biggest question of all: how is the expansion of the universities is going to be paid for? It cannot be ducked much longer. The case for financing universities out of general taxation was always hard to defend in theory: graduates are overwhelmingly drawn from the higher social classes and go on to earn higher-than-average incomes. It will soon become equally hard to preserve in practice. Some favour full fees for the affluent and scholarships for the less well-off. Still others advocate top-up fees. The universities need to make up their minds on the issue, fast. If they dither, more higher education could well mean worse higher education.

Peter Melrose

/the Economist, June 20, 1992/

Set Work