Does spending on education increase learning?

Evidence from the Guardian UK university ranking, which scores universities both on their value-added (final exam scores minus pre-university exam scores - a measure of how much students learnt at university), spending, and student-staff ratio.

aaaand surprise surprise, spending looks totally uncorrelated with learning.

Smaller class sizes do seem to be doing something (small sample sizes, correlation not causation, yadda yadda), which makes you wonder what the high-spend, large class-size universities are spending all their money on.

Higher Education in Africa

Ugandan journalist Daniel Kalinaki posted this exam from the Kampala International University on his twitter feed a couple of weeks ago, and it has been a bit stuck in my head. Is this really real? Is this normal? Their wikipedia page says that KIU is ranked 58th out of African universities. It's deeply sad if true.

How not to market your university

From the website of the University of Burundi (with thanks to Google Translate). Where do I enroll! To make a serious point though, is this a pernicious influence of the aid industry?