PODCAST: Labour, residential HE, PTES, academic freedom

This week on the podcast we analyse the Labour Party’s plans for education, scrutinise HEPI and UPP’s report on the fact that so many students live away from home in the UK, discuss the results of Advance HE's Postgraduate Taught Experience Survey, and finish up by delving into free speech on campus through Policy Exchange’s report into “academic freedom”.

With Philip Plowden, Vice Chancellor of Birmingham City University; Smita Jamdar, Education lead at Shakespeare Martineau; and Sofia Ropek, Associate Editor at Wonkhe.

Yes, but does it correlate?

This week we're looking at overseas flexible and distance learning - a huge growth area for many providers. But do we primarily find a large distance learning operation in providers that already teach a lot of UK students? Excluding two obvious outliers - the OU and the University of London - does it correlate.

The answer is no. R squared is 0.03, for a p value of 0.04, so there's very little relationship. Some providers do punch above their weight - Heriot Watt and SOAS have distance learning student numbers equivalent to around a third of their UK student numbers. And most institutions do at least some trans-national distance learning, though most have less than 500 students on such courses.

Data is from HESA - and is for all traditional HE providers in the UK. And where the data doesn't exist - I've not plotted it.

Items this week

• Freedom of speech means the same tired old arguments
• What damage does residential higher education do?
• People shouldn’t have to choose between education and financial security, says Labour
• Continued satisfaction for postgrads on taught courses in 2019

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To get involved in the Wonkhe Show, email team@wonkhe.com