Ratemyprofessor.com - the informal poll of the best university and college teachers in the US - published its first annual top 50 ranking today.
Though the site is unreliable it is no less popular for it. And it clearly highlights how student satisfaction rises as institutional prestige falls, not least because students there get a better classroom experience than their ivory towered peers.
There isn't yet a British version of ratemyprofessor.com, but a sizeable chunk of the website is devoted to UK universities. And if institutions here aren't careful, they stand to lose out in the battle to claim the best student experience.
As the cost of going to university rises, which is likely come the 2009 tuition fee review, institutions will no longer be able to fob students off with postgraduate teaching assistants rather than the big name professors by which they applied to be taught.
Studies by the Higher Education Policy Institute have shown, the "contact time" students get with their professors varies enormously. And students are, for the most part, more interested in how they are taught and by whom than their university's research rating.
Which is why perhaps the more worrying conclusion to be drawn from the Ratemyprofessor.com league table is how little status is given to good teaching compared with research in some universities.
Vice-chancellors are constantly striving to produce as much research as possible and despite measures to try to make teaching as relevant as research - for instance in terms of promotion - it's still overwhelmingly research that counts. Much to the detriment of today's students.
