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PODCAST: Return to campus, examnishambles, ministers

In our first podcast of the autumn term we consider the issues surrounding higher education's return to campus and the latest Covid guidance from government.
This article is more than 3 years old

News, analysis and explanation of higher education issues from our leading team of wonks

In our first episode of the autumn term we consider the issues surrounding higher education’s return to campus and the latest Covid guidance from government.

We also look at the summer results crisis and consider its long term impacts, and discuss two big speeches from Gavin Williamson and Michelle Donelan. Plus the return of Mike Ratcliffe’s hidden history of higher education.

With Mary Curnock Cook, independent higher education expert; Andy Westwood, Professor of Government Practice and Vice Dean of Humanities at the University of Manchester; Debbie McVitty, Editor of Wonkhe; and Jim Dickinson, Associate Editor at Wonkhe.

Items this week

Revised guidance for England on universities and Covid-19 means tiers before Christmas

Ministers hit out at burdensome university sector regulation

Correlate

We’re at the end of the main part of Clearing season, and it felt like the right time to assess the changes in international recruitment patterns. Are Covid-19 and Brexit having an impact on where students come from, or is recruitment broadly similar to 9 years ago. Excluding the four UK nations and China as outliers, does the number of UCAS acceptances by country for day 22 of clearing for 2020 correlate with the number of acceptances by country at the same point in the 2011 cycle?

The answer is yes, R squared is 0.74 – suggesting a strong correlation. The intervening years have seen a strong growth in recruitment from Hong Kong and India, but also from Spain and Poland. But recruiment has dropped from Brunei, Sweden, Norway, Lithuania, and Ireland. Cyprus is a particularly notable case – in 2011 it was second only to Hong Kong, China, and UK countries, but recruitment had dropped by around 910 by 2020, putting Cyprus on a par with the USA.

Data is from UCAS’s clearing digest, and where the data doesn’t exist I’ve not plotted it.

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