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Originally Posted by demonrail666
The RAE thing is being ignored by most universities as they increasingly focus on student numbers rather than the actual quality of teaching/research. At my uni, any department that can't guarantee 100 plus students per module is now vulnerable. I taught a course on Modernism last year which had fifteen students on it. It received excellent feedback from the students and produced some excellent coursework but has now been scrapped in favour of a new 'mega-module', focusing on employability - which none of the students I've spoken say they want.
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My undergraduate 'employability' lessons were laughable - derided by everyone concerned, but obligatory, and useless. In my course at the moment, there's one module which has a single student. MAs are a slightly different matter - they're much more profitable-per-student - but any class with more than 10 people in is an utter waste of time in educational terms. Universities needn't be exempt from market forces, but their prime focus should be on education. University of Bristol is currently axing something like 1 in 10 staff from humanities. Meanwhile, the administration is a sprawling wreck of disorganisation. You see this in banks, too - people holding the purse strings get rid of not that which is least efficient, but that which is least understood. Marketing departments are notorious for being money-haemorrhagers, but because there's a transparent in-out to the cashflow, they don't get job cuts. I'd bet Middlesex is keeping whatever Business qualifications it offers, regardless of their educational merit.