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Is 10 per cent alarmingly high or surprisingly small? It depends on where you’re coming from …

The British government has come under a lot of criticism for raising the ceiling for university fees from £3,000 per year to £9,000 from 2012.

So when the latest statistics showed a reduction in applications for next year’s entry, the headlines were predictable. “University applications see record drop as fee hikes bite,” trumpeted the Daily Mirror. The papers were unanimous, with words such as “plummeted”, “record lows”, slump” and “major fall”. And they all linked the 10 per cent decline in applications to the rise in fees. The “devastating” impact of the increased fees is a fixed part of the newspapers’ familiar narrative, and they were not going to deviate from that line now.

Then came a report on a different survey, commissioned by the BBC and published on the same day. This came up with the same rounded figure of 10 per cent. But the BBC said the survey of more than 1,000 youngsters concluded that “…only one in 10 are being put off applying for university by higher tuition fees…”.

Note that little word“only”, justified perhaps by a general expectation that the figure would be much higher. Suddenly we are in the realm of a moderate adjustment in university attendance, rather than the devastation presented by the newspapers.

Ten per cent is either a lot or a little. It all depends on how you present it.

Oliver Wates, MediaTrain


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