This week there’s the Chancellor’s spending review to get across and a new report from Universities UK on tackling racial harassment.
There’s also work out from Jisc on staff and digital, and a batch of complaints from the first part of the pandemic to learn lessons from published by OIA.
With Helen O’Sullivan, Pro VC Education at Keele University and Amatey Doku, Consultant at Nous.
Items this week
- Spending Review 2021
- Teaching staff digital experience insights survey 2020: UK higher education findings
- The work the sector needs to do to address systemic racism is difficult and uncomfortable, but – for David Richardson – it is work we all need to engage with.
- Independent Adjudicator Felicity Mitchell explains OIA’s judgements on whether complaining students were treated unfairly during the first wave of Covid-19.
- Jim Dickinson has heard the news about the NHS Covid-19 vaccination programme, and thinks it might be time to “leave it til April”
- Students in their thousands are signing new petitions calling for “no detriment” policies for this part of the pandemic. Jim Dickinson assesses the demands.
- Exponential view: Understanding the Enduring Consequences of Covid-19
Correlate
HESA now release financial data on providers based on when their financial year begins – and the data for some providers has already dropped for 2019-20. I thought it would be interesting to compare tuition fee income against the previous year, to see if this group of mainly newish private providers have grown at a uniform rate over the last year. Are all these alternative providers growing at the same rate – or are some heading for the moon and others fading away. In other words, does it correlate?
The answer is a very clear “yes”. R squared is a record 0.98, making this a very strong correlation. Most providers in this basket are growing fee income at a similar rate – it’s not a huge expansion but it is generally expansion. But even the largest providers here – The University of Law, and BPP University – don’t top £100k a year from fee income. This is a very small, but structurally interesting, part of the sector. Data is from the HESA Finance open data release, and where the data doesn’t exist I’ve not plotted it.
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