Month: April 2019

AN ENGLISHMAN ABROAD THINKS IT’S ALL IN THE NAME

It’s taken a while but I have finally worked out the major difference between US and UK politics.  In a field where presentation is everything there is a fundamental issue about personal branding.  And in this particular department America leads the way by some distance.

The current leadership of the United Kingdom has the main offices of State in the hands of a May, a Hammond and a Hunt.  Far too many imponderables, uncertainties and voiceless glottal fricatives. It’s no wonder the country is struggling to decide which way to go and so many people wish the Government would drop their ‘H”s.

Over in the USA the team is lead by a Trump, a Pompeo and a Mnuchin.  It’s no contest in terms of impact, plosives and a family whose history in the United States began with a Russian-born Jewish diamond dealer who emigrated there from Belgium in 1916. The names sound like characters in a blockbuster film and sometimes have histories to match.

I could also offer Huckabee-Sanders and Lighthizer as examples of the memorable and media friendly names that dominate.  But the big, bold, power-names also leave just enough space for the occasional subtler, headline-friendly option like ex-White House Communications Director, Hope Hicks.  Perhaps the next British Prime Minister’s spokesperson should be considering a deed poll change to become Aspiration, Austerity or Panic. 

There is such a wealth of brand-worthy names available that the President has even been able to dispense with strong contenders.  He got rid of a McMaster, who may have sounded too challenging, and a Priebus, who, perhaps, sounded too much like a foreign car in an era where the focus is on US first.  Most memorably he even forsook a Scaramucci because he featured too strongly in the operatic section of Bohemian Rhapsody to survive more than 10 days as White House spokesperson.

And where the name itself falls short there are some brilliant nicknames even if they have also fallen by the wayside.  Mattis may not have risen to the status of celebrity surname but being called ‘Mad Dog’ was always likely to draw attention.  And returning to Mr Scaramucci I can only be in thrall to someone who not only has a name worthy of Hollywood but glories in the nickname ‘The Mooch’.

Part of the brilliance of the best names lies in not being too over the top – teaming plain old Donald, Mike and Steve with a striking surname is part of the trick.  Just imagine having Theresa Trump, Jeremy Pompeo and Philip Mnuchin powering through Cabinet meetings.  They’d make pretty short work of a Rees-Mogg whose hyphenated Welsh-English surname owes more to channeling Daffodil-Rose than Dragon-Lion.      

All of this helps explain why the British media have latched onto the dishevelled, accident-prone figure of Boris Johnson as a potential leader.  He has become the one name diva of the current political generation with a unique line in hair.  While it’s difficult to credit there is no doubt that he is the Tory party’s equivalent to Beyonce, Pink and Madonna.    

The brilliance of Boris is that he has even been able to appropriate the nickname of a US multi-Olympic medal winner and a Golden Globe nominated singer-actress.  Sadly, Florence Griffith Joyner passed away in 1998 so there is no chance of the three ever teaming up.  BoJo, FloJo and J-Lo might sound like a slightly outre vaudeville act but I suspect that together they could have equalled anything that Groucho, Harpo and Chico managed.    

Of course, Boris’s given name is Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, which incorporates a distinctly Germanic-surname containing more consonants than necessary.  In that respect he joins Nigel Farage who has had a little help from the continent with a family name of French Huegenot extraction.  The forename-surname rule comes into play here as well because I suspect that Boris Farage would be too exotic and Nigel Johnson too prosaic for public support.

So there you have it.  In a world where attention spans get shorter and shorter the route to political success and media approbation lies in having the right name and demonstrating real affinity with popular culture.  The era of Tony, John, Gordon, Margaret and David is over and we are looking towards the day, depending on who wins the Premier League, when Pep.U.Up or JuergenaImojiMe2?  have a realistic shot at leading the country as it seeks re-entry to the China-European Union Alliance in 2050.

Credit: Image by Tumisu from Pixabay

More Pathway Recruitment Indicators

Detailed, consistent and up to date insights into pathway recruitment performance are often difficult to find.  Some US universities give good data at a granular level and I reported on some of these in a recent blog.  The completion of the reporting cycle for INTO’s Joint Ventures and wholly owned centres in the UK gives a comprehensive picture of their enrolments in the 2017/18 financial year.

For the ten entities – eight joint ventures and two wholly owned centres – that have been trading five years, total enrollments bounced back from the low point in 2016/17 but remain short of 2013/14 levels.  This suggests that it’s probably still pretty tough going for the UK pathway market.

Table 1 – Average Enrolments for INTO Centres 2013/14 to 2017/18

Source: Annual Reports

At a detailed level the drivers of growth were Newcastle and City which bounced back after several years of decline and Queen’s.  Long-term partners East Anglia seem to have bottomed out after three years of decline.  Neither Stirling or Gloucestershire, the most recent partners in this group, have got over the 200 student mark after five years.

Table 2 – INTO UK Centres Average Enrolments 2013/14 to 2017/18

Source: LLP Annual Reports

INTO centres split educational oversight between ISI and the Quality Assurance Agency with the former giving specific details on numbers enrolled and the latter being less prescriptive.  While the annual reports noted above are averages across the financial year (August to July) in question, the ISI education oversight into three centres gives deeper insight into the most recent autumn intakes.

The distinction between EFL and FE used in the ISI reports broadly distinguishes between students on English Language only or Academic courses.  Newcastle appears to have a significant number doing both. 

Table 3 – Student Population of three INTO centres – November 2018

Source: ISI Educational Oversight Reports

The other INTO Joint Venture is Newcastle University London which had an inaugural intake in 2015 and offers both pathway and degree courses.  At the time of launch the university indicated that ‘…..in collaboration with INTO, our London campus is expected to grow to 1,200 students’.  Three years in the average numbers for 2017/18 were 381.

Recent UK pathway activity from established providers has largely centred on adding well ranked partners with Study Group, Navitas and Kaplan gaining Aberdeen, Leicester and Essex respectively.  Newer players have generally picked up less well-known names with Oxford International adding Greenwich and QA HE with Southampton Solent.  With the UK Government launching its new strategy for international student recruitment it remains to be seen if the cake will grow for everyone or if the strong will dominate.

NOTE: Table 2 updated 16 June 2019 to include INTO Glasgow Caledonian University 2017/18 enrolment   

Academic Entanglement for an Englishman Abroad

My recent talk with a student counsellor from an American university was a pretty bracing engagement.  It was all about objectives, needs and ability to pay with a swift follow up email on what I needed to do next.  What I had anticipated as a low-key chat about study options became as clinical and unnerving as an exploratory colonoscopy.

One outcome was a suggestion that I really needed to get my academic qualifications verified in the US.  My initial indignation was around the fact that I have the certificates and academic transcripts for all the higher degrees.  They have been accepted as evidence for two senior roles at UK universities so it was a surprise to find that they would not cut the mustard if I chose to apply to a US university.

The certificates are with a small batch of papers which I keep in a hard-backed envelope and will leave the house with me in the event of a fire.  Leafing through the envelope I was surprised but relieved to see that I still have the certificate from Pontins Holiday Camp confirming that I swam a width when I was eleven years old.  I even have the scraps of paper which confirm my sub-optimal performance at ‘O’ and ‘A’ level

It’s fair to say that I was not the most dedicated scholar during my school years and ‘O’ really did mean ‘Ordinary’ while ‘A’ was probably shorthand for ‘Average at best’.  I also have four CSEs which my peers would reflect stands for Completely Second-rate Education.  I am still slightly stung by the comment on one school record that says ‘always did the minimum with least effort’ but realise, looking back, that it was probably true.

Of course, we are all familiar with stories about the rather underwhelming academic record of Einstein and Churchill.  But the former’s minor troubles in French and the Humanities were more than overshadowed by the fact that he mastered differential and integral calculus before he was fifteen.  Even the latter’s patchy school record can be forgiven for his 1953 Nobel Prize for Literature demonstrating “his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values.”

I can’t claim either as inspiration but by my late twenties, having been thoroughly schooled in the meaning of discipline and application by the retailers at Tesco and ASDA, I hauled myself out of my academic tailspin.  Eleven years of studying at a distance and paying out of my own pocket schooled me in submitting essays at 3am in the morning and posting them from motorway service stations, airports and even foreign capitals.  Six years of summer schools educated me in how surprisingly feral middle-aged people can become when let off the leash with people they will never see again.

After all that effort it was very satisfying to get my degrees which made it all the more perplexing to realise that the certificates and my honest demeanour were not going to be enough. I guess that every computer now has the software to knock up a reasonable copy that might allow someone to substantiate claims of having a really high IQ and a big brain. Or they might simply choose to make the claim while ensuring that their academic records never saw the light of day.

My diligent counsellor advised me that the best thing to do was have my qualifications reviewed by World Education Services (WES) or a similar service.  For $150 dollars they would confirm to an American university or an employer something that the University awarding my degree already knew.  I’m keeping the bits of paper in the hard-backed envelope but have a sense of sadness that their purpose is almost entirely lost.

I chose to go with WES because it sounds like a real person which, I suspect, is one of the reasons that Alexa seems to have become more popular and talked about than Siri.   SIRI is derived from Speech Interpretation & Recognition Interface but is also a real name in Scandinavia with the meaning ‘beautiful victory’.  Given that not many speak Scandinavian (and even fewer speak Swahili where ‘siri’ means secret) I’d guess that this is lost on most of the world.

While Alexa is a made-up name it has sufficient echoes of standard first names, male and female, to sound familiar.  Alexander the Great, Sir Alex Ferguson (who is considered the greatest after winning the Champions League, Premier League and FA Cup in a single season) and Alex Kingston are among the better known.  It is pleasing to note in terms of new words I have learnt today that Alexandra Smirnoff (1838–1913) was a Finnish pomologist – the branch of botany that studies and cultivates fruit.

Returning to the task in hand I can report that the entanglement with WES and my alma mater, the Open University, has been less than perfect so far.  WES has quite exacting demands in terms of material being sent under seal and signature and the Open University form making the request does not allow me to specify this in detail.  I am left hoping, without expectation, that these organisations are so familiar with the process that it will all work out.

The system seems to have largely been established for those pursuing careers or qualifications in academia.  It’s an opaque world which institutions would do well to open up by making transcripts available through secure digital systems for free.  These should be available to any institution or employer, anywhere in the world, authorised by the student to access them.