More Universities to Charge Maximum Fees

Last month we reported that Exeter University had announced it will charge the maximum of £9000 tuition fees when new legislation allows them to do so in 2012.

Since then, a growing number of universities have declared similar intentions. Indeed, with 21 universities now having declared their fees for the 2012-13 year, it is obvious that fees at a maximum level will be the norm rather than an exception. This is in complete contrast to the comments of David Willets, the government's universities minister, who said only last month that maximum fees would only be charged in exceptional cases.

The list so far can be found on the BBC news website. It includes eight out of the 20 members of the elite Russell Group, with the remaining 12 members still to declare.

All 8 of the second tier "1994 Group" universities to have declared will be charging maximum fees.

Only four out of the 21 who have declared will be charging less than the maximum, all of these being former polytechnics or higher education colleges.

All universities charging maximum fees will have to provide special provision for applicant students from poorer families and a system of bursaries.

We have covered the protests against the rise in tuition fees here. And if you are an A-Level student thinking about university, but worried about the increasing costs, we offer some words of advice.

If, as now seems possible, nearly all universities charge the maximum £9000 fees, there could be serious consequences for our entire education system. Firstly, the number of young people who can afford university will fall. With a limited number of bursaries on offer, there is a danger that the universities system will become accessible only to a privileged minority of the population, with students from low and average income families simply unable to afford it.

Secondly, the universities may suffer themselves if the number of applicants falls. With vastly reduced grants from central government, universities will have to take cold decisions about which departments are attracting the required numbers of students, with the remainder facing severe cuts or even closure.

Finally, these government plans may begin to look like a step too far for the country as a whole. Keeping students in education beyond sixth form is vital to the success of British companies and the wider economy. It also provides our young people with a valuable experience that they cannot get in the workplace.

Are these prospects a part of the fairer Britain the coalition government wanted to achieve when it took office?

A New Era in Super-Computing?

If you're looking for areas in which maths can be applied to the real world, look no further than computing and in particular the latest exciting advances coming from universities in the US.

At a meeting of the American Physical Society in Dallas, scientists from University of California, Santa Barbara have been demonstrating the latest steps on the road to a quantum computer.

A quantum computer, something that, as far as we know, has yet to be built, would be able to perform calculations on a scale that would vastly out-perform today's super-computers.

The UCSB device is one step along the road towards such a computer. It houses a chip containing 9 quantum devices, four of which are "quantum bits" or Qubits, which do the calculations. Later this year, the team hopes to increase the number of Qubits to 10. When scientists are able to increase the number of Qubits to about 100, they think the chip will be the basis of a viable, usable computer.

All of this opens the possibility that in the near future we'll have the power of today's super-computers on our desks, on our laps, even in our mobile phones.

For these developments, we owe a lot to Erwin Schroedinger, whose work on quantum physics and wave equation paved the way for the weird world of quantum mechanics.

At its heart, quantum computing depends on "super-position", which is the seemingly unnatural ability for a particle to be in two states at the same time. A particle spinning in one direction could be given a weak pulse of energy, which might be enough to set it spinning in the opposite direction, but maybe not. As long as the particle is not being observed or interacted with in any way, quantum physics says that the particle is in both states at the same time.

Now, we could use a whole line of these particles to represent the binary digits of a number. If a calculation is performed using a traditional computer, we would need to feed each number into the computer separately. But because a quantum computer can operate on particles in super-position, it can perform the calculation on all the possible combinations simultaneously. A number whose binary representation is 7 digits long is between 0 and 127. A traditional computer would need to do a calculation on each of these 127 numbers. A quantum computer could do them all at once.

But the power of quantum computing brings huge challenges for society. In fact, as things stand, a fully functioning quantum computer would jeopardise the stability of the world. This is because world commerce depends on the use of secure ciphers to protect and verify financial transactions. Additionally, many secure conversations between governments and government institutions are carried out using the same sets of ciphers. With the unimaginable computing power that quantum computing would bring, these ciphers, which we have previously considered unbreakable, would be rendered useless.

So the race is on: will the quantum computer arrive first, posing threats to international security and commerce? Or will a new quantum cryptography be developed first, securing transactions in a new unbreakable way? (It's another story, but such a form of encryption has already been shown possible over short communication distances. And it is absolutely unbreakable.)

Yesterday's science fiction really is tomorrow's reality.

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Exeter's Fees will be Maximum - Others to Follow?

Image via WikipediaExeter University has this morning announced it will charge the maximum of £9000 tuition fees when new plans allow them to do so in 2012.

Exeter joins a growing list of universities including Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial College intending to charge the highest rate, but it is the first university outside the elite Russell Group. If others in the second tier "1994 Group" declare similar intentions, it could be a sign that the government is going to struggle to keep fees to an average level of £7500, as planned. The government stated, when the plans were drawn up, that a level of £9000 would only apply in exceptional circumstances.

The announcement will mean Exeter will have to provide special provision for applicant students from poorer families and a system of bursaries.

David Willetts, the government's Universities Minister, has put himself on a collision course with the universities by stating that there is no reason arts courses should require fees of more than £6000 and scientific and medical courses £7500.

With the Russell Group universities, there is no doubt that setting tuition fees at the highest level is intended to signal exceptional quality. But the Exeter announcement appears to be a decision based purely on the university's finances. A spokesperson for Exeter University said that students would be expecting increases in the number of academic staff and better facilities. Since government cuts mean that the university is losing funding, it will need to increase its income in some other way. Students appear to be those who will pay.

Students at universities and FE Colleges, along with sixth form pupils, have all joined protests against the increases in tuition fees over the last few months. We have covered the student protests here. And if you are an A-Level student thinking about university, but worried about the increasing costs, we offer some words of advice.

Our feeling is that, with a growing number of universities announcing maximum fees, there will be serious consequences for the number of young people who can afford university. With a limited number of bursaries on offer, there is a danger that the universities system will become accessible only to a privileged minority of the population, with students from low and average income families simply unable to afford it. Universities may suffer themselves if the number of applicants falls. Are these prospects a part of the fairer Britain the coalition government wanted to achieve when it took office?

Want a decent education? Don't do A-Levels.

Image via Wikipedia
The Royal Society, one of Britain's leading scientific institutions, has declared A-Levels "not fit for purpose".

This conclusion stems from the fact that relatively few pupils deciding on the usual 3 A-Level subjects will choose to do a science or maths. Across the UK in 2009, 17% of 16 to 18-year-olds took one or more science A-level, or equivalent qualification, the report says. This compares unfavourably with Scotland, where pupils generally take 5 Highers and often spread their choice between the sciences and the arts.

The report says this difference indicated problems with the structure of post-16 qualifications provision and demonstrates an "underlying cultural indifference" towards the sciences and maths.

Other findings included a need for more specialist maths and science teachers and a broadening of the diversity of A-Level subjects.

The Royal Society is calling for the rapid introduction of an English Baccalaureate at A-Level, which would require students to take a spread of subjects, including maths and a science subject. A similar qualification has already been announced for GCSE level by education secretary Michael Gove. The government thinks this new qualification will drive up the take-up of maths and science at both pre- and post-16 levels.

A review of the A-Level system has already been promised, although so far there are few details of the shake-up. Gove previously announced a desire to return to more emphasis on a final examination, moving away from a modular system.

The Chair of the Royal Society's Education Committee, Professor Dame Athene Donald, said in the report that, at a time of economic uncertainty, it was deeply worrying to find maths and science numbers so low, when these specialities have such potential to revitalise the country's financial outlook.

Gove acted unlawfully

Two weeks ago we reported that the education secretary, Michael Gove, was facing a legal challenge to his scrapping of the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) scheme.

Yesterday, the High Court in London ruled in favour of the Education Authorities bringing the case to court. Michael Gove was told he must reconsider the decision to scrap the scheme because he had unlawfully failed to consult local councils. Seven hundred school building projects were shelved because of the decision.

In the House of Commons, Gove continued to defend his actions, telling MPs that his decision was clear and rational. He said that the scale of the deficit meant cuts were inevitable. He also pointed out that the judge had not ordered a reinstatement of the scheme, nor any compensation payment to the schools involved. The ruling gives schools the chance to "make representations".

For Labour, shadow education secretary Andy Burnham said that the ruling was damning. He demanded full details of conversations between Mr Gove and his civil servants and called on David Cameron to remove him from any future involvement in these matters.

Unfortunately, it seems unlikely that any of this will ever lead to the school rebuilds taking place.

Carl Friedrich Gauss (30 April 1777 – 23 February 1855)

Carl Friedrich Gauss
Oil painting by G. Biermann

Two hundred years ago, one of the greatest mathematical thinkers ever to have lived was in his prime. In 1807, at the age of 30, Carl Friedrich Gauss was appointed Professor of Astronomy at Göttingen. But this did not inhibit his prolific work in pure mathematics. In 1811, he published a paper on the meaning of integrals with complex limits and examined the dependence of such integrals on the chosen path of integration.

Remarkable as it is, it is not so much this particular piece of work we wish to celebrate in this article. In mathematics Gauss is remembered for so many things, but perhaps most often for the Gaussian or "Normal" statistical distribution.

Gauss was a child prodigy. There is a story, which may or may not be true, about his remarkable mathematical ability at primary school. His teacher, realising Gauss had completed a task well ahead of the rest the class, asked Gauss to calculate the sum of the numbers from 1 to 100. The child thought for a few seconds, then told her the answer: 5050. He had added 1 and 99, 2 and 98, etc, to turn the sum into 49 x 100, after which he added the only unpaired numbers, 50 and 100.

When Gauss was only 14, Charles William Ferdinand, the Duke of Brunswick, who was always on the lookout for bright students, paid for the boy to go to the university in Brunswick.

Subsequently, he studied further in Göttingen. 1796 was Gauss’s most prolific year, in which he documented at least 5 major discoveries and proofs in number theory and geometry. He demonstrated the construction of a 17-sided polygon using only straight-edge and compass, something that had eluded all mathematicians since the ancient Greeks.

Gauss sorely wanted to be accepted by the elite group of Parisian mathematicians. But he presented his ideas in cryptic ways and didn’t believe in showing much working and this ultimately went against him. He was to spend all his life in what is now Germany.

In 1801, there was great excitement in the world of astronomy as an 8th planet was discovered between Mars and Jupiter. It was named Ceres, and today we know it as the largest asteroid. This discovery was considered a great omen for a new dawn of science at the beginning of the 19th century.

Shortly afterwards, however, the astronomers lost sight of the newly discovered object. Gauss announced he knew where to find it, using mathematical techniques now used to analyse data of many different types. To solve the problem of measurements of Ceres, Gauss had invented the Gaussian (or Normal) Distribution, now used widely in statistics, enabling patterns to be seen in seemingly random data.

The breakthrough was his realisation that the measurements, accurate and inaccurate, would, when plotted on a graph, be distributed around the true value in the shape of a bell-shaped curve. With this and other tools, statistical analysis has become a powerful weapon to analyse data, to test hypotheses, to separate statistical fact from fiction.

Gauss had an aversion to teaching and said that a professor “loses his precious time” lecturing students. This led to his taking the non-teaching post as Professor of Astronomy in the University of Göttingen in 1807 and he spent the rest of his career tracking the paths of planets.

The Gaussian distribution crops up everywhere; it is one of the statistician’s tools for understanding the real world, in the fields of chemistry, medicine, engineering, finance and many others.
Although arguably the most famous of Gauss’s mathematical innovations, the Gaussian distribution is probably not the greatest of his many mathematical achievements.

Despite his enormous influence in the fields of statistics and astronomy, the properties of numbers was Gauss’s true mathematical penchant. He once said “Maths is the Queen of the Sciences and Number Theory the Queen of Maths.”