Universities

For the first year since GCSE’s came in we have not seen ‘the best results ever’.  Which is, of course, a great relief.  As Anthony Seldon, among others, has pointed out, these results suggest a return to credibility in our examination system. But there are already those, including some teachers and teacher unions who are now hinting darkly at ‘political interference’.  They are used to year-on-year grade inflation and expected this to continue forever. I think these people should themselves be asked to pass a simple test.  They should try to find a single university lecturer who is able to tell them (with a straight face) that each year –

What do you say to an Arts graduate? ‘Big Mac and fries, please!’ I used to laugh at that joke until I was served a Junior Whopper by one of my fellow arts graduates in Edinburgh and ever since then I’ve been suspicious of the story I was sold at school: that going to university takes you into a new league of earning potential. The A-Level results came out yesterday, and anyone who has opened an exams envelope will be familiar with the feeling. That you may as well have the results tattooed on your forehead because they will define the trajectory of your life. But in the 22 years since

A drop of 8.8 per cent in the number of students applying for university is surprisingly small, actually, when you consider the size of the hike in tuition fees. Still, the figures released today by Independent Commission on Fees prompted an angry response from Labour’s Shabana Mahmood, who said: ‘The Tory-led Government’s decision to treble tuition fees at the same time as cutting funding for higher education is already putting thousands of people off university who otherwise would be eagerly preparing to start their courses.’ It’s easy to brand this drop of 37,000 applications from the 2010/11 academic year as a failure for ministers who have insisted that the fee

Today’s ONS release will make pretty grim reading for students and recent graduates. It shows that the unemployment rate among recent graduates — those who graduated in the last six years — stands at 9.1 per cent, higher than the overall unemployment rate of 8.4 per cent. It’s even worse for those who graduated in the last two years — the unemployment rate among them is 18.9 per cent, up from 10 per cent before the recession. But there’s an even more worrying trend among those recent graduates who do find employment. In 2001, three-quarters of them were in ‘higher skill’ jobs — those requiring more than GCSEs. Now, less

Siphoning the contents of two brains through one mouth and on to a single page will generally produce eclectic results. And that’s certainly the case with David Willetts’ interview with the Times (£) this morning. The universities minister manages to range across subjects that include Robert Falcon Scott, climate change, the Falklands and universities access. He even reheats one of his old theories about Feminism and social mobility in a way that (coupled with the interview’s headline: ‘Moving on and up is very hard — and feminism is partly to blame’) makes it sound far more provocative than I think it’s meant to be, and much weaker for it. The

Michael Gove has said that ‘nothing is off the table’ when it comes to dealing with the revelations in today’s Telegraph that a chief examiner of the Welsh examination board, WJEC, steered teachers attending his board’s fee-paying advice session so flagrantly in the direction of what was likely to feature in the next examination, it amounted, as the man said, to ‘cheating’. The irony of the thing is that those teachers who did not pay £230 a session for his assistance are likely to do much better by their pupils: the obliging examiner was telling the teachers about the cycle of examination questions — in other words, which bit of

Fraser’s already commented on the welfare angle of Ed Miliband’s keynote speech to the Labour party; the welfare proposals are part of a broad analytical sweep that can be reduced to the catchphrase, ‘the something for something society’. Miliband’s vision of society will reward those who work and abide by the rules at the expense of those who do not – those who loot, who fiddle expenses, those who pursue short-termism in business. According to the Guardian, he will also emphasise the importance of social mobility and equality. To that end, he will encourage universities to take more people from disadvantaged backgrounds. Society and government should stand up for those

Coffee House has already touched on David Willetts’ interview with the Times (£), highlighting his view that the 50p tax rate is important to prove that “we’re all in this together”. Willetts does not limit his words to the top rate of tax. In addition to his universities brief, he discusses equal pay issues, social reform and the recent riots. Willetts confesses to being a “muser”, never happier than when applying his renowned brain to the broad sweep of government policy. “I wouldn’t be able to function properly as a politician unless I was able to range across some of these wider issues. It just wouldn’t be worth it,” he says.

The Gap Year has been declared dead. It’s A-levels day today, and the annual scramble for university places has been intensified ahead of next year’s tuition fees rise. According to this morning’s Times (£), the last count had 669,956 pupils sprinting after 470,000 vacancies. An estimated 50,000 students with adequate grades will not enter higher education this year as many universities have raised entry requirements to manage increased demand. This means that competition during clearance will be even more stiff than usual, particularly as universities will offer many fewer clearing places according to various surveys. Needless to say, UCAS’ website appears to have collapsed under the weight of this unparalleled