A minority of undergraduate courses leave students “saddled with debt, [expecting] low earnings, and faced with poor job prospects.”
This morning we learn that the government is going to do what it thinks is the right thing for students and taxpayers by asking the Office for Students to cap recruitment where courses are not taking enough graduates into good places 15 months after graduation.
Helpfully, OfS not only already has the power to do this, but has done it four times so far. The current “boots on the ground” B3 investigations – which look at graduate outcomes concerns alongside continuation and completion metrics – may result in more restrictions being placed where circumstances warrant it.
The interventions OfS would make are as a result of investigations following concerns over outcomes data, not the mere existence of data underneath an arbitrary threshold. When you are dealing with self-reported survey data with an average response rate of around 50 to 60 per cent the information isn’t good enough to rely on data alone.
