Calls for entry ‘flexibility’ for A-level students will help the already best positioned universities     Permalink

The Financial Times:

The UK government has urged universities to be “as flexible as possible” in admissions this year, as it acknowledged that the grades to be awarded, with exams having been cancelled because of coronavirus, may not be fair for all students.

It is of course right that any inequitable scaling of grades needs to be remedied, both immediately with universities displaying flexibility and in due course by reconsideration of those algorithms. Irrespective of the former, the latter is important because too many employers still ask for A-level results for graduates, and because many A-level graduates do not, and do not want to, go to university.

However, encouraging universities to be flexible is a gift to those already in a strong position. They can justify filling their targets, plus 5%, by responding to this call for flexibility. They can accept students they would otherwise have declined and use their status to take additional students in adjustment, brushing aside questions about offer conditions, advertised tariffs, etc., with reference to the scaling discussion.

The institutions used to collecting students who miss their first preference will struggle even more than usual.

With the expected shortfall in overseas and taught postgraduate students, this is a good year for students wanting to gain a place at the most selective institutions, despite the record number of applications, with almost 7000 more undergraduate students likely to be placed than last year.

Compulsory flu vaccinations for students, faculty and staff at University of California system     Permalink

Students, faculty and staff in the University of California system will be required to get a flu vaccination before Nov. 1, part of a system-wide executive order signed on Friday.

In consultation with the UC Health leadership, UC officials say the mandate is an “important proactive measure to help protect members of the UC community and the public at large.”

The newly signed order is also to help relieve the health care system during the upcoming fall and winter flu season amid the novel coronavirus pandemic.

A sensible idea. UK universities should replicate the policy, and should offer free seasonal flu vaccinations to all staff and students.

Covid-19 risk mitigation plans on campus - Fantasy documents     Permalink

Gillian Tett, writing in the Financial Times:

As the debate over how to reopen continues, I would urge students, parents and university administrators to look at a fascinating piece by the anthropologist Hugh Gusterson posted on Sapiens, a platform for social science.

Both Tett’s article and Gusterson’s are worth reading.

Drawing on his research of university student behaviour, Hugh Gusterson outlines the risks of assuming that university students will follow policies required to keep campuses Covid secure when classes begin.

While Gusterson focuses on the universities in the USA, the parallel in the UK are similar. Universities have been marketed as a place the broader experience. Imprinted in the minds of many students is that university is a place for social adventure, escaping the constraints of home and school.

Young people are more likely to play down the risks, and draw comfort from statistics that show that, at least in the short term, risk of serious illness and death are small for their age-group.

Gusterson uses the term ‘fantasy documents’ to describe risk mitigation measures that ignore these realities.

The contagious nature of SARS-CoV-2, young people’s behaviour combined with fantasy risk mitigation documents, creates the conditions for super-spreader events that could wreck havoc on university staff and people in the local communities.

Age and class, come into play. Lower paid workers at universities are more likely to be from minority ethnic backgrounds.

The Office of National Statistics reports:

• When taking into account age in the analysis, Black males are 4.2 times more likely to die from a COVID-19-related death and Black females are 4.3 times more likely than White ethnicity males and females.
• People of Bangladeshi and Pakistani, Indian, and Mixed ethnicities also had statistically significant raised risk of death involving COVID-19 compared with those of White ethnicity.

These workers are less able to take advantage of any work from home arrangements, and have less strong unions on campus to advocate for their protection.

University academics are more likely to be older, and more likely to have underlying health conditions. In the UK, vice chancellors have eliminated tens of thousands of part-time teaching posts, more typically filled by younger academics and graduate students, shifting the risks of infection during small group teaching to more vulnerable older academics.

University vice chancellors need to speak more forcefully and publicly about the Covid-19 world that students will confront upon graduation. That’s a world where unemployment, and particularly youth unemployment, is high and employers will expect employees to be able to work from home, have high technical skills, be good at self management and independent work.

The education experience needs reconfiguration, accentuating the shift in the bundle away from the broader experience to one more relevant to the economic and political circumstances of our time.