Bonus episode: What we know about the Class of 2024
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What is the purpose of the 2024 Applicant Index and why was this interview recorded?
With thousands of new students starting their courses, we are of course in the busiest time of year for student accommodation and just for higher education in general. I do hope you're holding up okay and I want you to know you're doing a really great job. I also wanted to share with you the full version of the interview with Happy Director Nick Hillman that we recorded back in July. We covered just such a lot of ground in a short time. Such as the level of hesitance among applicants and what this is going to mean for this year's freshers. how your social and economic background still affects your time at university, the challenges for higher education in a time of constrained resources, and what the new government might do.
Now, bear in mind this was recorded two weeks after the election, so let's see how Nick's predictions hold up. The need to expand higher education over the coming years, what that might mean. And the goals of a relentless optimist, which, to be honest, describes both of us. And finally, how student accommodation can create lifelong memories, which we all know to be true. I do hope you enjoy it. So I am here with Nick Hillman, Director of HEPI, the Higher Education Policy Institute. And Nick, it's really great to talk with you about the survey because we've been working together for the last seven years, I think it is, on understanding the applicant experience. Why is there something that you think is important?
Uh look, I love this survey and I love it partly not because of my current job, but because of my first job after university. And my first job after university. Was being a secondary school teacher. And I did run a pre-university course. This is going back to the mid-1990s. And the level of information available and the understanding of what young people were expecting about higher education at the time was minimal to non-existent. And over the years, of course, we've become really good at grilling and polling students, you know, official surveys like the National Students. survey and things like the Happy Advance HE student academic experience survey. And we got really good at polling, at least undergraduates, but we've been much less good at grilling the people on their way to university.
And the reason it's so important, in my opinion, is if you look, for example, at our other really big survey, the Student Academic Experience Survey that we do with Advance HE, it shows a big disconnect between what people think higher education is going to be like and what it's really like. What the applicant survey allows us to do is find out what people currently in sick forms in old money who have submitted a UCAS form expect higher education to be like. And I think that's really useful to them themselves, but also to their teachers, their parents, careers advisors, and to universities.
What do you think the value is of having this kind of data for universities, higher education providers?
Well, I think it's huge because of course admissions is a really big function of universities. And in a way, a bigger function in our country than other countries, 'cause in many other countries you typically go to your local university. And you often stay living at home. So it's a much less big transition point in your lives. Whereas here, uh, we have this very hierarchical system. Not every course is available in every part of the country. We have very selective universities and less selective universities. And so getting that match between the person and the course and the institution right is really, really important. But as I say, we you know, we haven't known as much about applicants as we might.
have done. And so I think it's really valuable to universities. And I think it also allows universities to think. about the incoming cohort. So for example, some of the qualitative comments in this year's survey about COVID and how young people feel that affected their education is useful intelligence for the universities that are going to be educating these people from next year to have because not every cohort was affected by COVID in the same way.
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Chapters
3 chaptersSpeakers
2 identifiedMore from Unite Students Accommodation Matters
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