UCAS goes PC
I see UCAS will be asking for details of parents jobs and educations levels on their next applications forms.
I can't really see what relevance this information could possibly have to a University when it was considering an applicant, apart from to fulfil some sort of "quota" to allow them to display how PC they are in taking students from differing backgrounds.
Apparently Bill Rammell, the Higher Education minister, said the Government supported the plans.
"We believe that admissions officers should have as much information as possible to help them to assess who has the potential to succeed," he said.The new information on candidates' backgrounds would ensure all applications were "genuinely dealt with on their merits", he told the House of Commons.How this information could help with the above I have no idea. I would tend to more agree with the following from Martin Stephen, the High Master of St Paul's, the independent boys' day school in London, whowsaid:
"This is taking university entry out of academic achievement and straight into social engineering."
Applicants must say if parents are graduates
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"How this information could help with the above I have no idea"
Ok, here's the press release explaining the change.
http://www.ucas.ac.uk/new/press/news150307.html
As you can see, the new information has been requested by HESA. HESA, like UCAS, are independent and are not Government organisations. Just in case you thought it was a Government - or even a university - idea.
The issue is this: the widening participation agenda seems to be failing. There is research strongly suggesting this, but we only have an incomplete dataset from which to operate so the conclusions can only be tentative.
We need the data, and the best place to ask for it is at the admissions stage (so we can check if the admissions process is not disproportionately favouring one set of applicants over another).
UCAS have decided to then give this information to admissions tutors as they've been having an internal debate about whether it's ethical to collect admissions data on applicants and then withold it from tutors. Admissions tutors have also said repeatedly that they appreciate not having information kept from them, but that they don't intend to use this over rather more useful data, like, say, grades.
Tutors have long received more than enough data to discriminate if they so wished, anyway - postcode is a reasonable proxy for social class, for example.
If you check the press release (really - read it - in fact, never read a news story without checking the primary source first. It's good practise), you'll notice UCAS have actually asked anyone who thinks this initiative is a bad idea to let them know and they'll change it. Ooooh, scary social engineering, eh?
The Times picked up on this story and roared into the distance, firmly grasping the wrong end of the stick. The other newspapers followed them like sheep. The result is that an instrument which might tell us that a key plank of Government education policy has failed will be crippled.
And a lot of people have been shown up as not thinking before they come to conclusions. All very depressing.
Sorry for the rant. As a declaration of interest, I'm one of the researchers who asked for the data. That's also why I'm anonymous.
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