Official: It pays to pay fees! (with or without blacks, laptops)
Aug 6th, 2009 by Donal
Much back slapping this morning in the IT in the event of the publication of “one of the most comprehensive league tables published to date”. It is in essence a version of the Irish Times own feeder list but “is the first to take socio economic background into account”.
In other words the table which has been put together by a joint team from UL and University of Ulster tries to take into account that some schools are bigger than others and some kid’s mothers are poorer than other kid’s mothers.
In the end it turns out that even when this has been done only three schools from outside Dublin and none from the north side of the city make it onto the list and the High School in Rathgar is unmoved from its perch as “the top school in the state”.
As the article by Sean Flynn and Grainne Faller points out “The Irish Times list is dominated by fee-paying schools” and “Schools in Dublin 6 and Dublin 6W dominated the new table”. The subtext being that charges levelled at the original Times list for being skewed are on the whole moot. This new study by serious academics proves it.
So let’s be clear oinks…fee paying schools would still kick your disadvantaged arses EVEN if they had to let in more blacks.
The new list gave school’s extra points for being in areas with high unemployment, low computer ownership (some poor people don’t have laptops), high immigrant populations (this one threw me as most of my best students come from immigrant communities) and low levels of third level participation. The last one there I particularly like. Students from your school can’t afford to go to college? Never mind sure we’ll give you a few pity points and move you up the university feeder table. But you still can’t catch D6. Oh well, we tried.
Prof. Borooah, who led the study, explains “we decided to equalise the circumstances”. Good man Prof. However, elsewhere in the article we start to see the big red baboon’s arse hanging off the back of all this research exposed. After the pity points had been handed out how were the rest of the schools judged?
“School performance was assessed by the number of students who progressed to third level and by the types of institutions to which the students progressed. Three points were assigned a school for each student it sent to TCD and UCD, two points were given for students sent to other universities and one if a student progressed to a non-university institution”
So let’s get this straight….
Ten students from a VEC in Galway heading to UCG to do medicine: 20pts for the VEC.
Ten girls from The Dominican in Cabra head to DCU to train as actuaries: 20pts
Ten ugg-booted alex girls heading down the road to do arts and find a hubby in UCD: 30pts for Alexandra College. And the culchies and northsiders still can’t catch us?
Once more for the cheap seats. This time side by side:
“Schools in Dublin 6 and Dublin 6W dominated the new table”
“Three points were assigned a school for each student it sent to TCD and UCD, two points were given for students sent to other universities”
Jesus wept.
The research seems (based on reading the IT piece) genuinely ill concieved, indeed had it been published on an April 1 it would be a lot less surpising. But as far as it goes that’s fair enough, after all university researchers throw up all kinds of stuff over the course of a year of highly varied value and standard. The real tragedy is the Irish Times report which is utterly uncritical and unbelievably lazy. Writing as a journalist any hack worth their salt should have been right on the blower to the president of UL wondering to what extent they agree with the proposition: a first class engineering degree from his institution is less well regarded than a pass in Greek & Roman Civ from an even number post code in Dublin. Obviously the real question is whether schools should be judged based on the number of pupils going direct to third level - with no weighting even for whether those kids that did go on got their first choice and not even the pretence that schools ought to be judged on the extent to which they help kids fulfill their own potential in whatever direction that takes them.
Prof. Borooah, whose primary degree is from cambridge would have only scored two points for a feeder school. Your absolutely right londoner. The point is not whether UCD and TCD are rated higher on international ratings for universities (those ratings will have to wait for another day). By ignoring the types of courses rather thatn a clumsy “type of institution” analysis the IT list is showing its true colours.
As a teacher in a less “dominant” cachement area I’m sceptical that lists like these have any value at all. In the case of the IT list and this “comprehensive” adaptation It’s clear that its value is very narrow and in my view very calculated.
In my opinion these lists are created, designed, skewed and presented with one purpose only: To convince the average middle class IT reader that;
a) The fees they’re paying will get their kids into the universities that they value (UCD and TCD)
b) To convince those who are outside of that system and cachement area that the status that fees buy is worthwhile.
In other words making those shelling out feel better about doing it and those not shelling out feel bad about themselves. In a word: Marketing.
Mindblowingly awful. In general, there’s more useful information to be gleaned from flushing your head down the toilet than there is in reading newspaper reports about league tables.
What I find remarkable is how terms like ‘feeder schools’ are common currency and used unreflectively (to talk about top feeder schools is also to talk about bottom feeder schools), as though children were some sort of raw materials to be processed in order to ‘feed’ the university system. This is nothing new, it should be said. Pearse noted in The Murder Machine that ‘Our common parlance has become impressed with the conception of education as some sort of manufacturing process. Our children are the ‘raw material’; we desiderate for their education ‘modern methods’ which must be efficient but cheap; we send them to Clongowes to be ‘finished’; when finished they are ‘turned out’; specialists ‘grind’ them for the English Civil Service and the so-called liberal professions’. He was also observed that ‘The modern school is a State-controlled institution designed to produce workers for the State, and is in the same category with a dockyard or any other State-controlled institution which produces articles necessary to the progress, well-being, and defence of the State.’.
And that was more than 90 years ago.
‘He was also observed’: clearly, I didn’t go to UCD or Trinity.
It’s mildly amusing that the Irish Times have published this, and that rather than decry the fact that it illustrates the entrenched inequality and lack of social mobility in Ireland they are celebrating it (with the idea that their list is some how the ‘definitive one’ — morons).
Recently though the British Government have published a report on the lack of social mobility in the UK, and offered recommendations for changing that situation. But what it found is relevant to the situation here because of the current ‘education’ debate with FF politicians saying that access to third level here has ‘mushroomed’ in the last couple of decades. What the Irish Times survey is about is access to ‘professional’ education and in turn, professional jobs.
Some of the key findings of the report include:
Full report here.
It discussed in a recent Thinking Allowed show, with Richard Reeves, Director of Demos saying:
Topic starts at 12.05. Reeves comment is at 17.40
Thinking Allowed