How do we measure social trends? Learn about key sociological data sources, demographic shifts, and the role of statistics in understanding society.
The National Student Survey is usually read as a scoreboard for teaching quality. This article argues that the NSS is better understood sociologically: not just as a measure of student experience, but as an instrument that shapes institutional behaviour.
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The National Student Survey ranks institutions, shapes league tables, and features in marketing materials as evidence of teaching excellence. But satisfaction is not the same as learning, and the social position of the student completing the survey shapes what they report in ways the instrument cannot detect. This article applies a Bourdieusian lens to the NSS — and finds that the data is telling us something rather different from what it is used to claim.
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Widening participation policy is often judged through dashboards of access, continuation and attainment. Yet focusing on who gets in – and who stays – can mask how universities continue to privilege particular histories, dispositions and futures. Drawing on Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, capital and institutional habitus, this article argues that belonging should sit at the centre of how we interpret student data, and explores what a more “belonging-sensitive” approach to WP metrics might look like in UK higher education.
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Student recruitment dashboards promise a single version of the truth about who will enrol. This article shows how small choices about funnels, conversion and melt can create competing “truths”, quietly shape who gets attention, and reproduce inequality in HE – and suggests practical ways to use dashboards, AI and KPIs more reflexively.
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