Will changes in the student visa system really cost the economy £3.6 billion over four years, as The Guardian, The Times, The Independent and the BBC report?

There is a spectacularly silly story on the BBC today.&nbs

Scotland should do more to encourage people from poorer backgrounds to go to university, according to the National Union of Students Scotland (NUSS).
 

Reports by national newspaper education editors have suggested that the average starting salary for new graduates is £25,000 a year– or even £29,000, if you&rsquo

David Lammy MP claims to have extracted some interesting information about the admission of black students to Oxford and Cambridge through freedom of information requests.

The Sutton Trust has long backed the use of additional tests, such as US-style Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SATs), as a means of assessing students for university places.

My first two papers of the day are the Racing Post, where the facts are invariably right and The Guardian

How many students taking non-academic routes finish up in higher education? Writing in The Times on Monday, Andrew Haldenby of Reform reported that “only 0.2 per cent of individuals not taking academic qualifications progress to higher education”.

The bust-up between the Home Office and its drug advisers is the latest in a long series of incidents in which it has shown contempt for scientific advice.

 Leaving out the denominator is a cardinal error in statistics. It is unhelpful to be told that 65 people in Sheffield have swine flu, for example, if one doesn’t know the population of Sheffield. Does this bald figure mean one in a hundred people has the infection, one in a thousand, or one in ten thousand?