PODCAST: Unconditionals, KEF, research culture, racism

This week on the podcast we're back in the UK and discussing Nottingham Trent's intervention into the ongoing row about offer making in universities. We also discuss the spec for the first run at the Knowledge Exchange Framework, a new report on research culture and we look at the press coverage over the Sheffield students being paid to tackle racist language on campus.

With Nick Hillman, Director at HEPI and Jenny Shaw, Student Experience Director at Unite.

Extrapolate

"Yes, but how does it extrapolate" is a new segment from the people who brought you "yes, but does it correlate". It celebrates a slow news day at The Times over Christmas, where a decision was made to extrapolate the rise in first class degrees from a massive four data points to come up with an exciting headline.

In this game you are going to guess the headline based on a (probably not entirely defensible but always more than 4 datapoints) trend from HE data. I'm looking for the year when the trend will cross the stated threshold.

This week, "yes but how does it extrapolate" looks at entry rates. Based on an extrapolation from data since 2006, in what year will the HE entry rate for English domiciled 18 year olds pass 100 per cent?

You'll have to wait until 2060 for universal HE for English 18 year olds, but Tony Blair's 50 per cent target will whizz by in 2033. On the other tab of the visualisation, you'd have to wait until 2092 for the application rate for English 18 year olds to reach 100%, so there's clearly more unconditional offers to come. This weeks data is based on UCAS end of cycle reporting - and where the data doesn't exist... I've extrapolated it.

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