PODCAST: Admissions reform, Demo 2010, Christmas

This week on the podcast we discuss admissions reform and what's looking like an impending shift towards post qualifications offers.

There's also a look back at the big student demo of 2010 and a look forward to both Christmas and what we could be faced with in the new year.

With Helen Higson, Provost and Deputy Vice Chancellor at Aston University and Chris Shelley, Director of Student and Academic Services at the University of Greenwich.

Items this week

• Debbie PW
• Former NUS president Aaron Porter looks back at a demonstration that shaped a generation.
• Jim Dickinson reflects on a decade of debates about students, consumers and marketisation in higher education.
• What's in the long awaited DfE guidance for students returning home for Christmas? David Kernohan and Jim Dickinson sniff it suspiciously from a safe distance.
• The Scottish and Welsh governments have announced plans for students returning home for Christmas.

Correlate

I've plotted the percentage of each US state's adult population with a batchelor's degree or higher, with the other axis being the proportion of voters who chose Joe Biden (at the time of recording) in the 2020 elections. Do Democrats have an advantage with voters who have more higher education? Yes but does it correlate?

All major networks have called this a decent correlation, even at this broad level of analysis. R squared is 0.67, making the relationship statistically significant at P < 0.0001. There's an assumption around the world that more experience in education makes for more left-leaning voters - and the correlation for advanced degrees is very slightly greater. Data comes from associated press and wikidata, and where the data doesn't exist I've expensively litigated for no real reason.

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