Tertiary Education
My undergraduate course structure was pretty simple - you attended lectures and practicals for three years, you took annual exams and practical tests. No flexibility, no course options, no tutorials, no essays, no lecture handouts. No real interaction with the staff, all of whom were admittedly excellent, but that was the system - no formal contact procedures existed.
And there was far too much lecture material to assimilate - you couldn't hope to cover it all. Fortunately, a seasoned fellow-student had a plan, perfectly ethical and legitimate, a way of second-guessing all the questions in Finals, based on statistics and psychology, and then honing our answers in advance. I suppose we could have got rich by marketing it. We certainly got very good results.
But the point is that it shouldn't have been necessary. I sincerely hope that degree courses (in those Chemistry Departments that still survive these days) are now far more realistically geared to the students' learning curves.
Everything should have been more rational at postgraduate level, but in some ways it was worse, at least for Ph D students (for whom their Thesis would be their only salvation - unlike the M Sc students who gained credits for taking courses and passing the tests). There is almost no situation in life quite so lonely and nerve-racking as Ph D research - unless you have a friendly and approachable supervisor. That is - by common consent - by no means the rule, especially if that (nominal) supervisor happens to be a busy Head of Department.
I believe that there should be a formal contract between the Department and the postgraduate, guaranteeing him/her a certain amount of regular support, encouragement and advice. There should also be realistic agreed targets and the wherewithal to accomplish them - quite possibly involving collaborative development of computer programs, for example, in order to achieve practicable timescales. I was expected to start from scratch, whereas a perfectly good CNDO / CI program was in the process of completion by a third-year postgrad. As far as I know, it was never used again.
And, as every postgrad or postdoc knows, the biggest hurdle of all is actually writing the stuff up, as a Thesis or for publication. Abso-blooming-lutely no advice or support whatsoever from the system. Over-runs were common, and no-shows not unknown. The most brilliant fellow-researcher I ever knew, RSM, from whom I learned a very great deal, eventually disappeared into the welcoming embrace of ICI Ltd, his Thesis unfinished to this day. To paraphrase the sorrowing remark by Newton about the luckless Roger Cotes, "If RSM had written-up, then we should have known something".
Just over five years ago, an official report (please follow links below) revealed that almost a third of full-time and two-thirds of part-time doctoral students had not completed their degree within seven years. And there's plenty of anecdotal evidence since then to be found via Google.
Additionally, there is mounting evidence that post-graduate research actually decreases ones earnings-potential relative to people of the same age who've gone straight into the jobs market after getting their first degree. And I have personal experience of the ambivalence of prospective employers, or even colleagues within the job environment, of 'somebody with a (!) title' - I quickly learned to keep it pretty quiet. Such prospects would be a certain demotivation and disincentive to a doctoral student in the throes of a difficult research or thesis situation with a disengaged supervisor.
I rest my case. And, what is more, the tax-payer deserves better of the higher educational system than that it should fail to make a proper and cost-effective use of its basic raw materials - the students.
www.independent.co.uk/student/postgraduate/no-more-poor-supervision-498663.html
(If the link is broken, see this copy.)
www.guardian.co.uk/education/2006/jul/18/highereducation.postgraduate
(If the link is broken, see this copy.)
PS. Just a few days after writing this, I came across the following excellent self-help guide to many diverse aspects of life as a research student, including the issues discussed above. The author is Visiting Professor for the Development of Graduate Education at the University of Manchester. My copy is actually the Second Edition published in 2000, and I understand the Third Edition is even better!
Pat Cryer, 'THE RESEARCH STUDENT'S GUIDE TO SUCCESS', 3rd Edn, Sep 2006, Open University Press
Online Journals
You might be surprised to find that quaternary education (traditionally scorned as autodidacticism, which does sound vaguely improper, but is of course a long and honourable tradition of self-improvement through private study - think of Faraday, Boole, Ramanujan, or Einstein, for example) has its own unexpected overheads nowadays.
Consider this Letter to the Editor published recently in a well-known newspaper as part of an ongoing correspondence regarding the exorbitant cost of public access to scientific research papers if available only online:
"May I make a plea for the independent scholar? Unless he or she is a member of an academic library (usually not possible if you are not a member of an academic institution) the extortionate pay walls erected by academic publishers prevent all access to original research.
This was never the case with the printed journals formerly held on the shelves of those libraries. Sometimes it seems that we are reverting to the days of chained books and inaccessible languages which served only the purposes of the elite and powerful."
This summarises perfectly the dismay I experience when faced with a (typically) £30 charge to see the content of an online reference, having viewed only the Abstract (which may or may not be hugely helpful in gauging the overall relevance to me of the content itself).
However it is very encouraging that the present UK government is now reviewing this situation, and is "committed to ensuring that publicly-funded research should be accessible free of charge".
For further discussion of these issues, please see the following (free!!!) links - I'm not a Guardian reader, but I deeply admire their campaign on behalf of affordable public access to scientific research:
www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/jan/16/academic-publishers-enemies-science
(If the link is broken, see this copy.)
www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2012/may/09/open-access-publishing-deep-pockets
(If the link is broken, see this copy.)
www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/apr/09/frustrated-blogpost-boycott-scientific-journals
(If the link is broken, see this copy.)
www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/apr/10/science-open-access-publishing
(If the link is broken, see this copy.)
A similar controversy is in full spate regarding the news media themselves, and as always Wikipedia provides a detailed and balanced account:
I'm an ardent admirer and supporter of Wikipedia, and would like to suggest that every regular user should consider making them a financial contribution from time to time!