The Painful Scam of the elite UK universities
The pathological sustenance of competent professors of incompetence & how accreditation screwed merit and effort.
A Russell group university. The golden triangle. Oxbridge. What sounds like a martketing ploy of some coke brand is actually a real thing when you search up higher education the UK after completing high school. The passage of time however, led me to believe all of this naming is shadowed underneath its initial success.
I remember being so excited after being accepted into one of the three elite colleges in London (LSE, Imperial and UCL) however little did I know the experience of a year abroad in the US taught me more than I learnt in 3 years of a so called top 10 university (according to QS world rankings). People come to be educated to improve, not to remain stagnant in their inherent differences upon entering an elite institution. Yet, the so called research based education and didactic teaching has managed to keep the good students good, and the rest left to waste in the sea of confusion over learning the opportunities and making up for the support they weren’t provided, or how online courses did a better job at teaching than 50 lecture slides on something with experimental knoweldge retention rates close to 5%. And yet, we were expected to learn from competent professors using proven ineffective methods paying a confounding amount on an education that did other than attach its brand name, but little to make us better people by then end of the ordeal . It was sad seeing that little was being done to make us actual better engineers, such as individual assessments, valuable feedback, professors going above and beyond to teach us rather than to preach and appear smarts in a roomful of dumbshits.
Well. That would be a tad bit of unfair representation because I did derive value from the eco system around the education itself when I went abroad. But I truly got the chance to experience what higher education in the US is, and elite London Universities are not at all on the same wavelength as the middle tier US universities. The rigorous testing, practice, assessment and room to improve using feedback in a given subject taught me more than I had learnt in 3 years of UK school. I didn’t find the education come close to making me a competent engineer at all, rather the extra opportunities that were brought in by the smart minds in the societies and clubs did most of the value provision. I probably cant design a bridge/ house / slab myself. But how long can eco systems thrive if the core value of competence lacks in its midst? Admitted you can make a gazillion connections with entrepreneurs, etc and make intellegent friends. However if most civil engineers are lured by the fat pay checks of finance, how will we create the mars and moon colonies as a Nation?
Can we honestly say that the country is producing the next Alan Turin with such a disfunctional form of education transfer with grade inflation and dodgy competence gauges? It’s like the story o the Emperor has no clothes, no one is calling out the system because there are no checks/ felt the lack of proper checks.
No wonder why the UK isnt innovating as the US, we exported the most daring of genes and now were left with the those who rarely aim to innovate and create, and the system is staggeringly showing cracks with the rise of China and its talent in ground breaking fields of AI.
The nail on the coffin of British Exceptionalism will be a culture change that is unable to perfect competence/ knowledge transfer. And a loss in belief of what we stand for.
