Just When You Thought Universities Were Going South Along Comes the Panacea -- God and the Bill Gates/Warren Buffets of the World Will Provide -- It's Student Accommodation, Stupid. (August 23, 2006)

    Perhaps you are under the delusion that Harvard is No.1 because of its faculty, funding base and research infrastructure.

The underlying reason that Harvard is No.1, Cambridge, No.2, and Stanford No.3 is highly correlated to the quality of their student accommodation.

According to The Australian's Catherin Armitage the Federal Minister for Education, Science and Training, Julie Bishop attended a seminar last Saturday on university futures organised by St John's College at the University of Queensland.

She, vice-chancellors John Hay of UQ, Ian O'Connor of Griffith, Bill Lovegrove of Southern Queensland and a group of about 30 senior scholars spent three hours discussing what makes a world-class university system built on diversity.

Armitage continues, "Residential college communities feature in all the finest institutions, the minister says, with their 'high degree of individual attention and interaction for students, the sense of intellectual engagement beyond the classroom and the focus on student welfare, character values and extracurricular activities'."

Did anyone mention voluntary student unions?

And furthermore, "It was also noteworthy to the minister that residential colleges tend to be magnets for philanthropy." And the Minister told Armitage, "I suggested the time had perhaps come for Christian and non-Christian institutions to renew the commitment to establishing residential colleges on campus and to consider expanding them."

Well now we know the reason that the US universities are sitting on top of the heap. It's all those frat houses on campus.