27th June 2011, 08:10 PM
(This post was last modified: 27th June 2011, 08:12 PM by Marcus Brody.)
You're right about the desirability of choice within degree courses to allow students to select their own classes according to their interests and ambitions. I agree that the availability of advice on career options is vital for students. And I also agree that both of these aspects could be improved in a lot of degree courses, without necessarily moving to the model of a degree focussing solely on producing staff for commercial contractors (which was what I originally thought you were suggesting, though I appreciate that I may have picked that up wrong).
I also take your point about the greater financial consequences of choosing the wrong course; ?30,000 would be a lot of money for anyone to spend on a degree that may not provide students with the necessary skills to work in the area they want. There are two possible outcomes / solutions that I could see developing to address this:
1. it’s possible that there may be a move away from the requirement for all people working on commercial sites to have a degree. This would be hard on recent graduates, who've had to pay out to get a qualification that may not be necessary to do the jobs they apply for, but as you said, it would be a lot of money to lay out on the expectation of possibly getting a job that may never pay above the threshold for repayment of fees. In this scenario, contracting companies may take more responsibility for in-house on-site training, to equip people with the particular range of skills needed to work in the commercial environment. This would provide an alternative path into archaeology, one which, as was noted above, hasn't really been available for the last 10 or 15years.
2. it’s also possible that all archaeology courses may not charge the top rate of fees. I know that a lot of institutions will in the first year or so,to test the water and see what they can get away with (market testing, or some such nonsense). If, as seems likely, this results in a reduction in student numbers, we may start to see a related reduction in fees to up the numbers and keep academic staff in jobs. They'll need to look at balancing individual charge-per-head against total income per course to see what offers the bes tresult in terms of revenue. It's unlikely that many places will be able to fill their full quota for archaeology students at ?9000 per year, so a situation may arise where there's a degree (excuse the pun) of competitive discounting. Whether such a commercial market is desirable in the education sector is a different matter, of course.
I also take your point about the greater financial consequences of choosing the wrong course; ?30,000 would be a lot of money for anyone to spend on a degree that may not provide students with the necessary skills to work in the area they want. There are two possible outcomes / solutions that I could see developing to address this:
1. it’s possible that there may be a move away from the requirement for all people working on commercial sites to have a degree. This would be hard on recent graduates, who've had to pay out to get a qualification that may not be necessary to do the jobs they apply for, but as you said, it would be a lot of money to lay out on the expectation of possibly getting a job that may never pay above the threshold for repayment of fees. In this scenario, contracting companies may take more responsibility for in-house on-site training, to equip people with the particular range of skills needed to work in the commercial environment. This would provide an alternative path into archaeology, one which, as was noted above, hasn't really been available for the last 10 or 15years.
2. it’s also possible that all archaeology courses may not charge the top rate of fees. I know that a lot of institutions will in the first year or so,to test the water and see what they can get away with (market testing, or some such nonsense). If, as seems likely, this results in a reduction in student numbers, we may start to see a related reduction in fees to up the numbers and keep academic staff in jobs. They'll need to look at balancing individual charge-per-head against total income per course to see what offers the bes tresult in terms of revenue. It's unlikely that many places will be able to fill their full quota for archaeology students at ?9000 per year, so a situation may arise where there's a degree (excuse the pun) of competitive discounting. Whether such a commercial market is desirable in the education sector is a different matter, of course.
You know Marcus. He once got lost in his own museum