Making sense of higher education: students as consumers and the value of the university experience

In the global university sector competitive funding models are progressively becoming the norm, and institutions/courses are frequently now subject to the same kind of consumerist pressures typical of a highly marketised environment. In the United Kingdom, for example, students are increasingly demonstrating customer-like behaviour and are now demanding even more ‘value’ from institutions. Value, though, is a slippery concept and has proven problematic both in terms of its conceptualisation and measurement. This article explores the relationship between student value and higher education and, via study in one United Kingdom business school, suggests how this might be better understood and operationalised. Adopting a combined qualitative/quantitative approach, this article also looks to identify which of the key value drivers has most practical meaning and, coincidentally, identifies a value-related difference between home and international students

Nonperturbative Renormalization of QED in Light-Cone Quantization

As a precursor to work on QCD, we study the dressed electron in QED nonperturbatively. The calculational scheme uses an invariant mass cutoff, discretized light-cone quantization, a Tamm--Dancoff truncation of the Fock space, and a small photon mass. Nonperturbative renormalization of the coupling and electron mass is developed.Comment: Latex, 4 pages, 1 figur