BLUNDER CITY #DUD —AND THE STADIUM REVIEW AIN’T NO HELP
![Ivy 1 [galleryhip.com]](https://dunedinstadium.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/ivy-1-galleryhip-com.jpg)
Ivy League Assaults: Dumber and Dumber due to UE failure, drunkenness, fires, civil disorder, better campus and study offerings up north and overseas?
AWAIT UNIVERSITY OF OTAGO PRONOUNCEMENTS AFTER THE MARCH MEETING OF THE HALLOWED UNIVERSITY COUNCIL
A ‘PUBLIC RELATIONS EPIC’ IS EXPECTED
### ODT Online Tue, 10 Mar 2015
University roll worry realised
By Timothy Brown
Fears of University of Otago first-year student numbers falling for the first time since 2011 appear to be realised, with “serious” vacancies at Knox College and Salmond College. About 10% of beds at the two non-university run colleges remain vacant and the Otago University Students’ Association revealed, earlier this year, the University of Otago could face a drop in first-year student numbers.
Read more
Both Knox and Salmond have undergone recent building upgrades and provide excellent pastoral care in quiet settings – who then, would choose a university-owned rough-house college if you were serious about career education.
What sort of undergrad student is the University of Otago attracting nowadays? Party animals? Generation Zero lefties? Discount ivy-leaguers (Kiwi-Asian style)? And how come accommodation at college halls is so steep? It’s an obscene weekly cost if mummy and daddy aren’t paying, so yes, way better(?) to camp out in the grunge and gunge flats of Studentville —or hey, move up the hill to sink the tone of City Rise, look at all those “historic-kick-apart” villas and mansions, incredibly suited to Face Book parties and upsetting middle class owner-occupiers next door. Cripes, at each former family or professional home there’s room to park “6 cars!”, yes, the cash-cow landlords will happily (just ask) destroy established 100-year-old plantings and gardens to lay down asphalt.
Welcome to ‘Absolutely Beautiful’, Dunedin. Welcome to the student ghettos, the broken streetscapes…. smashed bottles, lingering trash, burnt furniture, bouncing basketballs (all hours, Really Dumb like that), drying vomit and worse, weeds, untrimmed trees and hedges, a few kicked-in fences, more asphalt, flaking paint at once proud residences, stickering with satellite dishes and heat pumps, strings of poorly washed laundry draping house fronts. But who can forget the “Dunedin Sound”, of nights, drunken male yahoos, uncoordinated white trash hakas and ‘young girl’ screams, passion or torture, hard to tell. 111.
THIS is, Dunedin FOR Education.
Student loans FOR Banks and Slum Landlords.
Google Images: “castle street hyde street dunedin”
And Harlene, next! Frat Life starts in on St Leonards – just a quick ride from your Ivy League of diminished offerings, that overpriced BA, BCom or BSc.
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Posted by Elizabeth Kerr
What if? Dunedin... 
University entrance exam has been tightened up to reduce the number of functionally illiterate teens whose numeracy depends on never having a finger severed in an accident. This has “disadvantaged” Maori and PI students, I heard on the radio. Not sure how advantaged they were by getting a qualification that let them sign up for huge loans to do something for which they were woefully under-prepared by the secondary school system.
As with most University news, you read it here first.
This isn’t bad news if it is a result of UE criteria being strengthened. University rolls cannot just go on growing ad infinitum. Population blips don’t help.
You could still argue I guess that the University has not been as successful in competing in a presumably more stringent market and maintaining/increasing its market share of students. I wonder how other NZ universities rolls are going by comparison. Will the ODT do some research on this?
Saying all that, we are more than mildly amused by Farry and Co’s prediction about the role of the stadium attracting an additional 500-1000 students a year. We knew it was bullshit then and so it has proved to be.
Poor old Stuart McLauchlan looks silly with his Pro-Chancellor influence in hooking up the Highlanders to the University’s name. Same for John Ward. Dud move, costing the Uni $200,000….for now. Dud result. Where’s the extra students, Stu? Folk at the DCC and the Uni still think he is marvellous. Some of them got their degrees at Otago University. What does that tell you about quality control?
It might say more about BCom degrees and trumped-up bean counters….
Efts! Always Efts! Being ‘equivalent to a full time student’ is hardly being a student. As for Knox College, dont they have to be Presbyterian? This is the College that stopped the hazing, and good on them, for dunking 1st years in a bathfull of eels is not what John Knox had in mind, ken? Ken?
Why the surprise?
Submitted to ODT Online by Calvin Oaten on Tue, 10/03/2015 – 5:25pm.
“A 17% drop in students achieving University Entrance last year.” Should that be a surprise? Not if anyone had bothered over recent years to give a moment’s study to the nation’s demographics. It was and is clearly signaled in the national census over recent times. The trend is for a lower birth rate and parents putting off having children till later in life. That by its very nature reduces the number of children per couple.
We have seen the recent condensing of local primary and intermediate schools, which is only due to falling rolls. This should have signaled to the universities that the wave had crested and would wane. It should have influenced their forward planning for both Efts intakes as well as the grandiose building programmes.
Aren’t the academics supposed to be experts in these things? Surely they are aware of the fact that this is a worldwide demographic in developed countries. Just look at Japan and Russia for starters. This undue emphasis on perpetual growth is going to be a shock to the systems once they wake up to the fact. It’s not rocket science, just common observation of trends will do it.
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{Published at http://www.odt.co.nz/campus/university-otago/335760/university-roll-worry-realised#comment-69003 -Eds}