Ready, stats, go!

The will to survive the cut-throat higher education market place appears to have prompted a gung-ho use of statistics by Anglia Polytechnic University.

An apparently innocuous press release last week claimed that APU students earned Pounds 3,000 more than the national average for graduates in their first jobs, some Pounds 15,058 compared to Pounds 12,248. The release claimed that this was one of the findings in the Barclays National Graduate Survey for 1995.

But the "findings" were included in extra information sent confidentially to participating institutions with accompanying letters stressing "internal use only". Barclays say that it is disappointed but, optimism unfettered, hopes institutions will be a little more circumspect in future.