Selling Students Short: Why you won't get the university education you deserve - Couverture souple

Hil, Richard

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1743318898 ISBN 13 : 9781743318898

Editeur : Allen & Unwin, 2015

Synopsis

Today more students than ever before go to university, and what they experience there is vastly different from even a decade ago. The hi-tech libraries, funky cafes, and elaborate sporting facilities hide a less attractive reality. Today's universities are vocationally driven, they use technology to offset staffing costs, class sizes have blown out, and staff are rewarded more for research than teaching. Students are less well prepared, they work longer hours in part-time jobs, and their education leaves them in debt for years. Drawing on research studies and his own interviews with 70 undergraduate students from universities around Australia, Richard Hil lifts the lid on the university experience. Far from producing highly knowledgeable, skilled, mobile, and flexible job-ready graduates, Hil argues universities are turning out a consumer population which is often unable to perform some of the most basic professional duties, and has little capacity to engage critically with the world around them.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Richard Hil is an honorary associate at the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Sydney, and adjunct professor in the school of human services and social work at Griffith University. He is the author of Whackademia.

Extrait. © Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits réservés.

Selling Students Short

Why You Won't Get the University Education You Deserve

By Richard Hil

Allen & Unwin

Copyright © 2015 Richard Hil
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-74331-889-8

Contents

About the author, 
Prologue, 
Introduction: The other side of excellence, 
1 Brand power, 
2 The variegated consumer, 
3 The great student surveyathon, 
4 Traversing the campus mall, 
5 Inside the virtual world, 
6 A nice little earner, 
7 Limits to learning, 
8 The pleasures and perils of a PhD, 
9 Graduation — now what?, 
Epilogue: Reclaiming higher education, 
Acknowledgements, 
References, 

CHAPTER 1

BRAND POWER

'I don't like being treated like an idiot.'

Third-year IT student, University of South Australia

'Marketing is just a stupid necessity. It didn't help me at all; in fact, it got in the way. All I wanted to know was stuff about the course, not all the bullshit. But it did tell me about university priorities, which boil down to money, money, money. It's just not an intelligent way to treat students.'

First-year IT student, University of Queensland

'So, here's the problem for universities. They can change their marketing messages, but these will make no difference in attracting good students if the messages can't be backed up.'

'Third degree', The Age, April 2012

CAN I INTEREST YOU IN ...?

As quasi-businesses immersed in a cutthroat global competition, universities have over recent years taken on many of the characteristics of the corporate world. Key to securing 'market share' in this treacherous environment is the colourful practice of marketing: a highly creative activity devoted chiefly to projecting alluring dreams and illusions to a vast pool of choice-laden consumers. In so doing, says US commentator Thomas Frank, universities become (at least in the minds of its promoters) commercial agents of 'wish fulfilment and infinite possibility'.

The importance of peddling such fantasies should not be underestimated: a successful marketing campaign can make the difference between institutional stagnation and rapid expansion, especially since student enrolments remain the financial lifeblood of today's universities. And that's precisely why each of Australia's universities spend large sums on employing salary-packaged directors, whose job it is to oversee multifarious 'external' activities, including marketing. Most university marketing divisions are made up of a swag of specialist personnel (many of them recruited from private companies) who are responsible for developing (or outsourcing) campaign slogans, strap lines, tag-lines, mottos, vision statements and other forms of beguiling blurb. These outpourings find their way into glossy brochures, newspaper and magazine ads, websites and social media, and onto TV and cinema screens.

The success or otherwise of these offerings is 'tracked' by eagle-eyed market researchers who fix their empirical gaze onto prospective students from the point of initial inquiry right through to enrolment, and often beyond. Numerous surveys and focus groups are also conducted to identify the purchasing habits and preferences of today's tertiary shoppers. As one marketing head at a Queensland university told me, this focused attention on anyone who shows even the slightest interest in a course is essential to the 'collateral design' of marketing ephemera, the ultimate purpose of which is 'competitive differentiation' from one's equally inventive competitors. 'Shifting markets,' I was further informed, 'r

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Allen & Unwin
• Date d'édition: 2015
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1743318898
• ISBN 13: 9781743318898
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 227
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible