Universities

The Sutton Trust today criticised the system of personal statements for university admissions, as they favour well-connected children from private schools. Spectator readers might not be surprised by that, though: in September Molly Guinness revealed in the magazine that those who can afford to often contract the writing of the statement out to graduates for a generous fee. Guinness wrote: ‘They need help, and they’d be crazy not to get it. ‘Why would anyone write their own?’ says my cousin Malachy Guinness, who set up a tutoring agency. He points out that with no interviews, there’s no way of checking the authenticity of the statements. His company fields dozens of

University admissions service UCAS published figures today showing the number of students applying early for university has fallen by 8 per cent on last year, following a drop of just under 13 per cent the year before. ‘Oh dear,’ tweeted Times Higher Education’s news editor Simon Baker, adding that these figures are ‘worrying’ while NUS president Liam Burns said the data meant the government ‘should now finally admit that its higher education policies are having a significant impact on application behaviour’. Universities themselves might be worried about the effect on their business models of a decline in the number of students, particularly for undersubscribed courses. But are these figures really an

We have had the dreaded cartoons, films, teddy-bear and more. But I bet that until now nobody imagined we would ever see a (cue dreaded music) ‘Pineapple of Hate’.  Yet despite the now familiar feeling that this is all some terrible spoof, the fruit has joined the growing list of household items which can be legitimately regarded as ‘blasphemous’. As Student Rights reports, the crime-scene was the recent freshers’ fair at the University of Reading. For it was there that the Atheist, Humanist and Secular Society stall included a pineapple with the word ‘Mohammed’ on it. I always doubted that the Danish or French cartoons looked much like the prophet of Islam.

Cristina Odone begins her latest oh-woe-is-Britain post most amusingly: Around the world, people have long envied Britain’s two institutions: the BBC and Oxbridge. Britons, however, (or some of them) are determined to destroy both. They are going about it in a brutal and obvious way, by lowering standards for both Auntie and the great universities of Oxford and Cambridge. The BBC abroad was a byword for beautifully written and brilliantly produced programmes such as “The World at War” and “Upstairs Downstairs”. But in its obsession with “diversity”, the Beeb has allowed standards to slip: comedies that aren’t funny (but don’t sound middle class) and reality shows that teach nothing but

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