Blog written as promised!

Mario

Happy ‘mystery shopping’.

I can’t believe how much ‘under-age’ texting is going on (to use the second link’s terminology).

So, our universities should be texting their prospective applicants…

Harriet

I’ve come across a couple of links on my travels that may be relevant here – Unfortunately they are US based, but interesting none-the-less:

http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Student-Smartphone-Use/24876/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

“College Student smart phone use doubles, text messaging more popular than IM”

http://socialnomics.net/2010/07/12/under-twelve-age-group-sends-over-1000-texts-per-month/

“Under 12′s send over 1,000 text messages per month”

Hope that helps!

All the best
Dave C

“If we are expecting, as we have already done, the individual to pay more for their learning, and we are potentially expecting them to pay more in the future then it is time that we accepted that they are consumers and that they are entitled to high quality information and the sorts of intelligence that will enable them to make informed choices.”

Graduates now face tough competition in the job market and substantial debt on the one hand while prospective undergraduates find very little help in judging value for money (in terms of quality of experience, education, and prospects) on the other. I would (tentatively!) submit that very little information exists to help students currently – the student satisfaction survey, like most market research benchmarking tools works more for the institutions than the consumers they serve.

Until this is addressed, there exists a powerful disincentive for those less well off to burden themselves with debt that will take years to re-pay, especially with rapidly rising graduate unemployment.

What consumers value most in making purchasing decisions is feedback from their peers, yet this kind of information is very difficult to come by. There is little qualitative information out there; hopefully this will be considered as part of the JISC-funded project mentioned [2] at the round-table.

For more on our take on providing students with high quality information, we wrote a brief blog post just over a month ago: Helping Students Make Informed Choices[3].

^CK

[1] http://hereview.independent.gov.uk/hereview/2010/06/videos-of-leicester-public-hearing
[2] http://www.gold.ac.uk/staff/feature2/title,21056,en.php
[3] http://blog.evansfinch.co.uk/2010/06/18/helping-students-make-informed-choices/

How does a prospective student know what to do with the information if they haven’t been introduced to higher education yet? As with a car, you’d recognise some of the parts, but they would still mean nothing in isolation.

I think the guidance should go far enough to allow people an informed choice as to whether they even feel university is the best route for them to take. I feel this is necessary at a time when so many believe HE is the only possible choice to enhance career prospects. HE certainly can open doors and provide massive benefits, but it’s not the only way forward and it doesn’t automatically suit everyone.

Let’s make that information as easy to understand as possible, let’s give everyone as much chance to make the right choice, and let’s #loveHE to the max!

So what about in the UK?