‘Virtually all’ universities risk OfS sanction under new rules

Every process that has the objective of "ranking" things in an order of "priority" will have its critics, especially true where the results will affect funding. The Government has chosen "managerial or professional employment status and further study" as the most important outcomes sought. As a nod / "let out clause" to the Universities, "further study" will be critical - watch out for massive growth in students taking a second undergraduate course (at the same or a differnt University) and a rise in the number of taught post graduates and, in time, targets of 60% success to be achieved in all lifelong learning. The chosen measuring toll is to be "... jobs within groups 1 to 3 of the Office for National Statistics’ Standard Occupational Classification 2020 (SOC)." but as highlighted above, this is going to cause problems. Looking backwards is not the answer when over 30% of the jobs that current graduates will go into are not yet on the list and given that "the ONS job categories underwent revision only every 10 years – with early years education and nursing examples of careers upgraded to “professional” only in 2020". Wiil the new police constable degree fail to get offered by enough Universities? Are all the Apprenticeship degrees included in the list? The chosen measurement tool needs to be changed unless we want to go backwards. Universities and the ONS must be forward looking and update the key categories every year.

I find this a strange choice of metric. surely the government is more responsible for the availabiltiy of graduate level jobs, not the universities. Universities enable students to obtain the skills needed, but if there are no jobs, or no jobs where the graduates can afford to live, then that is a policy failure not a university failure.

Once again, more encroachments from the universal corporatization of the universities. see Chomsky: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/03/the-death-of-american-universities/

If they want to take an outcomes-based approach, why don't they use Student Loan repayment data? To put it crudely, if after 3 or 5 years, large numbers of students from a programme are not paying back student loans, then they will know the programme is not producing the sort of earners they want. But before they start closing programmes and bullying students and universities into doing nothing but STEM, they should at least let students study what they want, but produce easy-to-access information on income outcomes for courses. Not everyone will be interested, but if students know that learning a subject at such-and-such an institution is unlikely to result in riches but they still want to do it, then isn't it rather controlling and depressing to not let them? My English teacher at school in the 1980s used to go on about how miserable it must be for us being young in Thatcher's Britain and how much better it was for him growing up the 1960s. Now, here I am, looking at a generation of young people facing debt and having all the fun sucked out of their university life by COVID. Do we really need even less personal control and choice for young people?