What Are Universities For?
Analysis
BBC
4.6 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 12 March 2018
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Almost half of the UK's school leavers are now going to university. But the university sector is under more scrutiny than ever before. Sonia Sodha argues that it's time to take a profound look at what universities are really for.
Should we be spending vast amounts of public money educating young people at this level if the main purpose is to get ahead of the next person? Are vast numbers of students being failed by a one-size-fits-all system that prizes academic achievement above all else? Why has Apple - and several other companies in Silicon Valley - decided that training young people's imagination and sense of civic culture is of paramount importance? What are the long-term risks to society if universities increasingly become little more than training grounds for the workplace?
Producer: Adele Armstrong.
Transcript
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| 0:42.0 | Britain's universities have become an economic powerhouse, |
| 0:45.0 | but as they continue to grow, Sonia Soda asks, |
| 0:48.0 | what's an undergraduate education actually for? |
| 0:51.0 | She begins at the University of Coventry. |
| 0:55.6 | Is that a chassis of a car? That is. That's from an Aston Martin. |
| 0:59.9 | I was almost try. Absolutely. |
| 1:03.0 | It was a project where Coventry University, |
| 1:05.0 | Uni Part and Aston Martin worked together. |
| 1:08.0 | Our target here was to take the exhaust system, |
| 1:10.0 | which unipart were already manufacturing, and look at different ways in which we could |
| 1:14.9 | improve the efficiency of the vehicle, we would burn less fuel and emit less carbon dioxide. |
| 1:20.2 | The new product was validated with Aston Martin and is now in production. |
| 1:28.4 | I have to confess I'm slightly distracted by the thought of what Sean Connery might have made of the latest |
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