higher education – Page 9 – View From A Bridge – management, education and personal thoughts

There is more to student recruitment than edtechs offer

Louise Nicol and Alan Preece First published in University World News 04 August 2021

We probably all remember the big reveal in The Wizard of Oz (recently in the news again) when Oscar Zoroaster is revealed as a conman who had used clever props and magic tricks to maintain his place as Supreme Ruler of the Kingdom of Oz. Universities might consider this when they hear industry pundits eulogising the power of the aggregators and the Emerald City of big data. The smartest of them know that there is a place for brains, heart and courage in finding alternative solutions to meet challenging international student recruitment targets during a global pandemic.

It’s no surprise that, to date, due to lockdowns and border closures, universities have felt powerless to make an impact on international recruitment. Stuck in their back bedrooms while working from home, aggregators must have seemed like the answer to their prayers for a quick technology fix to match their new-found obsession with Zoom. This thinking was supported by the suggestion that they were low cost, simplified agent relationships and could improve student accessibility.The glamour of eye-watering valuations and bold investments by venture capital and private equity cash looking to ride the latest edtech wave seems very persuasive.

There is slick marketing, even slicker websites and the ubiquitous use of the word algorithm to confirm that artificial intelligence and machine learning can solve all problems. Anyone blinded by the hype could be easily persuaded to “follow the yellow brick road” and commit the lion’s share of next year’s recruitment budget to the Wizard.

Blinded by algorithms

But, before budgets are committed and valuable university brands handed over, it is worth taking a step back, looking behind the curtain and considering the future in a more measured way. Dorothy trusted the Wizard and did battle with a Wicked Witch on his behalf before finding he wasn’t all he appeared to be. He wasn’t evil, but it turned out that her first impressions were wrong and her true friends were really the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Lion.

In the case of the aggregators, those that have joined early are likely to see the best returns on their initial investment because the aggregators’ client lists remain manageable and the choices for students limited. As more universities pile in, convinced by the returns of those that have gone before them, those that have brands with limited reach or are less able to pay for placement and influence are likely to sink to the bottom. As aggregators gain clients, their revenues will grow while returns for institutions are likely to diminish over time.

Relying on an algorithm to place you in front of a student is all well and good but, just as has become accepted with Google searches, it only works out if you are on page one and preferably between one and three on the list. Showing how manipulated this can be can be seen in recent research on Studyportals where a search gave 839 courses on their ‘Our Picks’ list, with the first 10 being the University of Lincoln and the top 253 shown as ‘Featured’, indicating that they had paid to be near the top. It is debatable whether this method works in the interests of the student or the paying university.

That’s why, despite all the hype around aggregators, 46% of universities polled in a recent UK Education Advisory Service survey have not taken the plunge. They will be looking at the options and ways in which they can manage their risk while optimising any benefits that the new technology can bring. We return to Dorothy on her journey through Oz to suggest some valuable allies that might form part of a comprehensive strategy.

The Scarecrow is a model for having the brains to develop strategic thinking. Any university putting together their international recruitment strategy for next year should consider this checklist:

• Aggregators. Negotiate hard for the best deal. It is all about market share and brand for them, so they want you more than you think.
• Review direct recruitment. If you get it right, it can dramatically lower your cost of sale by building strategic relationships with international schools in target markets. Look beyond ‘Tier One’ schools which may have high numbers of expatriates who may want home fee status to ‘Tier Two’ schools to attract more international students.
• Think aggressively about meaningful engagement. Nobody needs another talk on “filling out a UCAS form” or “writing a personal statement”. Involve academic colleagues, set challenges and remember to personalise ongoing contact with schools and individual students after a first presentation.
• Get a handle on social media, networkers and influencers. Just one example is to join prospective international student groups in your target markets and search for your university name and respond to the various comments and requests for advice and guidance.
• Look to your TNE partners. They can be a route for progression, but may also add value in other ways. Examples include careers advice supporting students returning to the region or using existing employer relationships to create new revenue streams for Continuing Professional Development and-or applied research.
• Put international employability at the heart of your messaging. It is the reason students, and their parents, invest in international education. Ensure your institution has access to top graduate destinations by key international markets. Get robust, representative data to demonstrate graduate outcomes and be able to tell your ‘employability story’. Whether it’s through direct recruitment, pathways, aggregators or agents, a student’s decision will directly be influenced by their ability to get a good job and be able to progress in their career.

The Tin Man reminds us to have a heart. Do not be lured by the aggregators into abandoning pre-existing and new relationships with agents, institutions, schools and key overseas stakeholders. As the list of those on aggregator sites become longer, it is the personal touch that will end up paying dividends when it comes to recruitment.

Visiting agents’ offices, international schools and speaking to prospective students will never be a waste of time, and that personal touch is likely to be a far stronger incentive for a student to apply than their scrolling through a long list of possible study options.

Where the Lion comes in is in emphasising that universities need courage to make strategic decisions that they will stick with.

That means seeing past the possible short-term bump in recruitment that aggregators will claim and remaining focused on a game plan that both mitigates risk and builds flexible, scalable and meaningful engagement with students now and in the future. Aggregators may be a part of that strategy, but they are unlikely to be the only option or always the best solution.

Some will survive and others will fall by the wayside like the Wicked Witches of the East and the West. They will not own the student recruitment ecosystem unless universities let them.

Louise Nicol is founder of Asia Careers Group SDN BHD, and Alan Preece is an expert in global education, business transformation and operational management and runs the blogging site View from a Bridge.

Image by Please Don’t sell My Artwork AS IS from Pixabay

RANK HYPOCRISY

Shock and horror as the THE World Top Ten Universities 2022 are revealed as….exactly the same ten names as 2021. A small shuffle of the deck saw Stanford drop from second to fourth but The Stanford Daily seemed more concerned with the question Who Is Elizabeth Holmes, The Stanford Dropout Now on Trial? As someone probably once said – if you’re truly world class you don’t say it and you certainly don’t need the THE to tell you.

LinkedIn was full of university marketing chiefs and even some academics, who should probably know better, trumpeting their performance. Newcastle University’s marketers expressed pride that it had moved into the top 150 but it had simply returned to 146^th – exactly the position it occupied in the 2011-12 rankings. There were plenty of other institutions with short term memories talking without any regard for whether their ranking meant real, sustainable or even meaningful progress.

It’s a merry go round that was called out recently by Vincenzo Raimo who noted that universities tend to celebrate advances but complain about the distortion and negative impact of the rankings. When leading academics do call into questions the methodology, as David Price, UCL’s Vice Provost of Research did recently, they get snide responses from the promoter in chief. Perhaps the THE is becoming The Borg and thinks that “resistance is futile”.

What the THE has certainly seen is that university compliance and hypocrisy has enabled them to exploit the “trusted rankings” as a platform for THE Student. To the mix they add a spiel about “hand-picked partners” who will help student “make the right choices”. A cynic might suggest that the many privately financed partners on the list are much more likely to ensure a result which is in their own interests.

But It May Be Worse Than That

It would seem harmless to simply accept that the World Rankings have become a university version of the Sunday Times Rich List where envious glances are occasionally followed by spectacular falls from grace. Maybe The Stanford Daily is offering a metaphor by focusing on a cautionary tale of hubris and deceit just as these rankings were published. But the THE doesn’t appear to be in any doubt about the game it is playing.

They say that “even if you do not meet the inclusion criteria, you will be entitled to a university profile on our website that will increase your visibility to our audience of academics, prospective students and their parents.” It is a university version from the “Toxic Sludge is Good for You” playbook which Publisher’s Weekly called “a cautionary reminder that much of the consumer and political world is created by for-hire mouthpieces in expensive neckties.”. Even the most limited institution, regardless of reputation or quality, can benefit from reflected glory as part of this commercial enterprise.

The THE sells the benefits of the rankings very hard and articulates them as global exposure with tens of millions of page views, data trusted by governments and universities, and a vital resource for students when they are making decisions about where to study. The point about ‘trusted by governments’ is a big part of the sales patter including a recent Tweet which highlighted the EU Commission’s, Gerard de Graaf saying, “We know that rankings do more to direct universities’ attention, policy makers’ attention, students’ attention than any other policy tool… “.

Surprising then that in 2014, the very same year of de Graaf’s comments, the European Commission gave €2m funding to establish U-Multirank explicitly, “to avoid simplistic league tables which can result in misleading comparisons between institutions of very different types”. Dr. Simon Marginson, Professor of International Higher Education, UCL Institute of Education, University College, London called U-Multirank, “a vital corrective to the “football” league mentality that has crept into higher education…”. The point is that the EU did not see ‘rankings’ as the answer to anyone’s problems or need for better quality information.

Gaming The System

The tweet also claims that de Graaf “urged@timeshighered to develop rankings on impact” which they framed around the UN’s SDGs and first published in 2019. To be included in the overall ranking an institution has to self-select and submit data on SDG 17 and at least three other SDGs of its choice. It’s difficult to see, however, that an institution can’t selectively manage its performance in three SDGs and SDG 17 while being a mediocre or even poor actor in the other thirteen.

The University of Manchester’s top spot in the 2021 Impact Rankings suggests how partial this process can be and why students looking for insights might do well to look elsewhere. An alternative might be the People and Planet UK-based student network that has been running an environmental and ethical performance league tables since 2007. The organisation also does useful things like training and mentoring young people, campaigning and challenging vested interests locally and internationally.

Its 2019 League Table gave the University of Manchester a low-ranking in the Upper Second-Class Honours bracket and 59^th in the UK. To be totally fair it also notes that the University has fully completed a commitment to divest from all fossil fuels. It is arguable that the THE rankings give too much opportunity for institutions to game the system and, as a Professor of History in a 5* department once said to me, “we are all here because we are good at passing tests”.

If the principle is that the THE Impact Rankings are a “vital resource” for students wanting to make a choice they might do well to consider giving a broader context. Students travel internationally to share in a cultural experience and could easily find that selecting a university based on the Impact rankings leads them to places where the off-campus setting is a little less in tune with their sensibilities. It’s not necessarily that the universities aren’t trying hard but there are very real limits to their power.

The country with the largest representation in the Impact rankings is Russia with 75 institutions which seems counter-intuitive given that the country is only 46 of 165 in the UN’s own SDG rankings. In early 2020 Transparency International ranked the country 137^th out of 180 in its Corruption Perceptions Index at a point when the Russian Academy of Sciences was reported as finding “widespread plagiarism in Russian academic journals, with more than 850 articles rescinded from 263 journals after an initial review.” More concerning is the repression, sexual harassment and intimidation of students and faculty outlined by the Russian student magazine DOXA.

At 27 in the Impact rankings is Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University in Saudi Arabia – a country down at 98 in the UN rankings. The university scores well on SDG 10 for reducing inequalities at a point when the UN does not appear to have information available to give the country a score. Meanwhile Finland, which is top of the UN league table, doesn’t have a university ranked until the 201-300 bracket by the THE.

When Gaming Becomes Cheating

League table manipulation is a theme that Malcolm Gladwell picked up in his Revisionist History podcast series. Calling the U.S. News & World Report college rankings an “abomination” might sound harsh but his analysis points to the way the rankings can distort perceptions of higher education. The edition on Project Dillard focuses on the specifics of how a historically black university in New Orleans is disadvantaged “even though, on a number of very objective measures, it does an outstanding job of educating the students who go there.”

His argument is that, fundamentally, the league table gives no encouragement for small and rich colleges to use their advantaged position to serve larger numbers of students. The corollary is that Dillard University could leap sixty places up the US News rankings by cutting 75% of its students. All of this is before the various scandals of colleges manipulating data to improve their place in the US News rankings.

In this vein the THE Impact rankings have a corrections page where any errors in data collection and changes to rank as a result are listed. The notable thing about this is that every case where incorrect or incomplete data was submitted the university’s ranking has either not changed or they have gone up the table. It’s a relatively small sample but one might imagine that institutions are keen to, legitimately, correct the data when they feel they have done poorly but less likely to review data when rankings have gone well.

Earlier this year a report by the Center for Studies in Higher Education produced an analysis suggesting the QS World Rankings had a conflict of interest due to its consulting business. QS responded that the consulting contract with the university stipulated that there was no link to rankings and that they had policies to ensure staff were “free from personal or commercial bias”. Readers will make up their own minds but as league tables become increasingly commercially exploited the risks becomes greater.

If Resistance Is Futile…Consider Changing the Rules

Nobody should kid themself that league tables have not had a material impact on decision making within universities. Hours, days and weeks of planning and strategy have been exhausted on understanding the levers that can be pulled to move institutions up various rankings and this effort would not be made unless it fed into actions. The available tools are relatively blunt but increasing the number of ‘good degrees’ always looked manipulable and it is arguable that the 90% growth in first class degrees awarded in the UK between 2010/11 and 2018/19 is one visible sign of that pressure.

But Forbes tells us some interesting things about “no win scenarios and ethical leadership” and draws on Star Trek’s Kobayashi Maru scenario as its exemplar. Famously, Captain James T. Kirk overcame the no-win training scenario by reprogramming the simulation and has led a fierce debate over whether he cheated or was simply creative. Author Janet D. Stemwedel cuts through this by suggesting “it’s important to be able to deal with trying to live up to our ethical obligations while knowing full well that circumstances and our own limitation cannot guarantee we’ll succeed.”

University league tables won’t go away and universities may feel obliged to play the game because of the political, social and recruitment leverage they might offer. However, academics do not have to join in by offering their opinions about other universities and institutions do not need to manipulate their decision making with one eye on the league table impact. There could also be more concerted pushback against the dumbing down that emphasizes overall rankings and oases of excellence in a sea of mediocrity or even corruption. If the aim is to help students faced with the biggest decision of their lives it’s worth the effort.

Notes

The complexity of league table methodology is the stuff of legend but it does not really aid understanding. The commentary on the THE approach to the overall SDG table reflects my understanding of the paragraph – A university’s final score in the overall table is calculated by combining its score in SDG 17 with its top three scores out of the remaining 16 SDGs. SDG 17 accounts for 22 per cent of the overall score, while the other SDGs each carry a weight of 26 per cent. This means that different universities are scored based on a different set of SDGs, depending on their focus.

As always I am happy to review authoritative comment which may aid understanding and will reflect this in an update if necessary.

Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

This Time It’s Different Because…

While hoping for the best it is increasingly difficult to believe that the next two years won’t be very tough. The economic news changes by the day and there is still little certainty about the process for removing the various lockdown measures around the world. It is even tempting to not to write until the dust has settled.

A number of commentators have suggested that higher education is counter-cyclical in terms of student growth and refer to the experience of the ‘great recession’ of 2008. But I recently quoted Charlie Munger, vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway who said of the current situation, “This thing is different”, and I doubt that previous global shocks a good guide to what might happen this time around. For home and international student enrollments this may even be a fundamental turning point.

This is not a counsel of despair. There are signs that many students are still keeping their options open before deciding whether to travel across country or overseas for study. But the backdrop to their decision making and the factors constraining countries, let alone universities, are far more complex than 2008.

….it really is Global

The 2008 recession for the G20-zone (85% of all gross world product (GWP) is often called a global recession which lasted from mid‑2008 until 2009. But while 2009 saw real GDP rates fall in virtually all of Europe, along with Canada and the US, the reality was that China, India, South America and almost all of Africa had GDP growth. The coming recession may be V, W, L or swoosh shaped, but it seems likely that every country in the world will have a dip in GDP this year.

China was never in recession throughout the period of what was called the ‘great recession’ but the first quarter of 2020 saw the Chinese economy shrink for the first time since 1976.

…Established Student Sources May Not Drive Growth

China’s GDP growth was at 14.7% in 2007 and remained above 9% until 2012. Its 20-24 year age group grew by 13 million between 2007 and 2011. These factors fueled international student growth through the ‘great recession’.

According to HESA data, between 2007/08 and 2011/12 the number of Chinese students in UK universities grew by over 33,000 to 78,715. The next largest growth was from India which grew just under 14,000 from 25,905 to 39,090 by 2010/11 before falling back to 29,900 as Government visa policies hardened.

In the US, Open Doors data indicates that 2007/08 was the first year since 2001/02 that international student enrollments had got above 560,000. By 2011/12 the number of enrollments had increased by a further 120,000. China contributed over 100,00 of that increase.

China’s university age population is stable but at lower levels than a decade ago and financial pressure on the middle class was already evident before the coronavirus. Add in the safety concerns and it is little wonder that the British Council found that Chinese students had a high propensity to reconsider plans for the coming year.

…Oil Glut and Increased Production Capacity

In the previous recession oil prices dipped rapidly but recovered within two years. This time round some benchmark oil prices have gone negative early in the pandemic and the global oil glut is considered by some to be similar to the 1980s when prices stayed low for several years. The impact is exemplified by Saudi Arabia’s reduction of $27bn in net foreign assets in just the month of March. Development of technology and the re-emergence of the US as a dominant producer seem certain to make it difficult to constrain production in a way that forces prices up.

It seems unlikely that, in the foreseeable future, any government will be able or willing to fund substantial scholarship schemes driven by oil wealth.

…Quality, Value and Availability of Online Degrees

In 2009 it is estimated that there were 5.5m students worldwide taking at least one course online, but by 2017 it was estimated to be over 6m in the US alone. By 2019, 98% of public universities and colleges in the US offered some form of online program and the University of Pennsylvania had become the first Ivy-league institution to offer a bachelors’ degree totally online.

In the ‘great recession’ the for-profit universities were at the forefront of online education. This time around there is, literally, a world of choice and great brand names available to students. Students wanting to get a degree do not have to incur the health risk, the uncertainty or the extra cost of an on-campus experience.

Online has provided a short-term response to the coronavirus but students may find it a cheaper and more convenient option for future study.

…Cost of Higher Education to Students

Analysis suggests that going to college in the US in 2018/19 was 25.3% (private) and 29.8% (public) more costly than in 2008/09 on a like-for-like dollar basis. Forbes has estimated that between 1989 and 2016 the cost of going to college grew eight times faster than average annual wages.

In England the introduction of £9,000 a year student fees didn’t occur until 2012. By 2019 average student debt on entry to repayment was £35,950 compared to £11,720 in 2009. Rising levels of debt have not, thus far, deterred students in England from going to university but it’s on their minds.

As importantly, universities have been obliged to spend significant amounts on attracting students from less well represented backgrounds. The government debt burden has also been significantly increased as the real cost of student loans was added in late 2019. Faced with the cost of combatting coronavirus and a global recession students, universities and the Government may be less willing to absorb these costs.

The cost of going into higher education has become increasingly difficult for any of the stakeholders to absorb – even before the pandemic.

….Attitudes Towards the Value of Higher Education Degree Have Hardened

UK and the US students have never paid more for their degree and there is some evidence that disenchantment has set in. In 2013, Gallup found that 70% of U.S. adults considered a college education to be “very important,” 23% felt it was “fairly important” and 6% said it was “not too important.” In 2019, those figures had shifted to 51%, 36% and 13%, respectively with even bigger negative shifts seen in the 18-29 age group.

Longitudinal evidence about student sentiment is harder to come by in the UK but this year’s graduating students will be the first under the higher English fee level to come into a world where unemployment is rising. UK unemployment following the ‘great recession’ peaked at just over 8% in 2011. It is likely that the job market will be tough for at least a couple of years.

The value of a degree has always been partly about having choices and career options. The rising cost of education and the gloomiest jobs market for a decade may make potential students rethink their decisions. The UK Government may be forced to reconsider whether Post Study Work visas are creating too much competition for scarce jobs.

…and New Options May Be More Attractive

A recession is likely to focus this argument on the ways a workforce is able to help a country emerge from recession. It is claimed by Upwork that the 20 fastest growing skills on their Skills Index do not require a degree. It notes that in 2018 Glassdoor said, “Increasingly, there are many companies offering well-paying jobs to those with nontraditional education or a high-school diploma.”

Non-traditional education options focused on work skills have grown rapidly and the lockdown may be driving more people in that direction. Udemy has already seen a surge of interest in its online courses, particularly in AI and machine learning. A trend towards skills-oriented learning, whether online or in short-courses, leading to a qualification may become better established.

The safety of university degrees offering shelter from the jobs market for three or four years come at a high cost. It seems possible that the new options available and the scramble to find work or avoid excessive HE costs will drive people towards focused solutions.

This is not an exhaustive list but flags some things which seem materially different this time round. The extent to which institutions are able to adapt and pivot to meet the needs of students and society may determine their ability to survive. There will always be opportunities for the flexible, the creative and those who can offer value for money and the promise of a better future.

Image by WikiImages from Pixabay

Nine out of ten international students (might) prefer….

If governments and educational institutions are serious about differentiation, market segmentation and strategic marketing they should be wary of headline grabbing boasts driven by shallow or questionable research. It’s been a recurring and growing occurrence in recent years but is unlikely to lead to the type of self-analysis and improvement that will build competitive advantage. There are plenty of examples but a small sample relating to international students and taken from the four main recruiting countries is sufficient to show the problem.

A recent PIE article trumpeted the ‘overwhelming satisfaction’ that international student have with their experience in US higher education. The World Education Services (WES) survey, ‘Are US HEIs meeting the needs of international students?’ asserts that 91% of respondents are ‘overwhelmingly satisfied with their experience studying in the U.S’. But the report itself makes the point that the survey findings ‘may not be generalizable’ to the US international student population and may suffer from ‘self-selection and sample biases.’ There’s certainly plenty to question about how representative a sample of 1,921 self-selecting students can be.

This outcome has similarities to the recent UUKi Graduate Outcome Survey 2019 carrying the line that over 90% of graduates who studied in the UK were ‘satisfied or very satisfied with all aspects of their lives’ (UUKi Graduate Outcome Survey 2019). As noted in a previous blog the UUKi Survey is flawed for reasons that are as uncomfortable in terms of the ways universities engage with alumni. Only 6% of the total respondents were from China and, as a footnote confirms, “in the year 17-18, Chinese students made up 33% of the total non-EU student population…”.

Looking further afield Canada’s 2018 CBIE Survey indicated that ‘93% of students stated that they are either satisfied..or very satisfied’ with their experience. The sample size of 14,228 is noted as 4% of total post-secondary students in Canada so still a relatively small group. And the percentage from south and east Asia was only 45% compared to at least 70% of Canada’s international students coming from those regions.

Of the big four recruiting countries Australia’s DET 2018 International Student survey saw an impressive 27% response rate from international students. The outcome was that 89% ‘were satisfied or very satisfied with their living and learning experience in Australia’. Regrettably, there is no access to underlying data to determine how representative the sample is of the international population.

In their publicity material, however, Australia makes claims about its performance in comparison to others across the world. What is peculiar about these claims is that the margins are wafer thin with, for example, ‘satisfaction with learning’ showing as Australia 88.5% Other Countries 87.5%. And the comparison source is shown as *International Student Barometer (incorporating scores from hosting countries including USA, Canada, UK and New Zealand). The obvious question is – who else does it include?

Readers who are concentrating will have notice an interesting echo across all of the results – 91% (WES), over 90% (UUKI), 93% (CBIE) and 89% (DET). This suggests that there may be a self-fulfilling nature to these surveys with the international students who take part simply more likely to be satisfied. Those who found the experience less helpful may just be looking to get on with their lives after a poor experience that has left them struggling to find graduate level employment.

It’s a reminder of the minor marketing furore in the UK, where a well-known advertising slogan for cat food Whiskas was “eight out of ten owners said their cat prefers it”. After a complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority, this was changed to “eight out of ten owners who expressed a preference said their cat prefers it”. Perhaps student surveys should come with similar, upfront cautions about their relevance, authority and comprehensiveness.

Another manifestation of the problem is the tendency to cherry-pick data, draw misleading comparisons or ignore longer-term trends in the pursuit of self-congratulatory platitudes. This can happen with students surveys or enrollment counts. But it’s all part of the bland, self-congratulatory spin.

Nicola Dandridge, chief executive of the Office for Students, welcomed the UK’s 2019 National Student Survey with the words: ‘It is good news that overall satisfaction with higher education courses remains high this year.” The full statement recorded that satisfaction had risen to 84% from 83% the year before. No mention of the fact that in 2014 and 2015 the satisfaction rate was 86% and, on that measure, fewer students are satisfied than five years ago.

Some might argue that when the survey first came out in 2005 the overall satisfaction rate was only 81.3% and so there has been an improvement over the longer timescale. A reasonable response to that would be that universities are full of academics who are good at passing tests and that the Survey has been ‘gamed’ so improvement was inevitable. Institutions quickly worked out how to optimize response rates and manage academic behavior in ways that improved their rankings.

For those interested in more reading on the NSS, The Economics Network has done a really nice analysis of results across a number of dimensions, subjects and sector groups. As an example, the Russell Group of universities has, since 2015, seen a precipitous fall in positive responses to the statement, ‘Assessment arrangements and marking have been fair’. It fairs no better on overall satisfaction with scores of 86.5% in 2010 falling to just over 81% in 2019.

Finally, and as an example where enrollment data can be interpreted in ways that distort more worrying trends, there is official reaction to the latest Open Doors press release. As mentioned in several blogs and most recently in December it’s difficult to accept the headline that ‘Number of International Students in the United States Hits All-Time High’ with anything more than a sigh. Including OPT students who are doing post-study work and not directly contributing to universities either financially or academically seems an almost deliberate attempt to draw attention away from two years of decline in those enrolled.

It is reasonable to believe that the surveys mentioned and the individuals quoted are well intentioned, but the best organizations are obsessed with using research to find out what can be improved, and they realize the difference between the PR ‘puff’ and game-changing insights. Higher education decision makers need to be more demanding of student surveys and focus their thinking on students who are unhappy or who are not trying the product at all. They might also care to look harder at whether graduates are finding their degree has genuinely opened up better options, or whether they are benefiting from the ‘aftercare’ service implicit in alumni relations promises.

Colleagues elsewhere in the sector have also commented extensively on the ‘survey fatigue’ that is reducing response rates and undermining credibility. But there should be equal concern about the self-interest of organizations that accept the status quo even when it is manifestly inadequate. Far better to follow the line that made Bill Gates one of the richest people in the world – “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”

Image by Florian Bollmann from Pixabay

Shine a Light on Shorelight

Getting contemporaneous data and sales targets from privately held pathway providers is unusual. But in a July 2019 podcast interview, Sean Grant, Chief Recruitment Officer of Shorelight Education, tells us that Shorelight recruited 3,000 students “last year” (presumably 2018/19) and are forecasting to recruit ”4,000 students plus this year.” Grant notes that the 3,000 student figure for 2018/19 represented year-over-year growth of 35%, which suggests Shorelight recruited approximately 2,200 students in 2017/18.

It was equally enlightening to hear that the company continues to invest heavily in building its sales function. Grant noted that Shorelight’s US-based onshore recruitment team grew from five people to 28 in “about six weeks” last year. While staff growth of this magnitude and pace is prodigious by most measures, it may be the norm for a company that considers itself “the Amazon or the Google of the…international education sector.”

Because Shorelight is a private company based in the US, it has largely been able to maintain confidentiality around its economic performance (unlike UK-based competitors, who are required to publicly disclose annual financials). The Shorelight website shows 17 current university partners, and a press release announced their partnership with Cleveland State for fall 2019 recruitment, bringing the total to 18. Grant referenced 19 partners in his interview, so it’s just possible we may have had early notice of a new partner joining the portfolio.

Shorelight is now in its seventh year of operation since its mid-2013 inception. With the disclosure of recruitment numbers and the indication that the business continues to invest heavily in sales staffing, it’s worth drilling down to look at how the six public universities that signed early on with Shorelight are doing*.

Louisiana State University

Shorelight began recruiting for LSU in 2015 and since then the university’s total enrollment of non-resident aliens have fallen from 1704 in fall 2015 to 1599 in fall 2019 according to the Geographical Origin of Students spreadsheet.

Table 1 – Total Fall Enrollment of Non-Resident Aliens at Louisiana State University

Souce: LSU Fall Facts and Interactive Dashboard

In the form contract between LSU and Shorelight, publicly disclosed by the State of Louisiana, the articulated enrollment goal for the International Accelerator Program, i.e., the pathway, is 850 students in the ’fifth Academic Year of the IAP” (2020/21). Inside Higher Ed reported that in spring 2018 “there were just 136 students enrolled,” and market rumors suggest that recruitment remains a long way short of target. The absence of overall international enrollment growth at LSU suggests that neither pathway or direct recruitment are going to plan.

University of Kansas

There is a similar story at the University of Kansas where the fifteen-year contract with Shorelight came under fire from academics at the time it was signed in 2014. Sarah Rosen, then Vice Provost for Academic Affairs at KU (who has since moved to Georgia State), was reported to have articulated enrollment aspirations of about 600 in two or three years. As Shorelight sought and won an injunction preventing the release of the contract, no further insight into the parties’ ambitions are available. As KU’s total fall enrollment of non-resident aliens (termed international in the Factbook) has decreased during the relevant period, it seems likely that this aspiration was not met.

Table 2 – Fall Enrollment of Internationals at University of Kansas

Source: University of Kansas Interactive Factbook

Auburn University

Auburn signed with Shorelight in 2015. The university’s online, interactive Factbook offers the option to filter enrollments by on-campus, “Primary Major” which includes the various “Auburn Global” programs offered in partnership with Shorelight. Enrollments rose substantially between 2015 and 2016 but have been in steady decline since. Overall, enrollments are largely undergraduate and Chinese.

Table 3 – Fall Enrolment to Auburn Global Courses at Auburn University

Source: Auburn University Factbook

Table 4 – China/Non-China Fall Enrolment to Auburn Global Courses at Auburn University

Source: Auburn University Factbook

At the university level, the impact of the trends within Auburn Global are clear: total international student enrollment has grown from 1639 in 2015 to 3034 in 2019, with the percentage of Chinese students going from 46% to 62% during this same time. Obviously, the financial impact of 1400 additional students is material; however, the risk associated with such a large proportion of students from a single source country, especially in the current political climate, is palpable.

University of South Carolina

The Fall 2018 International Student Enrollment Report from USC captures the five-year picture on the university’s international recruitment. The International Accelerator Program (IAP) has helped push undergraduate numbers forward but its growth appears to have stalled. Of the total international enrollment for the university 40% of students are from China.

Table 5 – International Student Fall Enrollment – University of South Carolina

Source: USC Fall 2018 International Student Enrollment Report

Florida International University and University of Central Florida

Both of Shorelight’s Florida partners have seen strong growth in overall international enrollments. As a comparator, the University of South Florida, an INTO partner, saw total international enrollments grow by around 1500 between 2015 and 2018. This may reflect both the popularity of Florida as a destination for international students and that the three universities have lower fees than the others reviewed.

Table 6 – International Fall Enrollments at UCF and FIU

Source: Factbooks of Florida International University and Central Florida University

Summary

Some crude metrics emerge from the forecasted recruitment outcomes mentioned in the podcast. If Shorelight indeed recruits 4,000 students this year, the average number of students recruited by each member of the 145-person sales team this year will be 28, and the average number of recruited students per partner (assuming 18 partners) will be 222. Seasoned recruitment professionals will have views on how that ratio stacks up in terms of performance.

There will also be opinion on what the drive for 35% growth might mean in terms of cost of acquisition for US-bound students. As Inside Higher Ed reported in June 2018, promotional bonuses were already pushing agent compensation ”well north of the 15 percent threshold,” and it seems unlikely that this cost will have fallen. With the UK resurgent after reintroducing two year post-study work visas competition just got even tougher.

The closure of partnerships by Study Group, CEG and EC has provided insights into how difficult the US pathway business has become. The experience of the partners reviewed here suggest that, regardless of ranking, success can be elusive and only time will tell whether Shorelight’s strategy is a winner. Investment and targets are one thing, but brute market realities are quite another.

*University reporting formats are not wholly consistent. Extensive efforts have been made to verify data used and sources are given for reference. Authoritative comments or corrections are welcome.

Image by mollyroselee from Pixabay

PSW – The Morning After

There’s plenty of jubilation over the re-introduction of two-year Post-Study Work visas and congratulations are due to those who lobbied for it. But it’s worth remembering that Government’s rarely give something without wanting something in return and that every gift horse should be given careful scrutiny. In that context there are a few things to look out for over the coming weeks, months and years.

Drift, Detail and Design

A ‘popular’ announcement from a Government under pressure is often rushed out with detail and other policy intent still needing to be tidied up. The Home Secretary’s announcement that the new Graduate Route ‘will mean talented international students, whether in science and maths or technology and engineering, can study in the UK…’ was curious in the context of a scheme allowing all graduates to stay. It’s mirrored on the Home Office website and may provide cover for a later tightening of the rules to specific subjects.

A Step Forward But…

Some details of PSW are still to be announced but it seems slightly short of the Australian (two to four years) and Canadian (up to three years) schemes. It is not yet clear if families can join the PSW graduate as in Australia and it seems doubtful that there will be any room for promoting it as a route to permanent residence as Canadian institutions do. And there is always the potential for both those countries to step up their offer to become even more competitive.

Economic Conditions Can Change Policy

PSW was last introduced in the UK in 2002 when unemployment was 5%. It’s discontinuation in 2012 followed a rapid rise in unemployment to 8% between 2009 and 2011. Prime Minister David Cameron told the House of Commons, ‘Frankly, there are lots of people in our country desperate for jobs. We don’t need the brightest and best of students to come here and then do menial jobs.’

The economic direction of travel for the UK post-Brexit is uncertain but universities have been drawn very directly into discussions about employability and the value of a degree. It’s easy to allow PSW in an era of historically low unemployment, currently around 4%, but if recession hits and unemployment climbs it is equally simple to remove it. Trends in numbers and careers of home graduates may factor in that equation.

Table 1 – UK Unemployment 2000-2013

Grounds for Home Student Fee Reduction

The HE sector made an enormous song and dance about the contribution of international student fees but may find being granted it has unintended consequences. With increasing international students providing a major economic stimulus to universities there is fertile ground for populist and electioneering proposals to cut fees for home students and increase investment in school and FE. It’s probably helpful that international students also prop up the economics of many STEM courses and postgraduate study.

Limiting HE Investment to Support Other Priorities

Universities may hope the Augar Review has been buried but newspaper headlines about ‘low value’ courses, universities manipulating applications, grade inflation and VC pay are unlikely to have been totally forgotten. More importantly, more money from international students gives grounds to support more popular or political priorities. It was interesting to see Chancellor Sajid ‘I went to my local FE College’ Javid, Spending Round announcement include an increase for further education funding in the 2019 spending round and increasing ‘school spending by £7.1 billion by 2022-23, compared to this year.’

International Fees For EU Students

One of the arguments against introducing international fees for EU students post-Brexit has been that it will cause a significant decline in their numbers. A surge in traditional international fee-paying students attracted by PSW makes up those numbers and would allow EU students to work as PSW international students without a more complex arrangement with Europe. Making EU students ineligible for UK student loans would also eliminate headlines like ‘Thousands of EU students fail to repay loans.’

Never Mind the Quality Feel the Width

It is arguable that strong brands perceived as high quality or with potent strategies for recruitment have not been particularly troubled by the lack of post study work visas. Eight Russell Group universities each increased their first-year international student intakes by over 27% over the two years from 2015/16 to 2017/18. Even beyond that Group there are clear winners who achieved significant growth including De Montfort (+78%) and the University of East London (+90.6%).

For some universities these were grim years with five institutions each seeing their intake decline by over 300 students. PSW is likely to see such institutions making up for lost time and revenue by driving international numbers up but the quality of the intake may suffer. PSW as the driver for attracting less able international students to cash-strapped universities is not a particularly lofty ideal.

Competition for Places and Jobs

The potential for significant upturns in volumes of international students comes just as the upswing occurs in home student demographics with HEPI suggesting the need for up to 300,000 additional university places by 2030. This sets the scene for potential conflict between home students and international students – particularly if home fees go down and institutions are looking towards the economics. The OECD’s Education at A Glance 2019 noted, ‘there is a risk of squeezing out qualified national students from domestic tertiary educational institutions that differentiate tuition fees by student origin, as they may tend to give preference to international students who generate higher revenues through higher tuition fees”.

It’s suggested that in 2019 around 1,000 places were reserved for international students in Clearing and the economics may push institutions to favouring international students over home students just as home demand steps up. It is only a short step to stories about debt-laden home graduates being unemployed because universities are enticing increasing amounts of international competition for early career jobs. At that point the freedom of PSW may find itself subject to increasing scrutiny and Government intervention.

Conclusion

A benevolent PSW policy is to be welcomed where it builds on the reputation of the sector for quality and is part of a strategic approach to supporting higher education’s potential as a major contributor to global influence as well as the UK’s economic and cultural development. It is also possible that the recent announcement was carefully planned and is the start of a period of unprecedented benevolence towards higher education in the UK. But history and context suggest that things are rarely so simple.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Open Doors and Outliers – Looking For Rubies in a Mountain of Rocks

Open Doors data, published by the Institute of International Education (IIE) on 13 November, confirms the much-anticipated decline in international student enrollments in the US. But delving into the detail demonstrates that there are also outliers with significant growth in international students year on year. It is always interesting to dig down to see who is bucking the trend – but more importantly how they are doing it.

At the headline level there is unmitigated gloom with the total number of enrolled international students in 2017/18 down by 11,797 (1.3%) on the prior year. There are also signs of a fractured pipeline for Fall 2018 with non-degree student starters down 9.7% year on year (4,868 students) and down 23.8% (14,135 students) from the 2014/15 peak. Since a 2015/16 high-point undergraduate and postgraduate new-enrollments are down by 9% (10,723) and 6.8% (8,556) respectively.

Table 1 – New International Student Enrollment in the US 2007-08 to 2016-17
Source: Open Doors Report on International Educational Exchange. Retrieved from http://www.iie.org/opendoors

Against that background the state of Kentucky was eye-catching for two reasons. It posted a 26.9% increase in international students – an exceptional performance for a state that was, in 2016/17, 31st in overall popularity in terms of volume of students enrolled. Within the state Campbellsville University was the only one of the top five (by volume enrollments) to grow and became the leading recruiter with a year on year increase of nearly 2800 students.

Table 2 – Year on Year Change in Foreign Students in Kentucky (Source: Open Doors Fact Sheets 2017 and 2018)
IPEDS data shows that across all domestic and international, full and part-time enrollments Campbellsville grew by 96% year on year to Fall 2017. A time series shows that growth at the institution accelerated very significantly in the past year. Graduate part-time has been the primary engine of growth with graduate full-time and undergraduate part-time also contributing.

Table 3 – Campbellsville University Total Graduate and Undergraduate Enrollments 2014-2017
NB: 2017 data is listed as Provisional Release data by IPEDS

International student enrollments (as per non-resident aliens in IPEDS reporting) have been the driving force for the significant growth over the past year. Full-time international graduates grew by more than 600 year on year and part-time international graduates by over 1700.

Table 4 – Campbellsville Full and Part Time Graduate Enrollments
The graduate growth appears to be almost entirely driven by students from India. In 2016 Open Doors reported the proportion of students from China and India in Kentucky as being equal at 18.9% of the total. By 2017 students from India leapt to 43.1% of the total as China fell to 13.1%.

This is supported by the Quartz news website which published, in May 2018, an article reviewing the courses offered by Campbellsville and another Kentucky-based institution, the University of the Cumberlands . The article quotes Shanon Garrison, the vice president for enrollment services at the University of Campbellsville, as saying that “99% of the students in the course are native to India but live in and work for companies based in the US.” Most students are enrolled in the Masters of Science in Information Technology and Management (MSITM). which, according to Quartz, is ‘designed to allow international students to work full-time jobs while enrolled.’.

The report suggests that students are required to attend the campus for three days of face-to-face classes at the beginning of each term and that the degree costs around $17,000. Flexibility, affordability and the opportunity to work appear to be key factors in the popularity of the course. It is a powerful combination which appears to have turbo-charged growth at Campbellsville.

International recruitment has always been a space where intelligent minds consider ways to develop creative programming that works productively within the legal, visa and competitive environment. Large institutions can often be relatively slow in adapting to new circumstances or may rely on their reputations to see them through the bad times. Innovation and boldness are usually the hallmarks of smaller, more nimble institutions and their successes are often worth considering.

The purpose of looking more closely at the University of Campbellsville is to illustrate possibilities and is not intended to advocate for or against the model. The Quartz article outlines some of the potential challenges and it is not unusual for innovation to appear in specific niches that are inaccessible or out of scope for other institutions. But at a difficult time for US international student recruitment it’s interesting to see opportunities that are still being discovered and exploited.

FRESH HOPE OR ZOMBIE DAWN AS CLEARING FOG LIFTS?

Day 28 sounds like a bid for the latest in the zombie movie franchise but its the UCAS yearly data-release marking four weeks from A-level results day. For some UK universities the former might feel appropriate because the clearing season is nearly over and visa deadlines are coming. It’s not long before all that is left is the counting of enrolments.

This year Day 28 was 13 September with the data published a week later. These numbers give the best indication of how far the UK has come in enrolling new undergraduates for the 2018/19 academic year. It’s a mixed bag.

The good news that the number of ‘placed’ international students (non-EU) is up 4% to 38,330 – that’s 1,500 more than last year. It’s a solid gain although slightly disappointing after double-digit applicant growth in the early part of the cycle. It looks anaemic against the growth in Canada and Australia but is likely to be better than the US.

At a subject level the biggest winners are Business and Administrative Studies (+350), Computer Sciences (+310) and Biological Sciences (+240). However, the number of Engineering students is down by 230 and at its lowest level since 2012. The five-year growth in Technologies has also been reversed with a loss of 130 students taking it to its lowest ever total.

With 6,040 students international students still holding offers the eventual enrolment outcome remains uncertain. In 2015 the number holding offers on Day 28 was 6,380 but in the past two years had fallen to 1,760 (2016) and 1,610 (2017). It is difficult to understand what is driving this fluctuation and there may still be time for a late windfall. But the majority may just be phantoms preying on the minds of hard-pressed recruitment teams.

More good news is that EU-students ‘placed’ are also up by 2% to 30,350. This is still slightly below the number for 2016 but is some cause for encouragement. A number of universities, including De Montfort who opened an office in Portugal earlier in the year, are enhancing their physical presence in Europe. It will be interesting to see how these developments plays out with Brexit looming.

The bad news is that the total number of placed students after 28 days – counting all domiciles – is down by 10,000. At a standard UK home student fee rate that’s £277m of fee revenue over a three-year degree. Universities know that the home-student demographic dip will continue for a few years, which is one reason those that can have been building their student base. It seems to be one factor behind the growth in unconditional offers from well-ranked universities.

Table 1 – Total of All Placed Undergraduate Students 28 days After A-Level Results
Of course, undergraduate enrolments are not the only source of student income for universities and postgraduates make up the bulk of international enrolments. But it is also difficult to see why the postgraduate enrolment picture would be much of an improvement on that for undergraduates. And an enrolled undergraduate gives a near guarantee of three years income compared to the yearly challenge of recruiting more one year taught Masters students.

Against this background it was interesting to read Being set up to fail? The battle to save the UK’s Universities from speculative finance. The article, from May 2018, notes that ‘some £3bn has been borrowed by UK universities since 2016, over half of this in the form of private placements.’ Some of that borrowing may be based on predictions of student enrolments that look increasingly unsustainable.

This echoes WonkHE’s November 2016 report, Getting worse: HEFCE’s bleak prognosis for university finances. One recruitment related line from HEFCE was “Our financial modelling shows that removal of projected growth in overseas fee income over the next three years (2016-17 to 2018-19) would all but wipe out sector surpluses by 2018-19, with projected surpluses falling from £1,081 million (3.4 per cent of total income) to £56 million (just 0.2 per cent of total income).”

It is to be hoped that the early warning signs from HEFCE were heeded and that the long-term financial health of individual universities has been considered more carefully over ensuing years. My blog Getting To Grips With Pathways – A Thorny Subject? showed the decline in some university incomes that has already become evident as international enrolments fall. The UK demographics will not improve for several years and the battle for international students will not get any easier.

GLOBAL LEAGUE TABLES OFFER MIXED NEWS FOR THE US AND PATHWAY PROVIDERS

Credible and well publicised global comparative university rankings are one factor changing the face of international recruitment. Students and their advisers can compare and contrast between Beijing, Berlin, Boston and Birmingham at the touch of a button. The rapid growth of online courses from universities around the world has also helped to popularise the notion of ‘shopping’ for courses through the internet.

It is clear that league tables matter and that universities see them as an important part of student recruitment. Some less welcome consequences include misleading claims and recent incidents suggest that data submitted is not always accurate. Perhaps these incidents reflect the recognition that league tables can help build reputations that support both country and institutional desirability.

In that respect evidence suggests the US is losing its way as a global rankings leader with strength in depth. For pathway providers it’s a double-whammy when the quality of their US partnerships, as defined by global comparisons, looks to be lagging behind their partners in other parts of the world. At a difficult moment for US recruitment of international students it may be another indicator of harder times ahead.

US DECLINE IN GLOBAL RANKINGS
The US has traditionally been dominant at the top of global rankings and remains powerful. But The Economist (May 19th 2018) highlighted how its broader grip on the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) table has slipped over time. Chinese and Australian universities have seen the most significant growth in the table over that period.

Table 1 - Representation of Countries in ARWU TOP 500 - 2003 to 2017

The Times Higher Education (THE) World Rankings also noted that in 2018 ‘two-fifths of the US institutions in the top 200 (29 out of 62) have dropped places.’ In contrast, two Chinese universities had risen into the top 30 for the first time. This shift in global power reflects the growing power of China as a first choice for international students.

US PATHWAY PARTNERSHIPS BELOW TOP LEVEL
While many US universities are slipping in global rankings, pathway providers also seem to be struggling to secure partnerships with the very best universities in the country. Since April 2016 none of the partnerships announced by Study Group, Navitas, INTO or Shorelight has been in the top 200 in the QS Ranking or THE World rankings. Only two make it into the US News and World Report (USNWR) Global top 200.

Table 2 – Comparative Ranking of New US Pathway Partnerships Announced Since April 2016*National rank unless noted

Looking over the total portfolio of pathway partners of the ‘big 4’ providers in the US shows that more than half are not globally ranked by the QS, THE or, even in the US News and World Report Global Top 1000.

Table 3 – Global League Table Rankings of Pathway Provider Institutions in the US

UK PATHWAY PARTNERSHIPS LOOK STRONGER IN GLOBAL RANKINGS
Three of these providers are active in the UK where their portfolios look significantly stronger in terms of global rankings. With the addition of the fourth big player in the UK – Kaplan – the overall number of partners is similar. At an aggregate level the worst performance is in the USNWR ranking but even by that measure less than a third of partners are unranked.

The UK is a more mature market for pathways but the recent emphasis of the major players seems to be on enhancing quality. Kaplan partnered with the University of Nottingham in July 2016 and Study Group announced a deal with Durham University in February 2017. Kaplan and Navitas have established new-style arrangements, including investment in infrastructure, with long-term partners Liverpool and Swansea respectively. INTO’s last UK deal was with the University of Stirling in April 2014.

Table 4 - Comparative Global League Table Rankings of Pathway Provider Institutions in the UK

A GLOBAL LEAGUE TABLE FOR THE ERA OF THE CLICK
Some pathway groups also have strong representation in Australia (and to a lesser extent in Canada). A composite league tables to reflect this and show the ‘top 11’ pathway partner universities, according to three major global league tables, shows considerable consistency. Six universities (shaded) are in all the tables and five are in two. It is, however, worth noting that all but one have slipped lower in their placing between THE 2018 and THE 2019.

Table 5 - Top Pathway Partner Universities In Selected Global League Tables

NB: The University referred to in the table as Alabama is the University of Alabama – Birmingham.

CONCLUSION
Most people who work in the sector have seen the growth of league tables as an imposition with occasionally perverse consequences for investment and resource allocation in the institution. It is entirely possible to argue that that the rankings are arbitrary and spurious with no particular relevant to student outcomes. But they are increasingly offering new layers of insight to capture attention – the QS Graduate Employability Rankings is an example.

Students, parents, agents and employers look at league tables and most student recruitment marketing focuses on favourable rankings while ignoring less flattering indicators. They are far from the only factor involved in decision making but they set a tone that influences potential students and staff. It is rare to find an institutional leader who is not keenly aware of their relative performance.

In terms of international recruitment league tables are part of an institution’s ‘sales kit’ and the growth of global comparisons exposes their relative strengths and weaknesses. It is noticeable that as international student growth has stalled in the UK over the past five years the bigger and better ranked university ‘brands’ have taken a larger share of those coming to the country. It seems inevitable that this will be the story for the future and that universities without ranking ‘power’ will need to work harder to avoid being marginalised.

NOTE:

The exact nature of pathway provider and university partnerships is not always clear but extensive efforts have been made to focus on pathway partnerships where students are taught on-campus. The author is happy to hear from any authoritative source who has information that might improve the accuracy of the article. Any corrections will be noted below.

Correction and Update – 1 October 2018
The tables and commentary have been updated to reflect the publication of the THE Global Rankings 2019 during week commencing 24 September 2018 (comparative positions for individual universities are shown). Broadly speaking the new table showed declining rankings for both US and UK universities In addition, the tables have been corrected to show the rankings for Shorelight partner the University of Mississippi (Table 2) and INTO partner the University of Exeter (Table 5).

Unconditional Manipulation

The latest shouting match about UK universities giving students unconditional offers is drowning out the reality that the system is broken. It also ignores the likely reality that demographics will solve the problem in due course. But for now, and probably in the future, the playground bullies of government and UniversitiesUK will ignore the real victims – the students.

Here are some of the main reasons.

The evidence suggests that A-level predictions have always been a poor way to select students for university. A report, Predicted Grades: accuracy and impact based on the A-level results of 1.3 million young people over three years showed that only one in six A-level grade predictions were accurate. Three-quarters of actual grades turned out to be lower than teachers had estimated, while just one in 10 were higher.

Universities know this but have been happy to play along for many years. Indeed, it was a very useful thing to know when they faced a cap, with financial penalties for exceeding the limit, on the number of students enrolled. Universities could make more offers than they had places for, knowing that a significant proportion of students would miss their grades and could be rejected.

Then the game changed.

The cap was lifted and each individual student was worth more because of the introduction of fees. Universities had been on a major spending spree to build accommodation and so the need to enrol sufficient volume was no longer just an academic matter. And the growth in international students slowed significantly making UK students increasingly valuable.

The remorseless weight of demographics also played its part as the Office for National Statistics graph below shows. The number of UK students of university age has been declining for several years so institutions wanted to ‘fill their boots’ with as many as possible. The need was particularly acute because the decline in university age students will continue to fall for another couple of years.

For universities the ambition was to recruit as many students as necessary to fill the gap while finding ways to ensure that they got the best students possible. One way to manage that was to give unconditional offers to students that are in the A to B range for their A-levels while knowing that a proportion will slip to C or even lower. Students keen to get to the best quality university forsake their insurance offer and may mentally switch off on doing their best at A-level.

Worth remembering here that the first big name to go to ‘unconditional offers’ was the University of Birmingham who would be in search of top-quality students. Also worth remembering that University planning offices are filled with terrifyingly bright people who eat statistics for breakfast. They can predict with reasonable certainty how many students can afford to slip an A-level grade but are still likely to achieve a good degree (because the institution doesn’t want its league table position to slip).

A cynic would add that one of the points about emerging grade inflation in university awards is that the institution has the absolute power to manipulate the grades its students get. So even if the slippage in A-level points for the intake is damaging on one league table measure it can easily be made up for by an increase in the number of students getting a 2:1 or better. When organisations are autonomous and self-governing there is very little to prevent them making the rules up as they go along.

It’s a perfect storm of financial commitments, student scarcity, and a broken application system with poor data that the sector has consistently failed to fix. When you add to that mix the reality that universities can fix the outcomes it is no surprise they choose to game the system. Even if it’s not in the interests of the students.

But time will change these dynamics.

Even if nothing else changes the demographics of the UK will change behaviours. As the ONS data (above) shows the university may not have enough places by 2030 to take all the candidates that want to go. Faced with more students than they need universities will tighten their offer policies and the unconditional offer will become as rare as rocking horse droppings. It’s a situation where the basics of supply and demand provide a market solution.

But that seems to me to be cold comfort to students who have little insight and no voice at all in the way the system runs. Their plight is made worse by the constant changes in Government policy and the responses of self-interested universities. About time somebody set about mending the underlying system and holding people to account.