Xi'an's Og

This (rather special) issue of Nature has several articles (in the general public section) about the massive changes impacting universities, worldwide, and the need for a paradigm shift. With a terrible if dedicated cover. On the one hand, the explosion of student populations and the prevalence of online technologies make the medieval approach of lecturing to mostly passive audiences highly inefficient. Witness this recent article from the NYT on Harvard students not attending lectures and failing to read the material. On the other hand, the funding of higher education institutions is shifting away from State support to alternative sources, first and foremost by increasing students’ fees and resorting to private organizations. Incl. a supposedly socialist State like China. The scholarly traditions of free speech and open-minded debate—which in truth remained restricted for most of their existence, witness the repeated heresy accusations in the dark ages!—are under threat, for both internal and external reasons, here and there. The benefits of higher education trainings are also shrinking, unsurprisingly when most of an age group reaches master level degrees, and the quality of said training is getting more and more heterogeneous. The issue also points out the fast moving dynamics of studies abroad, with a high portion of candidates to foreign studies, able to shift destinations for multifactorial reasons (and not only Orange ones). Witness the drop in foreign students joining UK universities and the resulting crisis on their financing. The paper follows a UK experiment going the other way, the NMITE in Hererford, midway between B’ham and Cardiff, where a lab based engineering training is taking place, “the sector nationally that’s been most vociferously complaining about the quality and work readiness of the graduates the traditional sector produces”. In collaboration with local companies, which obviously makes sense but also raises concerns (not voiced by Nature) on the long-term benefits of the approach, when the skills leant to fill understaffed jobs will no longer be required. I thus find paradoxal that the article adheres to the claim that practical teaching makes for more flexible graduates, compared with hardcore courses that provide methods and principles… Unless the flexibility is solely in terms of employability. This coverage is nonetheless a realistic experiment better than the call for better training in a front page tribune that shows little practicality. Apart from this concern, reports on AIs reviewing grant applications and the Trump administration disbanding its climate panel after endorsing their terrible report. Plus unsurprising articles on plant-based diet improving diabetes risk and physical exercise colon cancer survival.