Lecturers may go for 'Strike' in UK

Tens of thousands of university students could have their final year exams and graduation ceremonies disrupted this summer after lecturers warned they may strike over job losses. 

The University and College Union (UCU) which represents lecturers may go for industrial action to oppose at least 14,000 job cuts on campuses across the UK. This could coincide with final exams in June and graduations later on in the year. Sally Hunt, the UCU's general secretary, speaking at the union's annual conference in Manchester, warned that if discussions about redundancies broke down, there could be a national strike. 

There have been at least 15 strikes over job losses at universities since March. Higher education institutions are grappling with cuts of £1.2bn between now and 2013. These include £200m that was slashed from their budgets last week. In March, more than three-quarters of universities in England were told they would have their budgets cut for this September – some by nearly 14%, prompting warnings of larger class sizes, further job cuts and a deterioration in the quality of courses. 

The UCU's representatives on campuses were reporting new redundancies each day, 

Hunt said she wondered how long "this will remain a local action", adding: "Soon our members will want us to take this to a national level and make a national response too." 

Academics at Westminster University have said they will not mark essays and exams in protest over plans to cut 50 posts. A university spokesman said it was taking "every reasonable measure to minimise the impact" on students. 

Meanwhile, academics today accused the government of forcing them to spy on international students. They claim new visa rules, under which academics must report an overseas student who fails to enrol, miss lectures or drops out of a course, are against academic freedom. The rules were devised so officials could keep track of the whereabouts of international students. 

Lecturers called for the union to put up a legal challenge to the points-based immigration scheme. They said they would be prepared to appeal to the European court of human rights if necessary. 

Courtesy guardian.co.uk

Consider all the Parameters before you join any 'University or College'.

Lot of Students ask about the various crucial decisions of their life like carreer which college to join or which course of education should be taken so as to build the career .My advice is to follow your heart’s desire that is what you feel like doing brilliantly in any field. If you feel that you are artistic go for arts and vice versa. However there are some problems like selection of colleges in India or foreign countries . 

A lot of general information is available about the humanities and the perceived rankings of graduate programs and universities. Most academics are able to assess the relative merits of the faculty in one department versus another—at least in our particular subfields. We can also visit Web sites and find out the features of programs, which are generally presented in the most positive terms. 

But, one should get some reliable, recent, and specific information about individual graduate programs, since perceptions about the relative merits of programs are often based on vague—and possibly dated—reputational capital. Useful information, such as attrition rates, are generalized for the entire profession so that one can't use such data to compare programs. And while some programs provide information about placement rates of their graduates in academic positions, that hardly presents the whole picture, and the methods used are inconsistent. 

You often hear that students should consider going to a graduate program in the humanities only if they get into a top-20 program. But there are underfinanced programs in the top 20 that have high attrition rates, heavy student workloads, and, for a variety of interconnected reasons, poor placement records. Those programs prepare their students for positions at research universities (for which they may not be competitive) and teach them to shun other opportunities. The majority of teaching jobs are at non-elite colleges, but hiring committees at those colleges share the bias toward the elite and too often assume that a candidate from a top program doesn't really want to teach at a lesser-ranked campus and will leave as soon as possible. 

Sometimes elite universities do not properly prepare students for the academic job market,nd sometimes departments promote a small number of star students and invest minimal effort in the rest of the cohort. 

Knowledge about such distinctions, however, is hard to acquire. It requires an extensive web of contacts and information sources that is nearly impossible to sustain outside of the most active centers of the profession. 

How many students are bold enough to ask the chair of a department to provide some hard data about a program? They can visit a department and talk to its students, but how do they contact former graduate students—typically, the majority—who left without completing their degrees? 

Typically, students feel grateful to be admitted to graduate school, and they go in with their eyes half shut. Sometimes it works out; more often, it doesn't. A lot of luck is involved. And it's much easier to talk about contributing factors in retrospect, perhaps 10 years later, than it is to predict the outcome of a program one is about to enter. 

The problem is that most applicants to graduate programs lack the most crucial information, and so do the people they trust and turn to for advice. 

Admissions: How many applications does your program receive each year? How many students are accepted? How many enroll? 

Aid for students: What kind of financial support can a student expect to receive during the entire course of the program? What is the cost of living in the area? How much educational debt have students accumulated, on average, by the time they graduate? 

Teaching: How many discussion sections and courses are graduate students required to teach in order to receive a stipend in each year of the program? What is the average teaching load in each year of the program? 

Attrition: What percentage of students enrolled in the program eventually earn doctorates? How many leave with master's degrees? At what point do most drop out? What are the reasons given, if any (i.e., money, concerns about job market, seeking other opportunities, family responsibilities, etc.)? 

Time taken to complete the degree: How many years does it take to graduate on average (not ideally, but in reality)? 

Placement:  Where, exactly, is every graduate employed in academy (and in what kinds of positions: tenure track, visiting, adjunct, etc.)? Who was their dissertation adviser? What were their subfields? Does the program also lead to appealing career paths outside of academe? 

On many department Web sites, you will find information about successful recent placements, but the methods are not comparable or verifiable, and leave out far more than they include. Only when you see all of the categories of program assessment together, compiled over many years (five, at least), do you begin to be able to discern which programs are healthy—maybe even nurturing the "life of the mind"—and which ones are somewhere along the spectrum toward dysfunctional and even exploitative. 

The value of such information for advising undergraduates would be enormous, and it could place positive pressures on universities to accelerate time to degree, reduce debt, curtail attrition, and, perhaps, encourage institutions to reduce their reliance on contingent labor. 

There may also be some external ways to encourage participation. Professional organizations like the American Association of University Professors, the Modern Language Association, and the American Historical Association could publicize the most effective programs, recognize the most improved, and censure the worst or the ones that refuse to participate. 

Remember prevention is better then cure and so we must acquire all the information which we can in order to have a safe admission in any university or college in other country.