UCL’s Malcolm Grant on Cost and Collaboration Challenges for Higher Education

As the U.K. government curtails funding to schools and colleges, University College London president and provost Malcolm Grant finds himself very popular with student protestors. But Grant acknowledges the burden put on students, who just over a decade ago enjoyed free higher education.

Grant says there are ways for schools to manage costs and still conduct worthwhile research and provide intellectual innovation. One critical step, he says, is greater collaboration between universities in researching key contemporary issues.

“Our view is in this globalized world it can’t be the universities alone that sit at home, we have to I think engage with globalization; and it’s not sufficient to do what we’ve done for decades, which is to have the world come to us,” he tells Arabic Knowledge@Wharton.

“Like most of the really research-intensive universities around the world, we are turning down huge numbers of proposals to establish ourselves elsewhere. We have to be able to do it at a pace that we can manage, because there’s a huge drawdown on senior management time to do any of these ventures. And we have to be satisfied that it fits with our mission and what we want to do.”

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The do’s and don’ts of classroom etiquette

The start of the school year opens the floodgates of university campuses to recently independent freshmen. Overwhelmed with their newfound liberation, some students drive themselves to excess, scrambling to experience previously taboo things. With no real check on one’s actions, professors find that some students may neglect all decorum.

In addition, from unprofessional interactions with a professor to blatant disregard for a course, students are often found dismissing appropriate classroom conduct. Wharton lecturer Barbara Roche even experienced “one student apply fingernail polish” during another’s mid-term presentations.

Even though there are always some difficult students, over-generalization should be prevented. Clearly such people are a minority or else the merit of acceptance into and completion of university would no longer exist.

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Teaching Troubles: Higher Education Hits a Low Mark

Last year saw the shuttering of Virginia’s George Mason University campus in Ras Al Khaimah and the Dubai campus of Michigan State University — two high-profile failures in the United Arab Emirates’s competitive higher education market. According to studies, there are just over 91,000 college-level students in the UAE, but nearly 100 colleges and universities in the country vying for their tuition, including 48 international higher education institutions. Even those with strong reputations find enrolling students difficult.

Read the article: http://bit.ly/hAAp62