Select Committee on Education and Employment Minutes of Evidence



Examination of witness (Questions 660 - 679)

TUESDAY 4 JULY 2000

MR TONY HIGGINS

  660. The issue really is applications, is it not? From your comment about the council estate, having no applications from that area, obviously applications is an important issue?
  (Mr Higgins) Yes.

Chairman

  661. So any university in this country could get a very sophisticated analysis from you of where they are succeeding in getting applications from, where they are not succeeding, by region, by sub-region. What you can offer to the university that is interested where they are not getting students applying is very sophisticated down to post code?
  (Mr Higgins) Yes. Down to post code and then through post code down to lifestyle. They are broken down by one of the software programmes that breaks down post codes by lifestyle derived from census and other information.

  662. Could you give us a bit more detail as to what do you mean by lifestyle?
  (Mr Higgins) It is very complicated. There are basically 12 lifestyles broken down in our particular mosaic software and that will range from big rambling houses full of managers and people on top incomes down to council houses, down to mid-urban semis, down to retired old folk or whatever it may well be. The data is derived basically from the census with one or two other bits and pieces of information added to it. It is interesting that we have tended to use that, we thought we could, as a proxy for social class. We collect also social class of every applicant and we find that we can map this lifestyle as a proxy of social class with social class.

  663. There is an enormous amount of information out there.
  (Mr Higgins) It is a huge amount of information.

  664. How long have you had this information?
  (Mr Higgins) We have had the programmes to be able to do that for about a year.

  665. Only about a year?
  (Mr Higgins) Yes. We have been putting in data from when UCAS was created out of the merger of PCAS and UCCA since 1994. We will be publishing information, for example, later this month on distance travelled between home and places of higher education which is reducing as the years go by as more and more people tend to study nearer home.

Charlotte Atkins

  666. It is not massively reducing, is it? The evidence we took earlier on suggested it was only a small reduction.
  (Mr Higgins) It is reducing. It depends on the region as to whether it is larger rather than smaller. What we have been doing over the last 12 months is testing these data and how the universities might use them. They will know, for example, certainly where their students that they accept have come from because they have got all that data. They will know where they have applied from but they will not know where they have not applied from. That is a service now that we can offer them. It will act as a marketing service. They can see if they are not getting into inner city Liverpool or they are getting very few from the rural poor areas of North Yorkshire or whatever it may well be.

Dr Harris

  667. I have seen that. I have been to Cheltenham, as has Phil Willis, to look at that and it is very powerful but it is not publicly available, only universities can have it and they can share it with who they wish but we cannot get a copy for our constituencies with named students.
  (Mr Higgins) I want to take that back, Evan. I have got a feeling that it could be made available more publicly. If the Committee wants to come to the Cheltenham to see it in action, you are more than welcome.

Chairman

  668. Some of us would be delighted to accept that invitation. Can I just nail you on this, it has been available for a year. What was available in terms of detail before that?
  (Mr Higgins) There was nothing. We are working with a commercial organisation which has developed the software and now we have been feeding in the data that we have to see what would emerge. We now have the first results of what has emerged. It may well be that for the company that produces the software, which as I say gets things derived from the census, it gets derived from those people who appear as directors at Companies House and other information, the success of getting into university or college might then become another factor in their software.

Mr St Aubyn

  669. May I apologise for arriving late at this meeting. Having also been to Cheltenham last year I would like to vouch for the effectiveness of your new system. As I understand it the idea is eventually students will be able to tap in on-line and pick this information up so if they are looking at a particular course at a particular university they will be able to find out where other people on that course have come from and various other information, is that correct?
  (Mr Higgins) I hope we can manage that.

  670. That is the long-term aim. Are you able to identify from this additional information gathering what are the key factors that persuade particularly those from disadvantaged groups, who we want to encourage more to apply, that make them apply? A lot of debate in recent weeks has been about academic excellence but many people are going to university today to learn to earn. Perhaps the focus today should be more on their employability and the increased salary they will get and a more commercial pitch might attract more of them into the system to realise the benefits and the wider academic benefits, the cultural benefits, will flow naturally alongside that? What do you say to that?
  (Mr Higgins) We are just beginning to work with three universities and a college of higher education who are working to attract those from less advantaged backgrounds to them. They are chosen to represent the country, different types of institutions and they are being reasonably successful. We would like to see exactly how they are doing it. Could they learn from each other, and then can all the rest of the institutions learn from it and perhaps implement some policies? I think the real issue, and I hope this might emerge from this research, is we have to get to families from the less privileged backgrounds and find why do they not apply. Can we get to them? Can we get to young people at the ages of 12, 13 and 14, perhaps when they are selecting GCSEs, to suggest that they should select them with a view to going on to higher education? This is a complete guess on my part because I am not a sociological researcher. Is there a whole raft of view that "we do not want to go into debt" and "we have to go into debt to become students", even though there may be plenty of proof that having graduated they would get decent, well paid jobs and they would begin to provide for their families and develop a tradition of going on to higher education? I just do not know.

Mr Marsden

  671. On that point, because we had some very interesting evidence last week from the Four Counties Group at Anglia Polytechnic University where some of their research, and I am being hesitant, suggested that young people from particular backgrounds were not going into higher education partly because of fear of debt but partly also because they thought that job opportunities they could get going straight from A level or whatever gave them a better situation. In terms of what you do in terms of the data that you collect, is it possible at the moment to make any judgment as to whether, in fact, one of the crucial issues is the subjects that people do both at A levels and subjects which they apply to do at university because there seems to be, and we have had some anecdotal evidence before this Committee, some belief around that obviously, if you like, the less job related courses at university are going to appeal less to people from those lower socio-economic groups?
  (Mr Higgins) I would need advance notice of that question. I think that is a good one to take back and we will see if we can do some work on it. There has been a tendency in recent years for there to be greater pressure on subjects which are vocationally oriented. There is no doubt about that. Whether that actually is among those from one socio-economic group or another, I do not know. We must do some work on that. That can be done.

  672. I do not want to go back to labour your daughter's experience too much but one of things you said was she decided she did not want to go down the Oxbridge route because she was keen on a particular course which she thought suited her abilities, in that case a joint course. Do you think the system of admissions as it currently works puts too much emphasis on applying to a university regardless of subject area and does not put enough emphasis on saying to students "these are the universities that you should apply for if you are particularly interested in French or geography or history" or whatever?
  (Mr Higgins) Our very strong advice to potential students is "you should apply to do something that you enjoy". Clearly if you want to be a doctor you are going to have to study medicine. If you want to be a lawyer you do not necessarily have to study law at first instance, you can pick up law at the end of a degree on whatever. We always say "you should study what you enjoy because you are likely to succeed in what you enjoy and you should do it where you are likely to enjoy it". This might sound extremely facile but if you have got a choice of perhaps ten or a dozen universities which are going to teach French and you want to do this particular kind of French and you are desperately interested in football then you will want to go to where there is a decent football team to go and watch.

  673. If I can just keep you on that point. That is a message I would agree with, to do what you are enthusiastic about and good at, but is that message being blunted by too much emphasis on saying "there are these holy grail elite universities out there and if you do not apply to them, you are not going to get anywhere"?
  (Mr Higgins) Not for the majority of the population I would not have thought. I would have thought that message would have been perfectly clear in the state sector schools, but I would think in the independent sector, where effectively they are being paid by results, the message demanded by the parents is "I want my son or daughter to go to what I consider to be a top university".

  674. So there is that pressure there?
  (Mr Higgins) There will be that pressure in certain areas, I am absolutely certain.

Chairman

  675. To be fair, in terms of socio-economic background, I do not think we can bandy the notion around that it is people from lower socio-economic backgrounds who are only interested in the sort of income they might get from getting qualifications. Speaking to the Master of an Oxford College in the last two months, he deplored the fact that the bulk of the students they now teach are interested in finance and want to go into the City into corporate law, very few want to go into public service of any kind, let alone teaching. We can be naive in this, can we not? Perhaps it comes from 18 years of Government promoting certain sorts of values but there is no doubt people in many of our elite universities do not want to go into public service these days, they are following the money, are they not?
  (Mr Higgins) I do not know.

  676. You do not know. I thought from UCAS you might have an opinion on that.
  (Mr Higgins) I have opinions but I do not know.

Mr St Aubyn

  677. Could I follow that up. It does seem to me that if we are going to appeal to this group we have to speak in terms that are relevant and if earnings are relevant we ought to speak in terms of earnings. I wonder if you have done any work on the relative value in earnings of a degree from one university as opposed to another? Obviously Dearing did some work over the sector as a whole and pointed out the benefit of the degree but, of course, some of that work was in terms of what you might term a smaller catchment group, he looked at people in their 30s and 40s amongst whom there are fewer numbers of graduates anyway, so there was some doubt as to whether that differential in pay would still hold true with the next cohort which is part of a wider group anyway. Is this an area where UCAS has done some work or feels it could usefully do some work?
  (Mr Higgins) We have done no work as yet. I think there are those who are probably better qualified than us to do it. I would like to suggest that what might help in this area, and might help in other areas as well, is that at some stage we could introduce a single student identifier, a single student number, which would be based on the National Insurance number. If you were to do that one of the benefits on graduation is you would be able to track through the graduates from various backgrounds, from various subjects, see what their first destination of employment was, see where they were ten years later or 15 years later or whatever it may well be. There are other benefits of a single student identifier for administrative purposes in relation to passing on examination results and all kinds of things like this. An identifier based on the National Insurance number so you could track people through the tax system or whatever, again provided you have the appropriate data protection, would provide an enormous pool of data and you could begin to answer those questions.

Mr Marsden

  678. When would you give them that number? At the moment obviously people acquire National Insurance numbers when they start doing something with regular employment.
  (Mr Higgins) I am no expert but I think they are actually allocated a National Insurance number at birth and it is then not used until you take your first job. So you could use it as your number at school, your application number through UCAS.

  679. There is no statistical bar to that?
  (Mr Higgins) No, that is right.


 
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