University League Tables (2012 update) and Participation

One of the most popular items on this blog has been University League Tables and Participation, posted in January 2011:

In a previous post (University Entrance - Today's 11+? ) I pointed out that the current participation rate in higher education in the UK was at a similar level to 11+ success and grammar school attendance in the 1960s. At that time, however, university was for an elite minority – less than 10% of the under 21 age group. Although this is no longer the case, there is a perception of there being an institutional elite, and arguably, for those choosing which universities to apply to, and for recruiters of graduates, the perception can be more important than the reality. This post looks at some possible shapers of these perceptions (league tables and elite groupings), and then revisits the statistics of participation.

The post combined the results of four published league tables (each one using its own assessment criteria, but with inevitable overlaps) to produce a listing of the top 30 universities. The league tables have been reissued for 2012 (by The Times, Sunday Times, Guardian and Complete University Guide) so I have taken the opportunity to update the table, again identifying the Russell Group, and the Sutton Trust’s ‘elite’ (ST13) and ‘highly selective’ (STHS) groups. Access to the ‘top universities’ continues to be a significant political issue and has come to be regarded as a key determinant of social mobility. For example, Ed Miliband used the words ‘top universities’ once, and ‘most competitive universities’ twice, in his speech at the Labour Party conference last week.  (UPDATE: However, David Cameron made no reference to universities in his speech to the Conservative Party conference on 5 October, with the education passage focussing on schools).

At the bottom of the 30, Manchester and Liverpool have been replaced by Surrey and Reading. Otherwise changes in ranking are probably not significant, particularly in the top 10.

The graph showing the capacity of the elite groupings alongside historic participation rates is taken from the earlier post – it is only meant to be illustrative and I have assumed that, for that purpose, the changes to the relevant data in one year are insignificant.

To find out how this Top 30 rates in the three international league tables, see my later post.

IPPR’s Three Tribes

An old joke recycled: There are three kinds of people who believe that there are three kinds of people: those who do, those who don’t and those who don’t know.

In the Guardian in July Allegra Stratton reported that Graeme Cook, from the think-tank IPPR, is proposing that the electorate has changed and that it no longer helps to think of swing voters and core voters, and in terms of the upper, middle and working classes. Instead he offers ‘three new tribes, and they do not have life-long loyalties to political parties’:

Pioneers (41% of Britons) are global, networked, like innovation and believe in the importance of ethics.
Prospectors (28%) like success, ambition, seek the esteem of others and if they think a party can help them help themselves, they are on board.
Settlers (31%) see things in terms of right and wrong, are wary of change, seek security and have a strong sense of place – patriotism and national security motivate them to vote.  All the social classes split up in roughly the same proportions. Settlers were most numerous after 1945, but as people became steadily more affluent, "post-material attitudes" dominated and so now Pioneers are the largest group.

Cook points out that:

"The question is which politician can harness the Pioneer, the Prospector and the Settler in a convincing way." The trick for politicians is to match up the different interests of the three groups like on a fruit machine. It is a complicated manoeuvre but it's what Miliband has managed to do on phone hacking.
… After the Milly Dowler hacking revelations, a campaign suitable for Pioneers suddenly became appealing to Settlers too. Prospectors joined in as it became clear to them at some point that Miliband was "winning".

However:

Miliband's natural base is Pioneers. But the Lib Dems and Greens appeal to this group too.

and the Tories also know which buttons to press:

Cook reflects that: "When Gove talks about school discipline, he is talking to Settlers. When Cameron talks about increasing aid to 0.7%, he is talking to Pioneers. And when George Osborne is talking about the deficit and tax, he is talking to Prospectors."

I looked for more about Cook’s research on the IPPR website, but it seems to be a work in hand and should be reporting later in the year. It certainly seems to be a different approach from the legendary ‘C2 housewives over 30’. To test out his proposal, I thought it might be informative to look at some recent polling results on major issues.

The key findings from an Angus Reid poll about Europe in July were:

57% say EU membership has been negative for the UK; 32% believe it has been positive (11% not sure)
49% would vote to leave the EU in a referendum; 25% would vote to stay in (27% not sure or wouldn’t vote)
81% would vote against the UK adopting the euro; only 8% endorse this idea (11% not sure or wouldn’t vote) 

This seems to suggest that even the ‘global’ Pioneers are divided over Europe.

YouGov@Cambridge polled in June about attitudes to International Aid for PoliticsHome and found that 41% were very or somewhat favourable towards it, 38% very or somewhat unfavourable, 17% neither.  This would give a good alignment of pro-aid and Pioneers only if none of the latter were neutral on the subject.

In August, Survation surveyed attitudes to crime and punishment including the death penalty for the Mail on Sunday. Its re-introduction for certain crimes was supported by 53%, opposed by 34% and 13% didn’t know.

The measure seems to appeal beyond the Settlers.



The factor missing from the IPPR typology (at least as described in the Guardian) is that of age, though it is implicit in the suggestion that Settlers have been in decline since 1945 and Pioneers are on the rise. The three polling examples indicate how important it can be. YouGov@Cambridge conclude that ‘Older voters are far more likely to be opposed to the principle of international aid than young people’ as can be seen in their chart below:

The Angus Reid poll also shows an increasingly negative view of Europe in older age groups, and the Survation poll showed an increasingly tough attitude about the death penalty for groups over 40:

The Survation poll also showed that on certain issues, gender has a significant effect on attitude:

The educational experiences of different age groups reflect the continuing expansion of opportunity over recent decades. Among the over 55s, about half finished full-time education before the age of 16, whereas about a third of the under 35s had finished under 18. (Source: Populus poll June 2011)

A much higher proportion of the full-time education has been at a university (in name) in recent years (data from an earlier post):

Whether older people’s attitudes reflect biologically-driven changes in psychological outlook due to ageing, or past levels of formal education is something that will become clearer over the next few decades. Perhaps by the time people reach 60 it is the experience gained on courses in the 'University of Life’ which counts.  However, formal educational seems to be inversely related to propensity to vote, for example in terms of turnout at the 2010 General Election, cited by MORI. The gender difference seems to be slight except for females under 25 who seem to find politics even less interesting than their male contemporaries. 

Britain, thankfully, has become an increasingly less class-conscious society, in which the majority of people now regard themselves as ‘middle class’, however squeezed they may be feeling. It therefore seems worthwhile to seek out categorisations other than the old favourites of A, B, C1 etc. It will be interesting to see whether Graeme Cook develops his Pioneer, Prospector, Settler model to accommodate those two eternal aspects of the human condition - age and gender, particularly when the former seems to be a major factor in variations in shaping opinions and in propensity to vote across the electorate.

ADDENDUM 22 SEPTEMBER

Grame Cook has now published Still partying like it's 1995 on the IPPR website which fills out his views on the 'political sociology' of modern Britain in some depth.  He seems to have moved away from the three types above, and looks at age as a factor in determining political opinions, if not gender.

Paul Krugman on Graduate Jobs

In January I posted about UK university participation rates, contrasting the much larger numbers of young people going to universities now with the situation in the 1960s. I suggested that acquiring a university degree in 2010 was roughly comparable to passing the 11+ (and entering grammar school) then. On that basis, job prospects for many graduates today might be similar to those for people who used to leave grammar school without taking A levels.

It now looks as though this might have been an optimistic assessment. In particular, Paul Krugman, the Nobel laureate economist, has made some sobering points in the New York Times recently. On 5 March in his NYT blog, The Conscience of a Liberal, Krugman revisited an article he had written in 1996, which was intended to be a look-back from 2096:

I decided to write the piece around a conceit: that information technology would end up reducing, not increasing, the demand for highly educated workers, because a lot of what highly educated workers do could actually be replaced by sophisticated information processing — indeed, replaced more easily than a lot of manual labor. ... So here’s the question: is it starting to happen? Today’s [NYT] has an interesting and, if you think about it, fairly scary report about how software is replacing the teams of lawyers who used to do document research.

Developing the post's theme of The Falling Demand for Brains, he then introduced some evidence that higher education had been oversold: the ratio of earnings for full-time working men with college degrees versus those with high school:

Krugman concluded:

In my mind this raises several questions. One is whether emphasizing education — even aside from the fact that the big rise in inequality has taken place among the highly educated — is, in effect, fighting the last war. Another is how we have a decent society if and when even highly educated workers can’t command a middle-class income.

On 6 March in an op-ed article, Degrees and Dollars, Krugman pointed out that, as well as legal researchers, electronics designers were likely to be replaced by software, and, more generally, high-skill jobs performed by the highly-educated were vulnerable to “offshoring”, further hollowing out the US jobs market.

… the notion that putting more kids through college can restore the middle-class society we used to have is wishful thinking. It’s no longer true that having a college degree guarantees that you’ll get a good job, and it’s becoming less true with each passing decade.
So if we want a society of broadly shared prosperity, education isn’t the answer — we’ll have to go about building that society directly. We need to restore the bargaining power that labor has lost over the last 30 years, so that ordinary workers as well as superstars have the power to bargain for good wages. We need to guarantee the essentials, above all health care, to every citizen.
What we can’t do is get where we need to go just by giving workers college degrees, which may be no more than tickets to jobs that don’t exist or don’t pay middle-class wages.

Krugman’s views are certainly left-wing (‘liberal’) by US standards, and how the “society of broadly shared prosperity” could be achieved is far from clear. However, his reservations about the value of university degrees certainly seem realistic. Perhaps the current UK preoccupation with issues of fair access and tuition fees is missing the point (“fighting the last war”) that the majority of degree holders (who by definition cannot attend the most prestigious institutions) will never get above-average jobs. There then has to be some doubt as to whether the government will ever recover the money it will be borrowing to lend to students for fees.

University League Tables and Participation

The data in the Table below has been updated in a later post.

In a previous post ( University Entrance - Today's 11+? ) I pointed out that the current participation rate in higher education in the UK was at a similar level to 11+ success and grammar school attendance in the 1960s.  At that time, however, university was for an elite minority – less than 10% of the under 21 age group. Although this is no longer the case, there is a perception of there being an institutional elite, and arguably, for those choosing which universities to apply to and for recruiters of graduates, the perception can be more important than the reality. This post looks at some possible shapers of these perceptions ('league tables' and elite groupings), and then revisits the statistics of participation.

There are currently four league tables of UK universities published by the Independent, Guardian, Sunday Times and Times newspapers. Taking the top 30 in each case, they consist of 41 different institutions. However, 22 of the 41 feature in all four tables. Also, 11 of the 41 feature in only one, so an overall top 30 can be identified as those institutions appearing in more than one league table, and their rankings can be combined as below. There are three other groupings of highly-rated institutions which can be put alongside the league tables. The Russell Group of 20 major research universities is regarded as being an elite. Also, the Sutton Trust, which looks at issues of social mobility and access to higher education, has identified for its purposes a group of 13 elite universities and a larger group of 30 which it regards as highly selective. The table below indicates which of the 'Top 30' universities fall into these three groups (RG, ST13 and STHS respectively).

A graph in the previous post showed how university participation has increased since the 1960s. Using UCAS statistics for the undergraduate numbers at each university, the proportion of the under 21’s which various groupings of universities within the 'Top 30' are recruiting can be calculated, and the levels are indicated on the new graph below.  The 4.2% for the 'Top 12' cater for the mid-60s level of participation

Of course, there are obvious limitations in drawing up a league table of universities – there are going to be excellent courses and very able students in the many unlisted institutions. Individual circumstances can be overriding as well – if your family owns a chain of golf courses, you might well want to go for the best golf course management degree wherever it may. However, if your aspiration is to take a humanities degree – one of the many flavours of history, say – but then move into management, the perception a future employer may have of your university is a factor which can’t be ignored. Being at one of the universities in the table above, particularly in the top half, is unlikely to stand in your way; although it won’t be the only thing they will be looking for.

Notes on the Table and Chart

As last time, this is a blog post not a PhD thesis, so I have used a broad brush with the data.

From 1950 to 1998 the graph shows the Age Participation Index (API) which was defined as the number of UK-domiciled young (aged less than 21) initial entrants to full-time and sandwich undergraduate courses of higher education, expressed as a proportion of the averaged 18 to 19 year old GB population. After 1999 the data is for the Higher Education Initial Participation Rate HEIPR20 (17-20 year olds English domiciled and in English Welsh and Scottish institutions).

Positions in the individual league tables were added (Oxford, 1st in all four, scoring 4 etc). A university unplaced in a particular league table was assumed to be 31st equal if it appeared in the other three tables, 32nd equal if it appeared in only one other table. UCAS provides numbers for undergraduates for each university, (all courses are assumed here to be of three years), and percentages for mature and international students. Hence the places available to the HEIPR20 contingent, the recent overall size and participation rate for this being provided by the BIS Department. The decimal place in the statistics for the groupings (eg Russell Group 9.2%) should probably be ignored.

University Entrance – Today’s 11+?

Describing the educational experience of my age group, I would point to the two main hurdles we had to jump: first the 11+ exam which controlled access to grammar school education, and then, for a minority within the grammar schools, A-level based university entrance. Of course, there are exceptions: I’m ignoring independent schools and the few who might have gone to university from secondary modern schools or the handful of technical schools, but I think it sums secondary education up for the majority in the 1950s and 60s.

At first sight, the current scene of secondary level comprehensives, academies etc and government aspirations of 50% going to university might seem a different world, but I thought it might be interesting, particularly given the current controversy over university fees, to bring together what historical data I could find on grammar school and university participation. Hence the chart below, but see the cautionary notes.

The interesting feature is that from the early 1950s to the early 1970s, when the “Tripartite System” of secondary education was in full swing, about 30% of those at school were being taught in grammar schools (G+ including equivalents, see below). At that time, a third at most of that group went on to university. Now we seem to be at about the 35% level for university participation (U, as a proportion of those aged about 18). A tentative conclusion might be that possession of a university degree in 2010 is roughly comparable in terms of an academic experience to having been to a grammar school in the 1960s. The economic and other benefits of going to university to the individual and to society in general are way beyond the scope of this posting, as are issues of social stratification and gender among the entrants and among different universities. I will make one observation, though.

Prospect magazine’s In fact column in November 2010 (Issue 176) stated, “One in three British call centre workers is a graduate; a rise from one in four in 2009”. These figures came from the Daily Mail on 22 September 2010, which had reported a survey by Hays Contact Centres in conjunction with the Top 50 Call Centres for Customer Service initiative (sic). “35 per cent of their agents are now educated to degree level - up from 25 per cent last year.” I recall that some pupils left grammar schools after ‘O’ level (the GCSE predecessor), and typically went into white-collar work at a fairly low-level, say clerk in a bank, perhaps the call centre agent equivalent of the time. Of course, they had no loans to pay off and also had reasonable career prospects in the absence of any large-scale graduate entry schemes. The Mail pointed out that in 2010:

... many graduates intend to develop a long-term career in the industry. ... Call centre starting salaries are usually £12,000 to £18,000. Some graduates can expect to move up to senior marketing or sales roles ...

One can only hope so.  Many of the young graduates taking these jobs apparently see them as stop-gaps.

Some academics regard the transition from “elite” to “mass” university education as having taken place once the participation level went over 15%. But to look at it another way, mass possession of degrees having been achieved, it is painfully apparent that not all degrees and universities are equal. There is still an elite, particularly of institutions, and its identification may be the subject of a future posting.

Notes on the Chart

This is a blog post not a PhD thesis, so I have used a broad brush with the data. However, I’ve explained the sources and what I’ve done, and if anyone wants to improve it, please do.

G+

This is the percentage of maintained secondary school pupils taught in grammar schools (taken from a House of Commons Library Note, Grammar school statistics, SN/SG/1398, March 2009) which I have enhanced by 3% to allow for the direct grant grammar schools and by 3.5% to allow for a purely nominal half of the attendance at independent (aka private or “public”) schools being of 11+ pass standard. I cannot establish whether children at private schools were obliged to sit the 11+ examination. G+ is a percentage of pupils being taught rather than of the age group. The pass level for the 11+ varied between local education authorities (LEAs) and seems to have been about 25%. For comparison with U, the level of grammar school and equivalent participation was probably about 30% in the Tripartite period (see below).

U

From 1950 to 1998 this is the Age Participation Index (API) which was defined as the number of UK-domiciled young (aged less than 21) initial entrants to full-time and sandwich undergraduate courses of higher education, expressed as a proportion of the averaged 18 to 19 year old GB population. After 1999 the data is for the Higher Education Initial Participation Rate HEIPR20 (17-20 year olds English domiciled and in English Welsh and Scottish institutions, here and similar later). The government’s target is for HEIPR to be 50% for the age range 17 to 30. This extension currently adds another 10-11% to the HEIPR20 figure.

I realise comparing G+ with U is a little like apples with pears, but I hope not as bad as apples with bananas, and that it serves to make the point.

The Tripartite System

This was the theoretical arrangement of state funded secondary education between 1944 and the 1970s in England and Wales, and from 1947 to 2009 in Northern Ireland. State funded secondary education was to be arranged after the 1944 education act into a structure containing three types of school: grammar, secondary technical and secondary modern. Pupils were allocated to their respective types of school according to their performance in the 11+ examination which was administered by the LEA. In practice the system was “bipartite” as there were very few technical schools. It was also disliked by the majority of voters whose children were, by definition, excluded from grammar schools.

In July 1958 the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell (educated at Winchester College, a prestigious public (ie UK private) school) formally abandoned the Tripartite System, calling for "grammar-school education for all". This policy was taken forward by Gaitskell's protégé, Anthony Crosland (educated at Highgate, also a public school), who advocated comprehensive schools as less divisive, and vigorously pursued the goal of their introduction, and the consequent elimination of grammar schools,  on becoming Education Secretary in 1965.