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Today more students than ever before go to university, and what they experience there is vastly different from even a decade ago. The hi-tech libraries, funky cafes, and elaborate sporting facilities hide a less attractive reality. Today's universities are vocationally driven, they use technology to offset staffing costs, class sizes have blown out, and staff are rewarded more for research than teaching. Students are less well prepared, they work longer hours in part-time jobs, and their education leaves them in debt for years. Drawing on research studies and his own interviews with 70 undergraduate students from universities around Australia, Richard Hil lifts the lid on the university experience. Far from producing highly knowledgeable, skilled, mobile, and flexible job-ready graduates, Hil argues universities are turning out a consumer population which is often unable to perform some of the most basic professional duties, and has little capacity to engage critically with the world around them.
