🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <alan.697387088@aucs>, alan@aucs.acadiau.ca (Alan W. McKay) writes:

> What are your opinions on the amalgamation?  I personally think it
> is an excellent idea since it will be much less expensive, and will
> give students a better quality education.  However, there is the
> down side that programmes will become less flexible.  For example,
> it may become impossible to take Comp Sci and Philosophy at Acadia,
> which is what I did.

You think it will be much less expensive?  On the surface it may seem so, 
intuitively, it seems that moving Dal's Business program to SMU would make 
it cheaper to run.  But before one can decide that, one must ask if SMU has 
the resources to absorb Dal's business school, or any other component.  If 
you uproot a whole department and move all the people and equipment to a 
new location, they must have buildings, classrooms, storage space etc.  
Space is more precious than gold in a university and I for one think this 
will be the achilles heel of amalgamation.  The cost of absorbing a program 
from another university will outweigh the savings IMHO.  I use the Business 
school as an example, but I think it applies to any program.

> 
> Personally I think that this sort of thing should happen right across
> the country.  Germany does it this way and they seem to be getting
> along quite good.  Makes sense really, offer a certain programme in
> 6 or 7 places and do it extremely well, rather than trying to spread
> money, resources and professors across the country at every university.
> You end up with concentrations of excellence that cost a heck of a
> lot less than having a bunch of mediocre universities.  A strange thing
> about Germany as well is that there is no way to rate universities, it
> just isn't done and has no meaning.  When students apply for a certain

If there is no way to rate the universities then how does anyone know they 
are centres of excellence?  The above would seem to be self-contradictory.

> programme, they give a few universities of preference but are not
> guaranteed this place unless they have a very good reason to go there
> (e.g. want to live at home with parents, uncle, aunt, etc).  As well,
> students there get paid as much as 500DM per month or more, which is
> a stark contrast to our own system of making students pay to go to
> university.

At $0.66 Canadian per DM that comes to about $330.00 / month.  A single 
person willing to share accomodations with several other people might be 
able to just get by on that here.  Given the current levels of taxation in 
this country I for one shudder at the thought of any new program that would 
have a large outflow of cash by the government as its central theme.
-- 
John Robinson                  Only criminals, tyrants, and cowards have
robinson@ac.dal.ca                 reason to fear the armed, honest citizen.
DOD #0069