Why the Chinese will own us in 20 years 81

Do tell

Sounds to me like "full fee paying" courses are overpriced then. If they were priced simply in order to fulfil the University mission to impart and enhance knowledge it would not be possible for the Uni to be reliant on them. Lose a FFP student, don't have to provide the resources for the place, break even.

Instead it seems Mr & Mrs Rich pay more than what it costs to educate their pride and joy. Doesn't seem very fair.

Both. They are separate functions. Perhaps how they are funded should be separated too.

Why not? We had a schizophrenic chap in our lab who had barely graduated high school. Someone has to wash the glbuttware.

Further up the scale we had some people with BS degrees who were a bit on the thick side. They were good at monitoring experiments other people had devised and recording results.

Toward the top was a person who failed to understand how to retrieve his-her email despite being shown weekly for 2 years and monthly for nearly a decade. Step by step written instructions were provided, to no avail. Yet this person has made a number of original contributions to science and is well regarded in his-her field.

At what I consider the very top we had a chap who I reckon is a bona- fide genius. He wrote a computer program that was writing his thesis for him. It handled the computations needed, conducted computer simulated experiments, evaluated the results, wrote up the conclusions, modified theory based on the results and conducted further experiments to fine tune the theory. It had an X windows monitor so he knew what it was up to. As some of the experiments took months to complete he devised a way of distributing the computer load around the world and attacking problems by parallelism. His science was conducted on hundreds of systems around the world during computational idle time while he got on with the actual thinking part.

Quite a spectrum of talent, I'm sure you will agree.

There is no need for a high tertiary entrance score to end up working in Daddy's company, or to record test results in a research lab.

So if Daddy wants to buy a place in a BS course, or some plodder (like me) wants to save up and buy a place in their dream of working in science, whats the problem.

The real problem is not rich people paying for places in a degree course. The more the merrier IMO.

The real problem is iff universities start dumbing down their degrees to attract students.

But that is a problem for academics and the peer review process, not for national politics.

Which leads to the question: do we trust Academics?

Thanks. If I had a few dollars I might transfer to here:

-- DM personal opinion only