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©www.savagechickens.com Suppose I tell you that I know of a magician, The Amazing Significo, with extraordinary powers. He can undertake to deal you a five-card poker hand which has three cards with the same number. You open a fresh pack of cards, shuffle the pack and watch him carefully. The Amazing Significo deals you five cards and you find that you do indeed have three of a kind. According to Wikipedia , the chance of this happening by chance when dealing from an unbiased deck of cards is around 2 per cent - so you are likely to be impressed. You may go public to endorse The Amazing Significo's claim to have supernatural abilities. But then I tell you that The Amazing Significo has actually dealt five cards to 49 other people that morning, and you are the first one to get three of a kind. Your excitement immediately evaporates: in the context of all the hands he dealt, your result is unsurprising. Let's take it a step further and suppose that The Amazing Significo was less ...

© Cartoonstock The Green Paper Fulfilling our Potential: Teaching Excellence, Social Mobility and Student Choice is a consultation document by the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) that sets out plans for a radical shake-up of English universities. One of its many goals is to encourage ‘alternative providers’, aka private higher education institutions (HEIs), into the system. The rationale behind this move has four elements: Widening access : The need to widen access to higher education is a central plank of the Green Paper. New providers are seen as part of this: they “ can offer programmes that are attractive to hard-to-reach communities and to groups of people that are not currently well-served.” Equipping students for the world of work :   As I have argued elsewhere , the Green Paper is rather disingenuous in creating the impression that businesses are unhappy with the quality of university graduates.   Nevertheless, there is a shortage of STEM graduate...