100k? And Whither The RAE?

Two stories this time around. The first is the annual UK Graduate Careers Survey, in which we discover, amongst other things, that 12% of a sample of 16,452 current finalists - or 1974 current final year students - expect to be earning 100k a year by the time they are 30. Whilst it is tempting to just have a bit of a laugh, it is a rather deeper concern that there are so many young people at university who don't seem to be sufficiently aware of the labour market that they are setting themselves up for disappointment. It is not as if information is not available to them.
One could also see it as refreshing that, despite a constant diet of gloomy stories, many finalists are so aspirational.
There's lots of other interesting stuff in the report (as long as you ignore the rather silly stuff about what students would do if they had to pay £3k tuition fees - which look really like a thinly-disguised 'do you agree with tuition fees' question.)

Over to the Higher Education Policy Institute, where the redoubtable Tom Sastry and Bahram Bekhradnia have produced a 74-page document assessing alternatives to the RAE. The authors are concerned about Gordon Brown's budget statement, and the 'Next Steps' document, updating the Science and Innovation Investment Framework, that came out as a result. The concern arises over the statement in Next Steps that after the 2008 RAE, research funding will be allocated on the basis of quantitative 'metrics', and mentions specifically metrics based on income from research funders.

Whilst it is meticulously argued, I do wonder about the value of such a document so early in the process - we have no real picture of what these metrics will be, or if the process will change in the near future. But the authors do make excellent points about potential inequities in funding, and particularly about possible impacts on academic freedom.

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