Thursday 15th August 2013 - A Level results day and the media swarm

A few years ago I examined a PhD thesis, in another university, on Rome's Bangladeshi immigrant community.  The women were almost all domestic servants.  But it was the men who interested me more.  They were predominantly street traders.  But they exhibited a herd instinct whereby instead of each one developing their own line in goods, they all migrated between activities en masse.  The latest wheeze was that someone had discovered that there was a good trade in writing people's names on a grain of rice.  So almost all the Bangladeshi male traders had ditched their previous lines of business and moved into rice-writing, often within sight of each other along the main tourist streets.  And the result?  The market for rice-writing became saturated, the distinctiveness of the product disappeared, and the trade collapsed.

I was reminded of that thesis today with the media coverage of the opening of the clearing and adjustment season following the publication of A level results.  Instead of Bangladeshi street traders in Rome the 'competing' and yet ultimately replicating interests were the television channels.  Anyone who watched the national BBC bulletins today will have seen a focus on Birmingham schools, with some soundbites from David Eastwood, the Vice-Chancellor.of Birmingham University.

But anyone watching any other channel would have seen Sheffield featured.  Of the 100 or so universities in England, and the dozen or more in Yorkshire, ITV, Sky News, ITV Calendar, and BBC Look North had all chosen to focus on us as the exemplar.  Anyone switching between news channels would have seen almost identicial shots of our clearing hotline room.

And they would also have found almost identical interviews with me.  Perhaps I should have brought in a change of clothes so that I could have been wearing something different for each interview.  In total I did 7 televsion interviews, two of them live broadcasts and the other 5 as parts of 'packages' for later editing and transmission.  But rather like the Bangladeshi street traders, the television crews were almost tripping over each other, with at one point three organisations in the room at the same time, complete with their  camera tripods, fluffy boom microphones (Sky were different and went for a lapel microphone), and cables. 

So what was the story line today?  For all but one interview it was about the way in which universities like Sheffield are now in clearing looking for high quality candidates, and I had to explain in each case that the limits on our recruitment of certain students (those with ABB grades or above) have been removed so that we can now facilitate students 'trading up' to a better unviersity than they had been committed to if their A level grades were higher than predicted.  So, again like the Bangladeshi traders in Rome, the 'product' from the media teams became relatively homogenous.  But one of the local channels took the line that more people from the north want to stay at home in the north and that university catchments are becoming more localised.  Unfortunately for the interviewer, that argument isn't true for Sheffield.  We haven't yet analysed the home locations of the students who will arrive next month, but over the last 4 years the proportion of our students from the Yorkshire and the Humber region has fallen a little, with the proportions from London and the South-East rising.  But I thought it was probably too much to go into that detail on air so stayed with explaining why northern cities are such good places to be a student.

Thursday 8th August 2013 - The National Student Survey and its impact

I have spent today juggling two major issues at either end of the 'student journey' - the preparations for the declaration of A level results next week and the consequent activity leading to the admission of a cohort of new students in 6 weeks time, and the National Student Survey results for students who have just graduated.  It is a belief of the present coalition government, and particularly of the Higher Education Minister, David Willetts, that there is a connection between these two.  It is argued that candidates for admission to university need as wide a range of information as possible about the possible choices open to them, and that key within this is the material that comes from the National Student Surevy - in other words, the opinions of students who have taken the courses they are considering.

I'm not so sure.  If that idea is true, then courses for which the National Student Survey (NSS) results show a low level of satisfaction should see a reduced rate of applications, and vice versa.  A few years ago I undertook some research to ascertain whether this was indeed so.  I found that there was a positive relationship between NSS score and applications levels, but it was very weak and not statistically significant.  From the perspective of a Pro-Vice-Chancellor this is a little unfortunate: had the relationship been demonstrably strong that would have given me ammunition for pointing out to departments that the long-term outcome of poor performance in terms of satisfaction could be a drying up of applications.  Do candidates really look in detail at satisfaction scores for the possible courses they are consdiering, and if so does such information play a major role in their decisions on which course to apply to?  A few months ago I took part in a round table discussion at the Guardian newspaper where we came to the conclusion that candidates are perhaps bamboozled with too much information, and that as immature consumers they are anyway more likely to rely on personal recommendation and anecdote than on surveys.

But I am clear that the national student survey does have a significant infleunce on the admissions position - although perhaps indirectly.  And that influence is not nuanced for different departments.  The influence coems via the way that NSS data are incorporated in the major university league tables published by newspapers such as the Times, the Guardian and other media.  And those league tables take the aggregate data for whole institutions rather than the figures for individual departments and courses.  Evidence from market research suggests that league tables are being increasingly used by candidates in choosing where to apply to.

And that actually does give me a lever to use with any poor-performing departments in the NSS.  Instead of saying to them 'your scores are such that people won;t apply to you', what I can in effect now say to them is that their scores are such as to drag down the aggregate figures for the university as a whole, and thus affect the institution's league table position adversely.  I suppose that sounds rather like the approach of the head teacher in the boarding school novels of the past - "Your poor behaviour is letting yourself down, but more importantly it's letting the SCHOOL down." 

Sheffield continues to do very well indeed in produing high levels of satisfaction among our students.  This year's data will be publicised next week when the embargo on doing so nationally is lifted.  Not coincidentally, that is the same week as the publication of A level results.  But I have already taken action over a very small number of under-performing departments to get the message to them that they are letting the University down.