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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