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.
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