Dreams
Making good choices in a changing world Lucy Stonehill describes technology that will help students and staff What does it mean to be ready to leave school? University advisers and guidance counsellors can no longer just make sure students have a plan for the next three or four years; they must help students to prepare themselves for the next ten years. To do this, schools need to adopt a data-driven, flexible approach to higher education and careers. Most importantly, they need to be armed with accurate, real-time information in order to help their students make the types of decisions today that will position them for bright tomorrows. Half a century ago, a university education was seen as an elite privilege, reserved for the wealthy, ambitious and upwardly mobile. In 1970, there were fewer than 30 million people enrolled in higher education in 1970. Since then, the size of the world’s student body has grown significantly, so that it’s estimated that the number of students in higher education worldwide will have risen to 262 million by 2025. The rapid growth in the number of students in higher education is important, but it’s also part of a bigger story. The explosion of student demand for higher education means that there is a great deal more competition than before on all sides of the school-university-student ecosystem. What’s more, students now have career options that are remarkably far from the potential pathways that they might have followed twenty or even ten years ago. Every day, school counsellors and careers advisers are faced with an immensely complex post-secondary landscape, which can be made less daunting with the help of data-driven, management-streamlining technology. Higher education becoming broader is certainly a good thing, leading to better access to tertiary learning and professional opportunities for a larger percentage of the population. However, the consequences of that growth are under-examined. The size of the industry means that universities are run much more like businesses than they were in the past. Budget cuts have been severe – in the UK, the contribution to each student’s funding
from the Higher Education Funding Council for England has dropped by over 86% – which has led to an increase in private funding and corporate involvement to fill the financial gap. This approach has many positive effects: students have more of a say in their university’s principles and management; higher behavioural standards are introduced; and results are more public. But it also means that competition is more of a factor in HE now. There are more students, which means more competition for the most attractive courses and universities, whilst the universities themselves have to compete for the top students. In order to give their students the best shot at getting into their top choices, schools need to help them to access more information about their potential destinations. The smart university matching offered by BridgeU looks at a student’s academic and personal profile and provides a holistic analysis of the courses and universities that might best suit the student; and the strategy advisor helps students and their teachers to prepare detailed, compelling application materials. One example of how universities make sixth form guidance more complicated is offer transparency. Universities publish minimum grade requirements for a course that may be lower or higher than the grades actually requested of a student. What’s more, some universities will be very flexible if a student misses their offer grades. This data is often not public, or is at least very hard to find, but BridgeU’s smart algorithm takes it into account when analysing a student’s chance of acceptance onto a course or at a university. Artificially high minimum requirements help busy admissions officers feel reassured that they’ll only get the best applicants, despite it being widely accepted that grades are just one part of a student’s holistic quality and aptitude for a course. Asking students to accept a university’s minimum requirements without any sort of transparency as to how they relate to
The rapid growth in the number of students in higher education is important, but it’s also part of a bigger story. The explosion of student demand for higher education means that there is a great deal more competition than before on all sides of the school-university-student ecosystem.
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Autumn 2017
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