This article is more than 4 years old

Private schools, RORI, care leavers, VC pay

On the podcast this week we discuss Labour's party conference resolution on capping the percentage of kids from private schools going to uni
This article is more than 4 years old

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

On the podcast this week we discuss Labour’s party conference resolution on capping the percentage of kids from private schools going to uni. We also discuss the newly launched “research on research” institute, a new report on care leavers and HE and an intervention on VC pay from the Taxpayer’s Alliance.

With James Wilsdon, professor of research policy and director of impact and engagement in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Sheffield; Tristram Hooley, Professor of Career Education at the University of Derby and Chief Researcher at the Institute of Student Employers; and Sofia Ropek, Associate Editor at Wonkhe.

Yes, but does it correlate?

With elections and area based measures in the air I’ve gone back to plotting constituency level data. But does the % of people in a constituency with a managerial job correlate with the POLAR young participation rate in England? Are white collar jobs and indicator of HE related aspirations? Yes, but does it correlate?

And the answer is – yes – r squared is 0.6 which is a decent correlation, if not as clear as you might expect. For fun, I’ve plotted the size of the parliamentary majority as the size of the marks, and also given you the opportunity to filter by the percentage that voted leave. It seems that the types of employment prevalent in a constituency are a good predictor of young participation – and are likely to be linked to parental education and earnings. Data is from the House of Commons Library and OfS, and where the data doesn’t exist, I’ve not plotted it.

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