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In: Education, HE funding, tuition fees, & student loans, HE policy, Politics, Skills

Forget about canaries, the signs of impending doom are more like the sound of cracking rock thundering through the coal mine and debris collapsing around us. Here are just two recent signs. Sign 1 New research recently revealed that now more than half of supposedly full-time undergraduates are doing paid work for more than 15 hours a week and nearly a quarter have full-time jobs alongside their studies to make ends meet. The idea that students whinge about not having enough money is nothing new. (There are even a jokes about it in Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale from the fourteenth century.) But we have reach a differentRead More →

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In: Careers education, information, advice & guidance, Fair access, HE policy, Social mobility
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I felt (quite literally) honoured recently to receive an invitation from the man who puts the ‘great’ into Paul Greatrix – none other than the Registrar of the University of Nottingham, the blogger, the podcaster and the chronicler of all things higher education.  He asked me to appear on his podcast My Imaginary University. If you’re not familiar with it (where have you been?), this is the closest thing the HE sector has to Desert Island Discs. It’s a ingeniously simple format in which Paul interviews someone, invites them to make some seemingly fantastical choices and, in the process, of course, they reveal as much about themselvesRead More →

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In: Admissions and access, Careers education, information, advice & guidance, Education, Employability, Fair access, Opportunity, Social mobility, Student choice
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I don’t think I agree with the idea of university as a ‘failsafe’, although I’m still not sure I understand what you intend by the word. So I’m going to use Matt Pinkett’s line: ‘Aim for whatever you want to do, and if you don’t get it, well, at least you can go to university.’ That assumes that whatever you want to do won’t be best achieved by going to uni. Obviously, university is not the best route for everything or for everyone, but for the vast majority of the best paid and most secure jobs, it is – if not a prerequisite – at least aRead More →

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In: Admissions and access, Careers education, information, advice & guidance, Education, Fair access, Opportunity, Social mobility, Student choice, Student information
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There is plenty of research showing a significant earnings premium on average for graduates regardless of background. Probably the most comprehensive work is the paper by the IFS ‘How English domiciled graduate earnings vary with gender, institution attended, subject and socio-economic background’. The Sutton Trust has also done many excellent studies on different aspects of this question which is actually a lot more complex than it sounds.