wtf?! how? this isn't europe.

Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, University of London.

Was very well regarded when I joined several years ago - top 20 universities in the country overall and top 10 for History.

It has gone downhill in recent years. I myself am disillusioned with the place... only one more year now.

I don't know exactly how they get the money, but from what I understand its a mixture of alumni donations and some odd real-estate arrangement. According to wiki, they get $7 million annually from the land alone. It's fairly small, though. Anyway, again, I know I don't need to say how pleased I am about this. I sent in my acceptance letter and some documents yesterday, as well as answered questions for the housing (which we have to pay for, and its only offered for the first year).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooper_Union

Do tell. Not all of us are familiar with British college controversy.

Oh, it's not that exciting - I could probably sum up the problems in a short list:

1) To make money, the university has tried to attract wealthy foreign students of dubious academic ability (and English language skills) onto courses of similarly dubious worth (Business Studies, Management etc.). The quality of the students on average has fallen as a result.

2) A couple of years ago the administration staff put a decimal point in the wrong place when submitting yearly results to the bodies that rank universities. This blunder caused the uni to lose out big time in national ratings.

3) There is a lot of disparity between departments. The history and music departments, for example, are still very strong, but the management department in particular is rather shoddy.

4) Quality of student publications has fallen hugely since I first joined. The student magazine, The Orbital, won an award for best student publication in the country in 2005-2006. It was able to secure interviews with fairly well known people, like Zach Braff for example. Then they started to let socialite idiots run it until it ceased being printed this year, having gone through a ridiculous eco-friendly stage where they printed it on recycled paper. The best publication is now The Founder, which is basically a newspaper which started the year I joined and is actually pretty decent. Not a patch on the old Orbital though.

5) There's a lot of conflict between university administration and the academic staff. Last month a new principal was appointed, and he is reknowned as caring little about academics and a lot about money and budget cuts. In fact he was called 'The Axeman' at the last place he was at.

Unrelated to the university itself is the fact that I am going to graduate in the middle of the country's biggest economic problems since the 1980s. That is not good.

Other than making the school look stupid, does this have any effect besides bad rankings? It really doesn't seem like that matters much, unless grant money is doled out based on the rankings. The fact that you pointed it out makes me lean to the latter.

It means the university will attract lower quality students, causing further ranking loss.

Going to the Cooper Union reception tomorrow. Also, this is a good year to be going to there. They have a new Engineering building, which looks, at the very least, extremely interesting. I really can't wait to see what else they have.

EDIT: It's nice. It has an, apparently, very intensive workload, and the provided dorms (for one year; getting apartment afterwards) aren't great. Academically, it looks fantastic; they have a ton of humanities electives in addition to the main curriculum, as well as technical electives. The building is extremely odd. It's mostly very nice and modern, but the central staircase (my biggest gripe) goes from 1-6 and 7-whatever. Skips 6-7. Need to take a side staircase for that, very strange.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Apr 15 2010, 3:36 am by Centreri.