This has been a big month for media coverage of higher education, and I guess it's only going to get more intense over the coming weeks.  Someone texted me at 0930 this morning to ask if I'd read page 6 of today's Sunday Times - which I hadn't at that time.  Sheffield takes a lead role there in a story about how universities are raising their likely required offer grades for 2011 entry, despite the fact that prospectuses were published several months ago showing lower grades.  Universities really can't win in this situation.  If we keep our offers at the levels that seemed plausible back in December 2009 when the 2011 prospectus was being produced we would run the risk of being swamped by students and then fined heavily by the funding council for exceeding the limit they have put on numbers.  The press would no doubt then tell us that we were bad managers of our admissions process.

If we kept the grades as stated but then were highly selective in making offers and rejected many candidates who would have made the original offer grades we would be pilloried for apparently being inconsistent: the papers would alight upon individuals and bring out sob stories about them ("4 As student rejected by university").  If we put up our offers we are criticised for having done so.

In my view we run an excellent admissions process involving very large numbers of people in something that we take very seriously.  But we are doing so at a time when demand exceeds the supply of places in many programmes in universities like ours, and when the level of mis-understanding amongst many journalists borders on the wilful.

Other press stories of the last few weeks have, of course, been around the universities' funding issues and the future of student fees (or a graduate tax), and around the possibility of more private providers and degrees taught in FE colleges.  I heard the representative of one private provider recently talk of how his organisation would soon have a distributed full-scale comprehensive university running in all the major cities of the UK. I asked him when they would be opening their first department of Biomedical Science: of course there was no answer. Private providers will only go for low-cost bulk numbers programmes.

This blogging week coincides with graduation ceremonies.  I am scheduled to attend 11 of the 15 this week.  I am sure that thoughts occasioned by some of the ceremonies will appear in this blog, but there will be other things in my life as well.