Andrew Fisher

Interesting trends in latest UCAS data

by Andrew Fisher February 1, 2013

UCAS have now published their data for applications to the 15 January deadline. By this stage, almost all school-leavers who are going to apply have applied, and a significant proportion of the overseas and older applicants have also applied. This provides us with a reasonably firm basis for taking stock of this years’ recruitment position.

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UCAS Data: 2013 Cycle

by Andrew Fisher January 8, 2013

UCAS have now published their mid-December data on the 2013 cycle, and the press coverage has been mainly downbeat, perhaps because UCAS has not tried the faintly ludicrous ‘late surge’ spin that they put on the equivalent data last year. But there are several reasons why we need to be cautious about drawing hasty conclusions from the data released so far.

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Clearing 2012: How wrong was I, and why?

by Andrew Fisher October 1, 2012

Back in July, I wrote a post confidently predicting that this year’s Clearing would be less interesting than was widely expected, Somebody, somewhere will have a bad experience in Clearing because somebody, somewhere always does, but there is no reason to expect a pattern or trend. Those who do badly this year may do well next time. Life staggers on much as before. In this post, I look back at Clearing and ask who won, who lost and why? And why I got it wrong in July. Sort of.

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Gearing up for Clearing

by Andrew Fisher July 30, 2012

We are now in the final stages of preparing for Clearing. This post is about a macro-level question: will we all get enough students to meet our budgets whilst staying below our student number control limits? The answer of course is no: but not in a very interesting way.

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The College of Law: misunderstandings continue

by Andrew Fisher April 19, 2012

The College of Law put out a press release on 17 April to announce the expected conclusion of the sale of their legal education business to the private equity firm Montagu. The sale of a private HE provider with degree awarding powers isn’t unprecedented, but it is unusual enough to have made the news. Unfortunately, the news reports have got some significant aspects of the story wrong because they don’t understand how degree awarding powers are regulated, and the College’s press materials on the issue were unhelpfully worded.

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Strategies for student number control

by Andrew Fisher March 19, 2012

University’s have been faced with a very difficult choice; to choose the high-fee or low-fee route without any clear knowledge of the consequences and much uncertainty about the final regulatory framework. If you look at the relatively small group of HE institutions that have won places in the core/margin allocation, it is clear that most (although not all) of them are relatively unpretentious new universities. On the other hand there are plenty of similar institutions which have set higher fees and did not win any margin numbers. This is an attempt to model the different student number control strategies that are in play and look at the decisions that are currently being in taken because it has never been more important to have a viable strategy for the future.

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