Janet Napolitano resigns to take academic job at University of California

Janet Napolitano has resigned as secretary for homeland security and will take a job as president of the University of California. Photograph: Hyungwon Kang/Reuters

Barack Obama's secretary for homeland security, Janet Napolitano, resigned on Friday to take a senior post running the University of California.

Napolitano, the first woman to hold the post, has been a close confidante to the president, leading the administration's response to natural disasters and terrorist threats.

She has also been a strong supporter of the comprehensive immigration reform proposed in a Senate bill, which would provide a landmark route to citizenship for millions of workers in the country illegally.

The timing of her departure could unnerve the White House, which is grappling with how to overcome opposition to wholescale immigration among House Republicans.

Obama said in a statement that Napolitano had dealt with "some of [the] toughest challenges" facing the US.

"Since day one, Janet has led my administration's effort to secure our borders, deploying a historic number of resources, while also taking steps to make our immigration system fairer and more consistent with our values," Obama said.

"And the American people are safer and more secure thanks to Janet's leadership in protecting our homeland against terrorist attacks."

The LA Times, which broke news of her resignation, said Napolitano had been head-hunted for president for the University of California, an unusual move given such posts are normally granted to senior academics.

"While some may consider her to be an unconventional choice, secretary Napolitano is without a doubt the right person at the right time to lead this incredible university," Sherry Lansing, the regent and former film industry executive who headed the search committee, said in a statement to the newspaper.

"She will bring fresh eyes and a new sensibility – not only to UC, but to all of California. She will stand as a vigorous advocate for faculty, students and staff at a time when great changes in our state, and across the globe, are presenting as many opportunities as challenges."

Napolitano, 55, a former governer of Arizona, has led the department for homeland security, which has an annual $60bn budget and 240,000 employees, since 2009.

She has had an often fractious relationship with Republicans on Capitol Hill, not least over her stance on immigration reform, which looks likely to become an issue of ongoing and protracted debate in Washington.

Brendan Buck, the press secretary for Republican House speaker John Boehner, tweeted: "Well, that'll be fun. A new DHS Secretary in the middle of the immigration debate."

Napolitano said she had been honoured to work for Obama during such an "important chapter" for the country.

"We have worked together to minimize threats of all kinds to the American public," she said.

"The department has improved the safety of travelers; implemented smart steps that make our immigration system more fair and focused while deploying record resources to protect our nation's borders; worked with states to build resiliency and make our nation's emergency and disaster response capabilities more robust; and partnered with the private sector to improve our cybersecurity."

View the original article here

In defence of the university technician

Don't shrink into the background, Kelly Vere urges her fellow technicians – find your voice. Photograph: Juice Images/Alamy

This month has been a good one. I've had my first ever scientific book chapter published, taught an excellent cohort of students in a lab class, had a paper accepted in an international journal, become a teaching fellow of the Higher Education Academy and was invited to give a seminar at another university – in California.

This may read like just an average month in academia. But, I'm not an academic – I'm a university technician. Have I surprised you? I'm not unique. There are 20,680 technicians working in universities in England and we make a crucial contribution to research and teaching activities.

Alongside the provision of essential traditional technical duties, we also present at international conferences, publish research papers, teach, lecture, even convene degree modules and mark students' work. Given the increasing pressures on our academic colleagues, it's hardly surprising that the technical role has diversified so much over the years.

I've been a technician since the age of 18 and admittedly, I didn't even know the role existed until I saw the job advertised. I was looking for any position that would fund a part time degree and fell into a junior technical post by accident. From day one I loved it.

Fourteen years later and now a senior technician, I'm fortunate that's still the case. I love the diversity, breadth and frankly the sheer randomness of my role. Every day is different and I get a real buzz from it, whether it's finally getting that all-important result or the look of realisation on a student's face when they eventually grasp a scientific concept or technique.

When I started out in 1999, I discovered that technicians are often the first port of call for both staff and students. Amid the frequent turnover of research staff, it's the technician who's the reassuringly permanent fixture in an academic department, equipped with a wealth of knowledge and expertise that you won't find elsewhere.

Beyond the department, however, technical staff are often invisible to all but their immediate co-workers. There are countless examples of this invisibility on a local level: advertisements for hall wardens that specify administrators/academics only; that initial meeting regarding departmental mergers that neglected to mention the 100+ technicians affected; the lack of technical representation at a senior management level in most universities. The full extent of our contribution isn't always formally recognised and so there are limited development opportunities.

But it's not just locally, it's nationally too. Technicians rarely make higher education news, are notably absent in sector wide award ceremonies, are not featured in the National Student Survey – the list goes on. Is it that we have nothing to offer or do we just fall under the radar?

It's hard to define us. There's no such thing as a typical university technician because the job title encompasses many disciplines – from art to zoology – and many grades – from those employed to undertake basic, essential duties to those with specialist expertise. Inevitably this causes communication problems between ourselves, between departments, between HEIs and with external agencies.

We're a hard group to pin down in a sector that is dominated by many well defined occupations. Maybe technicians get lost in the system. But if the university technician is not seen as important to higher education, why would young people aspire to the role?

In 2011 the UK Commission for Employment and Skills identified a shortage of technicians across all sectors, estimating that the UK would require an additional 450,000 technicians by 2020. Technical skills are vital for the UK economy and technicians in higher education have a double contribution to make, both driving innovation (through knowledge transfer activities) and educating technicians of the future through the University Technical Colleges initiative.

A professional registration scheme has been launched for technical staff working across science, engineering and technology to ensure recognition and development. If quality standards can be linked to future funding – as the Roberts report did for research staff – it will ensure universities invest in our development.

Times are changing for technicians. The HEA now formally recognises the technicians' contribution to the teaching and learning experience through its annual Technician of the Year award launched earlier this year. It also encourages technical staff to gain accreditation through the UK Professional Standards Framework (UKPSF) in the same way as their academic colleagues.

So, it's an exciting moment to be a technician. The opportunities are there for us to gain voice, visibility, recognition and support. To my fellow technicians I say: we must engage. Let's take ownership of our profession, make ourselves heard and actively seek accreditation and recognition for our roles. To stakeholders both within and outside our universities: please recognise our talents, invest in our development, utilise our skills and listen. We have so very much to contribute.

Kelly Vere is a senior technician in life sciences and engineering at the University of Nottingham – follow her on Twitter @kellyvere

This content is brought to you by Guardian Professional. To get more articles like this direct to your inbox, become a member of the Higher Education Network.

View the original article here

University fundraising: what the UK can learn from Canada

By learning from the mistakes made in Canada, the UK has the ability to raise ￡5-￡10m per year from philanthropy, says Andrew Derrington. Photograph: Getty

Canada is a good place to learn about university fundraising because the giving culture is fairly similar to the UK, but its practice tends to be about 20 years ahead. So it was that I recently found myself on the annual CASE fundraising study tour, which takes groups of academic leaders and fundraising professionals from Europe to Canadian universities to learn first hand how they approach this trickiest of businesses.

At McMaster University, we learned about the motivations of fundraising's three main actors: development professionals, donors and academic leaders. Lorna Somers, vice president of McMaster University Foundation, told us about the transition from her early days at McMaster in the late 1980s, when academics treated her "like someone with advanced leprosy" and alumni would tell her that universities should look to the government for any money they wanted. Now academics are eager – sometimes too eager – to be involved. McMaster's annual fundraising target is $21m (￡13.4m) and their last campaign raised $470m (￡300m) in four years.

Donors have changed too, as we discovered when we met three of McMaster's most generous donors. All were alumni who had lost touch with the university and been attracted back, either to study or because they wanted to get involved in the running of the university. For each, giving was prompted by the realisation that they had the means to help the university do something exciting and extraordinary. This realisation is not the result of a fevered sales pitch but rather the culmination of a long relationship. Most of McMaster's top 20 donors started small, with less than $1000 (￡640) and more than a decade elapsed between their first gift and their major gift.

McMaster was not the only place where we heard how important it is to manage, or steward, this relationship. Donors give because they want to make a difference. Once they have given, they need to be told what their gift has achieved. Then they may know that they can achieve more by giving again. Professionals who take the lead in donor stewardship involve academic leaders in generating and sustaining both the excitement that may result in a gift, and the satisfaction that the gift has been put to good use.

But not all academic leaders are good at this. We tend to get too hung up on the issue of asking for money. Some of us are terrified of the idea, others become too eager to askand become 'askaholics'.

John Kelton, dean of health sciences at McMaster, who has raised over $200m (￡128m) in the last 10 years, told us about his relationships with major donors. Appropriately enough, our meeting took place in the 'floating' boardroom suspended in the atrium of the Michael G De Groote School of Medicine, a building funded by a donation of $105m (￡672m), the largest single donation to a Canadian university.

Kelton's account of his work with donors made it clear that listening to donors and understanding what they are interested in, is as important as talking. Although our visits to three other universities confirmed everything we had learned at McMaster, in each of them we learned something distinctive and new. Max Blouw, president of Wilfrid Laurier University, told us how a successful campaign must be rooted in reality.

One of the first tasks he had set himself as president was to develop a story about the university based on the facts of the present rather than the myths of the past. As a result, Wilfrid Laurier's new mission statement, 'Inspiring lives of leadership and purpose', contains a strong component of business excellence that adds distinctiveness to its earlier bland image based on its origins as Waterloo Lutheran University.

Waterloo University, just next door to Wilfrid Laurier, tells a story of itself as producer of scientific and technological innovations that fuel a local high-technology economy. It encourages its staff, students and alumni to generate wealth, substantial chunks of which get fed back as donations. Waterloo alumnus and inventor of the BlackBerry, Mike Lazaridis, has given hundreds of millions to support research to develop technologies of the future in nanoscience and quantum computing. A Waterloo student donated the million dollars profit he made from selling his first business.

Despite these successes, only a small fraction of the alumni who could make substantial donations are disconnected from the university. Jason Coolman, director of alumni affairs, told us about his research on using 'elite' alumni to engage these disconnected former students and gradually get them on board.

On our last day at University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM), Gillian Morrison from the university's central campaigns office talked us through the stages of developing UTM's extraordinary $2bn'Boundless' campaign. The biggest in Canadian university history, this campaign is directly linked with academic mission, and shows that smaller universities can have no excuse for lack of coherence in their campaigns.

So could the UK emulate what the Canadians have achieved? The more I think about it, the more I think we could. And if we learn from their mistakes rather than repeating them, we could do it faster. An average sized, middle-ranking British university should be able to get to a point where they are raising ￡5-￡10m per year from philanthropy within five to 10 years.

Andrew Derrington is executive pro vice-chancellor of humanities and social sciences at the University of Liverpool – he blogs about university management and grant writing

This content is brought to you by Guardian Professional. To get more articles like this direct to your inbox, become a member of the Higher Education Network.

View the original article here

Student ball at Oxford University ends in 'catastrophe'

A straw boater on a punt in Oxford, where students have had an end-of-term ball to forget. Photograph: Jeremy Trew, Trewimage/Alamy

It was supposed to be a night of "decadence, debauchery, and indulgence", but instead guests of an Oxford University end-of-term ball endured a "catastrophe" with some left with burns, in tears and without food and drink.

Guests at Last Ball at Somerville College, Oxford, paid up to ￡150 for tickets but found that entertainers that were advertised did not turn up and almost all the alcohol had run out before 1am, five hours before the end.

May balls are a tradition at Oxford, Cambridge and other universities. They are normally extravagant and usually well managed by student committees.

The organisers of the ball – planned jointly by Somerville College and Jesus College – had great ambitions; they had planned to exhibit a live shark until they were inundated with complaints. In the event, the ball descended into farce with guests questioning what the organisers had done with the money paid by 1,000 guests.

The Cambridge Tab reported "Food ran out early on in the evening, with only one food stand to cater for 1,000 people. Vegetarians went hungry, with pita bread and cupcakes acting as measly substitutes for the previously mentioned hog roast. What's more, all the alcohol (with the exception of rum) had run out by 1am, and by 4am even that had run out."

Cherwell, the Oxford University magazine reported: "Somerville-Jesus 'Last Ball' goers are 'ripped off'. A 'violent scrum' for food, misleading advertising and 'unprecedented prices' criticised by students and alumni."

Guests using the maze got stuck in bottlenecks and some were injured when it was left unstaffed.

Guests set up a Facebook page to list complaints. Some posted pictures of burnt skin and dresses, caused by crowds waiting around the hog roast for up to an hour. One guest complained that he had to pick up tickets in person despite paying for postage. The same guest had to wait for an hour for a pork roll and suffered bruising in the melee to get food before it ran out.

Another student described how she was prevented from going to bed by overzealous security guards. "I'm a Somerville student and felt ill at about 2am on the night of the ball. Being cold, hungry and having drunk a fair bit I asked to be allowed to go to bed. I spoke to security and a member of the ball committee and when I wasn't allowed to go to bed I burst into tears and explained that I was feeling ill and suffer from depression. I needed sleep but was instead sent to the first aid room," she wrote.

She also noted that other Somerville students were not allowed to go to their rooms to pick up possessions such as asthma inhalers because of "security reasons".

Some of the ball organisers posted a letter apologising for their failures and denying charges of embezzlement. They blamed their failings on their inexperience and the small numbers of committee members. They blamed the injuries sustained at the maze on "some of the maze staff going rogue; a handful of maze actors attempted to leave their positions and sneak into the ball as guests."

‧ This article was amended on 25 May as it mistakenly said that Jesus College was in Cambridge

View the original article here

The supreme court should fully support using race in university admissions | Nick Chiles

University of Texas-Austin president Bill Powers speaks to the press outside the supreme court. Photograph: Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Considering the astounding variety of characteristics and accomplishments that applicants to America's most competitive colleges present to the admissions boards every year, it is disturbingly narrow-minded and off-base for our society to focus so much attention and angst on the color of an applicant's skin. The totality of a college applicant is about so much more than her racial group, or even her SAT scores.

The US supreme court ruling today is basically a "do over" on the issue of whether universities can consider race in the admissions process, sending the Texas case back to the lower courts. If it does anything, today's ruling sets an even tougher standard for public universities to use race as a factor in their admissions. If the court ultimately rules against affirmative action, the higher education community will be forced to take a huge step backwards – perhaps absorbing the final blow in American society's decades-long assault on affirmative action.

It's fascinating to note that all this debate about affirmative action on college campuses has occurred even as the business world and the military so strongly support affirmative action and believe in the importance of diversity. Consider that a slew of Fortune 100 companies (pdf), in addition to the US department of defense, submitted friend-of-the-court briefs to the Supreme Court urging it to keep affirmative action in place.

If the value or appeal of a college applicant was just about his GPA and standardized test scores, schools like Harvard, Yale, Stanford and MIT wouldn't even need an admissions board. They could simply fill each freshman class with all the students who boasted perfect SAT scores and 4.0 (or better in this era of inflated grades) GPAs. But in building universities that more closely resemble the real world that their students will be entering upon graduation, in creating vibrant and varied academic experiences for their student bodies, top schools know that they must cast their gaze far beyond a cursory look at a student's racial group and test scores.

When cello-playing honor roll student Abigail Fisher filed the lawsuit against the University of Texas challenging the school's policy of considering an applicant's race, she claimed she was denied her lifelong dream of going to Texas while students in her high school class with lower grades and similar activities were admitted. She alleged that "the only difference between us was the color of our skin".

University officials contended that Fisher wouldn't have been admitted even without the race factor because her numbers weren't high enough. University of Texas President Bill Powers argued that in academia and the business world, no one ever gets hired based only on their class rank in college or high school.

Abigail Fisher's analysis presents an exceedingly limited view of what goes on in the admissions offices of ultra-competitive schools like the University of Texas. If Fisher wanted to focus exclusively on grades, why single out the student whose skin color is different from hers? Why not challenge the university on its acceptance of the prima ballerina or the chess grandmaster or the linebacker or the award-winning essayist or the daughter of the Fortune 100 CEO or the all-state violinist or the hundreds of other students with fascinating resumes who likely were admitted with lower GPAs than Miss Fisher?

It is obvious that any school must look beyond just test scores and race when building a viable incoming class, so why have we become so preoccupied with the race of admitted students? Why didn't Fisher take on school "legacies" or athletes or musicians and accuse them of taking her spot?

For the past quarter century, I have interviewed about five students per year who are applying to my alma mater, Yale. The university considers these alumni interviews a valuable opportunity to form a more complete portrait of applicants who happen to live too far from New Haven to be interviewed by an admissions officer. In my 25 years of conducting interviews, I have had eight of my interviewees admitted to the university. Though that number is depressingly low, it is actually in line with the school's admittance rate of slightly over 7%.

The most interesting part of this experience has been the stunning level of talent I saw in the hundred or so students who weren't admitted. Through the years, among the legions of students who got the narrow envelope of rejection were class valedictorians, perfect SAT scores, top-flight musicians and passionately committed social activists. Some of them were so gifted that it would bring tears to my eyes to know that they would have to feel the sting of rejection after compiling resumes so remarkable.

Elite schools like Yale and the University of Texas would be quick to acknowledge that they could reach into the pool of rejected students and create incoming classes of students just as talented and deserving as the students who were admitted. Acceptance to these schools is never a guarantee for anyone, no matter a student's level of accomplishment.

Every year, I prepare my applicants for the probability of rejection by telling them that the student they are competing against is the one who looks the most like them. If they are a white trumpet-playing track star and student body president with a 3.9 GPA in rural Georgia, the Hispanic prima ballerina with a 3.7 GPA in Chicago is not their competition, it's the other white kids from rural schools far from the university, whose presence on campus would be considered a valuable part of the student mix.

Our preoccupation with the race and test scores of applicants sends our young people the dangerous message that their eventual advancement in their careers and their lives will come down to a simple numbers game – just focus on making the most sales or bringing in the most new clients and you will rise straight to the top.

View the original article here

Why the Guardian university guide is the one to watch

Students at St Martin's new campus near King's Cross in London. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

As the Guardian unveils its 2014 university guide, this year's rankings are set to be more influential than ever.

And that's because, as new research has just shown, students base their decisions about which courses to apply for on the Guardian guide.

Economists at Royal Holloway, University of London, analysed university application data for the past eight years to see how scores given to institution departments by the Guardian affected the number of student applications they received.

The researchers made two findings: subject departments that score highly in the tables get more applications, and, tuition fees are making league tables more influential.

According to the study, individual departments moving up a subject-level league table experienced a rise in applications of almost 5%, with the increase most pronounced among overseas applicants.

Changes to student number control, which allow universities to recruit for more high-achievers, mean that league tables will become more influential as universities vie for extra students, says Xiaoxuan Jia, the report author.

"As the market for higher education gets liberalised and institutions become freer in recruiting the best home and EU students, the income effect of the Guardian ranking will increase."

Researchers say based their study on the Guardian's guide because it is "easily accessible and currently the most popular."

Universities already pay close attention to league tables, but the report authors added that university administrators may wish to, "review their resource allocation based on the criteria used to construct those league tables on a regular basis, to improve and sustain their respective ranking performance."

Carl Gilleard, chief executive of Association of Graduate Recruiters says universities recognise that, especially after the fee rise, students want a return on their investment in education.

"The senior management at institutions are paying far more attention to league tables and employability statistics than ever before, and that will prove to be the best catalyst for bringing about changes to the student experience – and changes for the better."

It's not just universities that are keeping an eye on league tables – they're also watched keenly by graduate employers, adds Gilleard. "Recruiters base their decisions about which universities to target on a number of factors, one of which is the reputation of an institution."

University league tables aren't without their critics – and, as career advisers point out – they shouldn't be the only resource students consult when applying to university. But the Guardian's rankings, which unlike other league tables prioritise student experience, is the place to start.

View the original article here

University guide 2014: download the Guardian tables and see how the rankings have changed

Cambridge University has retained its top spot on the Guardian university league tables for the third year in a row. Photograph: Brian Harris/Alamy

Cambridge University has retained its top spot on the Guardian undergraduate university league table for the third year in a row. Oxford University and the London School of Economics (LSE) are in second and third place respectively, unchanged from the 2013 rankings.

St Andrews remains at fourth place, whilst UCL and Durham have each climbed one position taking them to fifth and sixth place respectively. Bath are up two places to seventh and Imperial climbs an impressive four places to return to the top ten.

A new addition to the top ten is Surrey university coming in at eighth beating Imperial at ninth and Warwick at tenth place. Richard Adams writes:

Surrey's rise above the likes of Imperial College and Warwick University – in ninth and tenth places respectively – is a remarkable effort for an institution whose origins go back to the Battersea Polytechnic Institute of 120 years ago. Some 56% of its student population are women, while more than 90% of its young applicants come from state schools

It's not such good news for Lancaster though, dropping to 11th. Exeter also failed to make the top ten after dropping two places to 12th.

So who have been the biggest climbers on this year's league table? If we don't take into account St Mark and St John, which dropped off the list last year and are now back in at 101st, Northampton have seen the biggest increase in their ranking.

Northampton have increased their position by an impressive 39 places bringing them up to 47th from 86th. Portsmouth are up 30 places to 48th. Liverpool John Moores, Swansea and Winchester have all also recorded significant changes in their positions since last year.

The chart above shows the universities with the biggest improvements in ranking and also those that have had the largest drop from the previous year's position.

Cardiff Met has fallen 39 places since last year, down from 66th to 105th. Sussex tumbles down from 27th place to 50th with the second biggest decrease since last year.

The University of the Arts London, Gloucestershire and Robert Gordon have also witnessed noticeable decreases in position since the 2013 rankings.

In other news, the Guildhall School of Music and Drama tops the specialist institutions rankings, followed by the Courtauld Institute.

Cambridge dominates the subject rankings, coming top in 14 out of 47 including medicine, veterinary science, biosciences, chemical engineering, maths, sociology and modern languages and linguistics. Oxford came top in eight subjects including economics, politics, psychology, chemistry and physics.

Although it's not exactly new that Oxbridge dominate the majority of the subject league tables, what is notable however is how their grip seems to be loosening on certain subjects. For example, once top for law, Oxford has been trumped by UCL which also comes top for civil engineering, archaeology, architecture, English and art and design.

Birmingham are ranked top for computer sciences and IT and LSE have overtaken Cambridge for Philosophy. Imperial have replaced Southampton as number one in mechanical engineering, Durham are ranked first for sport science beating Lougborough to the top spot and Sussex have jumped from 17th to first for social work.

The tables were compiled by independent consultancy firm Intelligent Metrix. It's based originally on information collected by Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) and the National Student Survey, published by Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce). The Guardian university guide is a ranking at undergraduate level only.

The Guardian undergraduate university guide can be explored below alongside information such as spend per student, student to staff ratio and the change in ranking by institution.

Click on the downloadable spreadsheet to view the individual rankings by subject. We'd love to read your comments in the thread below.

‧ If you want to pose any questions regarding the league table, the compiler of the tables, Matt Hiely-Rayner from Intelligent Metrix, will be online from 1-3pm today, to answer your questions and explain the lengthy process of consultation, categorisation and number-crunching that goes into putting these figures together each year.

Click heading to sort table. Download this data

‧ DATA: download the full spreadsheet

Data journalism and data visualisations from the Guardian

‧ Search the world's global development data with our gateway

‧ Contact us at data@guardian.co.uk

‧ Follow us on Twitter
‧ Like us on Facebook

View the original article here

Riot police arrest eleven at Sydney University protest

Protest at the gates of Sydney University. Police have arrested at least six people. Photograph: Helen Davidson

The fifth day of strike action at Sydney University took a dramatic turn on Wednesday morning, with eleven people arrested by police in two incidents.

Senior lecturer and picket line leader Nick Riemer told Guardian Australia the riot police had “behaved like violent animals” during the first incident.

“We had a picket line of staff and students who were observing the NTEU [National Tertiary Education Union] protocol which says that we are allowed - and it’s what we are here to do - to have conversations with people about why we are here,” said Riemer.

He alleged the police gave no verbal warning before “swooping” on protesters after they sat down on the driveway of the Carillon Avenue entrance to the university in front of a truck attempting to enter the grounds.

Riemer claimed protesters were “violently manhandled, they yanked them out of the way, they pushed them - I got pushed, I got asphyxiated for a small number of seconds. I got violently manhandled.”

A NSW police spokesman told Guardian Australia Newtown police were aware of the action and the incident began when it was alleged protesters were blocking Carillon and Western avenues.

“This was seen as a safety risk to people accessing an adjacent primary school and pedestrian crossing. Police attempted to move the group and it appears some resisted, leading to arrests,” she said.

The people arrested have been taken to Newtown police station and are expected to be charged with resisting arrest, according to ABC News.

The strike action began in March after negotiations between staff and the university broke down, senior lecturer and chair of the department of political economy and vice president of the NTU, Damien Cahill said.

“We’re striking in pursuit of a new enterprise agreement which strengthens our conditions, gives us a fair pay rise. Unfortunately the management saw fit to put a proposal on the table which would have stripped back most of our protections,” Cahill said.

“We’re hoping this will be the last strike and they’ll agree to a fair pay rise. If not we’re going to be back here in second semester.”

Cahill did not witness Wednesday morning’s incident, but said police had taken a “very heavy-handed view to the strikes from the second strike onwards, and they’ve increased their militancy.”

View the original article here

Most people in the UK do not go to university – and maybe never will

Data suggests that the majority of the UK population will never go to university, finds Charlie Ball. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

Almost everyone goes to university nowadays, everyone knows that.

Except that not everyone does and we rarely see accurate statistics about how many or what proportion of people actually do. It's quite an important question, bound up with thorny issues of workforce skills, educational aspiration and, of course, how (and how much) the UK taxpayer funds our domestic higher education sector.

Against this backdrop came a widely-reported piece of analysis from the department of business, innovation and skills (BIS) on the Higher Education Initial Participation Rate (HEIPR), which examines participation rates for 17-30-year-old English domiciled first-time participants in higher education in the UK, including outside England.

Higher education in this context means every kind of accredited higher education course, from two-year foundation degrees delivered at a local further education college, to PhDs from Cambridge. This time round, the HEIPR stood at 49%, up from 46% last year. The media duly reported that almost half of all young people went to university in 2011/12.

They didn't. The HEIPR is an odd beast and it doesn't measure what you think it might measure. The methodology involves finding the proportion of people at each age from 17 to 30 who are involved in university for the first time – and then summing all of those participation rates.

The resulting rate is designed to equate roughly to the probability that a 17-year-old will participate in higher education by the age of 30. It doesn't measure the proportion of young people going into higher education. Nor does it tell us what proportion of people has a degree – and it shouldn't be presented as if it does.

What if we do want to know this information? Where do we go? Well, there are a couple of places. The first is government datasets. The Annual Population Survey involves a sample of 155,000 households and 360,000 people, and is rigorously audited. It is good data and you can interrogate it using Nomis, a service from the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

Using Nomis, we can see that in 2012, 34.4% of the working age population of Great Britain, aged 16 to 64, achieved NVQ4+ (a degree-level or equivalent qualification or above). You can check my working if you like – here is the report I ran. Related data reveals that 40.2% of those in work have a degree or equivalent – unsurprisingly, degree holders are more likely to be in work than those without.

We can also get data from the census. This has some advantages – a much, much larger sample – and some disadvantages – it's only taken every 10 years. Fortunately, we had one in 2011, so the data is still quite relevant.

It's now possible to examine census data yourself using Nomis, but the ONS also produced a report of some of the key facts in December 2012, which found that 27.2% of the population aged 16 to 74 had a degree or equivalent or higher – about 12 million people all told. This proportion is lower than the proportion for 16 to 64-year-olds because of the much smaller participation rates for the 64-74 age group covered by the census.

What none of this addresses is the proportion of people that the UK needs educated to degree level. That's even trickier, as the nature of work changes with time. A modern economy with rapidly-developing technology like ours tends to demand more skills and qualifications as time goes on. The recent Skills and Employment Survey found that 26% of jobs in the economy explicitly require a degree – or, put another way, if you don't go to university, more than a quarter of jobs are inaccessible to you.

If we then return to the APS data for the whole country and look at jobs in the managerial, professional and associate professional categories – those that are deemed 'graduate level' – we find they make up 43.6% of the jobs in the economy. This doesn't mean that some graduates aren't currently working in sub-graduate level jobs – they are – but it does suggest that we have room for a few more graduates yet.

In short, it's not actually very easy to work out what proportion of the UK population has degrees (nor how many more or less graduates the economy needs). Depending on which dataset you study, it's 27.2% or 34.4% or 40.2% of the population. It certainly isn't 49%. Most people don't go to university and current data suggests that most people in the UK never will.

Charlie Ball is deputy director of research at the Higher Education Careers Services Unit – follow it on Twitter @hecsu

This content is brought to you by Guardian Professional. To get more articles like this direct to your inbox, become a member of the Higher Education Network.

View the original article here

Survey finds today's university students are anxious to find alternative social activities that do not involve drinking

The study of more than 2,300 students by the UNITE group, the country's largest student accommodation provider, found “a recurring theme” was that students were desperately searching for alternative social activities that did not involve drinking.

One said his priority was “a wide variety of activities for all people” but added “this is only well met if you're a sport student or you want to drink yourself to death”.

Less than one in three students said they were going to university to have a good time - the majority (84 per cent) said they were studying their subject because they were interested in it.

“The traditional student stereotype of beer-swilling, lecture-skipping, hovel dwelling layabouts is completely outdated,” said one respondent.

On their prospects of employment, one in eight still thought it would be “easy” to find a job on graduating despite the employment gloom. Only two per cent thought it would be impossible,

Meanwhile, a separate survey by graduate recruiters warned that employers were discriminating against young people from disadvantaged background through their interviewing processes.

Too many were relying on the evidence of unpaid internships - which could only be afforded by those whose families could subsidise them, said the survey by the Association of Graduate Recruiters and Association of Graduate Careers Advisory Services.

“Far too many employers are, unknowingly and unintentionally, using recruitment and selection methods that present barriers to graduates from less privileged backgrounds,” it adds.

View the original article here

Survey finds today's university students are anxious to find alternative social activities that do not involve drinking

The study of more than 2,300 students by the UNITE group, the country's largest student accommodation provider, found “a recurring theme” was that students were desperately searching for alternative social activities that did not involve drinking.

One said his priority was “a wide variety of activities for all people” but added “this is only well met if you're a sport student or you want to drink yourself to death”.

Less than one in three students said they were going to university to have a good time - the majority (84 per cent) said they were studying their subject because they were interested in it.

“The traditional student stereotype of beer-swilling, lecture-skipping, hovel dwelling layabouts is completely outdated,” said one respondent.

On their prospects of employment, one in eight still thought it would be “easy” to find a job on graduating despite the employment gloom. Only two per cent thought it would be impossible,

Meanwhile, a separate survey by graduate recruiters warned that employers were discriminating against young people from disadvantaged background through their interviewing processes.

Too many were relying on the evidence of unpaid internships - which could only be afforded by those whose families could subsidise them, said the survey by the Association of Graduate Recruiters and Association of Graduate Careers Advisory Services.

“Far too many employers are, unknowingly and unintentionally, using recruitment and selection methods that present barriers to graduates from less privileged backgrounds,” it adds.

View the original article here