Posted: Tuesday 24 February 2009
Where do S6 want to go next?
This time last year I had just written my article for the Hutchie Herald, in which I decided to share with everyone a summary of the university applications made by the then S6. I now have this year's data, and it is interesting to look at trends in the sorts of courses that our leavers are applying for. Although the full list of courses applied for has massive diversity, to make things easier to understand I group them into ten broad areas: medical, law, economics & business, art & architecture, maths & science, engineering & computing, social sciences, english & languages, music & drama and education & sport.
This year's applications are broadly similar, but with the first three categories again accounting for a greater percentage of the whole (65% this year, 61% in 2008 and 57% in 2007). Engineering has stayed popular after a big increase last year (11%, 12%, 5% for the three years going back), and the main area to be seeing a decline is social sciences (7%, 10%, 16%). My only comment is that I understand why some pupils apply for the high status medical and law courses, but are all of them doing this from a genuine interest, or because it is the done thing when you have achieved five As at Higher? There is a lot of evidence that a successful career can start with a good degree in any subject, not just something directly related to the career you want to end up in. This is especially true of business, with some top companies deliberately seeking out graduates who have followed their academic interests from school rather than a vocational degree.
This year I decided to do something new as well and look at the destination universities that our pupils were applying for. This shows some interesting results, but in looking at them it must be remembered that I have counted all five choices from each pupil (medics are only allowed four) and they will of course end up at only one of them, so until they make that choice later in the year, this list only shows where they are considering going to university, not where they actually go. Nevertheless I think the results do show clearly that Glasgow (19.1% of all applications) is the most popular, with Edinburgh second on 15.5%, closely followed by Strathclyde on 15.1%. The full table contains 39 different universities, showing that Hutchie pupils are prepared to consider venturing a bit further, but Scottish universities do account for 83.9% of all applications, and 39.1% of them are in the West of Scotland.
I will reserve judgement on this until we have the data on final acceptances, but I would like to urge this year's leavers to perhaps be a bit bolder and think about leaving Glasgow. There is some research which suggests that drop-out rates for universities are lower when students live in halls of residence rather than living at home. There is also some evidence that pupils from independent schools are slightly more likely to drop out than pupils from state schools, but this data is UK-wide and has been challenged by other researchers. What no-one disagrees on is that pupils from independent schools, when they do stay the course, tend to do as well if not better in the classification of their degree, particularly when you consider that many have applied to highly selective universities for academically demanding courses, as can be seen above.
I'll end by noting that very few pupils seem to consider universities in the USA and this is something they should look into. Several prestigious American universities (Harvard, Princeton, Yale etc) have a lot of money available for scholarships and are increasingly looking at British schools to recruit top students from. Headmaster colleagues in English schools similar to Hutchie are telling me that there are growing numbers of their pupils going to these universities and reporting back very positively. I'll be talking to a contact from Harvard later this year.