The number of universities in England with operating deficits in 2017-18 increased to 32, compared with 24 the year before and 10 in 2015-16. Across the UK, the number reporting deficits rose to 47, compared with 40 in 2016-17.

And who are those worst off?

Reading’s income, reported to the Higher Education Statistics Agency, was £317m against total expenditure of £348m.

Other universities in England with large budget deficits included London Metropolitan and Bradford, while Robert Gordon and Queen Margaret in Scotland also posted large deficits.

Soas University of London, seen as being in considerable financial difficulty, reported income of £92m but spending of nearly £95m.

AssProf: "Joerg, if the Applied Math group is the Tory party of mathematics, what is the Pure Math group then?"

Me: "LibDems."

AssProf: "But the LibDems are completely irrele.. ah, well."

Me: "And the Statistics group is the DUP."

AssProf: "I cannot believe you just said that! Just because they are all dogmatic Bayesians. Anyway, what are we then?"

Me: "SNP."

AssProf: "I can just about see you bringing a Lochaber axe to a Faculty meeting."

Me: "All I want is my own little Department for Operational Research."

Here is an interesting abstract on public research funding:

Conventional wisdom holds that the social rate of return to R&D significantly exceeds the private rate of return and, therefore, R&D should be subsidized. In the U.S., the government has directly funded a large fraction of total R&D spending. This paper shows that there is a serious problem with such government efforts to increase inventive activity. The majority of R&D spending is actually just salary payments for R&D workers. Their labor supply, however, is quite inelastic so when the government funds R&D, a significant fraction of the increased spending goes directly into higher wages. Using CPS data on wages of scientific personnel, this paper shows that government R&D spending raises wages significantly, particularly for scientists related to defense such as physicists and aeronautical engineers. Because of the higher wages, conventional estimates of the effectiveness of R&D policy may be 30 to 50% too high. The results also imply that by altering the wages of scientists and engineers even for firms not receiving federal support, government funding directly crowds out private inventive activity.

Its a short paper (15 pages), but its from 1998, so ymmv and all that. The most headscratching bit is that it claims the supply of researchers is inelastic. Reading closer, the claim stems from the fact that there are never many researchers going around, so we have a case of small numbers never changing to big numbers: hey, inelasticity. But we have to look at the relative flux of researchers: if the best minds end up in private companies inventing new online ad schemes because they get paid good money, then thats a net loss. Increasing salaries of researchers who actually work towards the public good might help here.

Well, I would say that, wouldn't I?

(Via +Daniel Lemire.)

More on the college admission scam, and inequality.

Drawing false conclusions with statistics.

The crassness of the American college admissions scandals reads like a Molière play, set in the colonies.

It’s not just that extracts can’t convey the fathomless entitlement and mendacity exhibited by affluent, ostensibly respectable parents. They can’t begin to do justice to the affidavit’s entertainment value as savage social comedy.

Here, too, cultivated, fluent people, many of whom also sound deluded, greedy and hypocritical, appear to be playing with their children’s lives for no reason beyond self-gratification. But the dialogue, when not jaw-dropping, races along (“And it works?” asks a defendant. “Every time.”), the plots and motives are horribly plausible, and the jeopardy is evidently real to the alleged conspirators, even if the all-encompassing irony of their alleged scheme is not. “She actually won’t really be part of the water polo team, right?”

And on this side of the pond? We are just a tad more sophisticated, of course.

Many British parents, equally fearful of mediocrity, are similarly unabashed on local tricks and stratagems – not only private education, but house moves, music lessons (for reserved school places), intensive coaching, internships, resits, religious conversions, fake addresses, and, the Times now reports, FOI requests to Oxbridge, from disappointed parents – that will end up, added to financial and cultural capital, delivering much the same outcome as the US scandal. Legal or otherwise, the result is enhanced educational opportunities for the privileged and untalented, fewer for the talented but disadvantaged.

Surprisinlgy good news from the Department of Education, UK:

International students will be given visa extensions of up to a year to look for work in the UK as part of a package of government measures to boost numbers of overseas students after Brexit. The move represents a break with current policy, where students are allowed to stay for just four months after graduation.

Maybe the racists in government are slowly losing their influence. We will see.

Alongside the extended visas, the DfE and the Department for International Trade are to unveil an international education strategy with a 30% increase in overseas students in UK higher education during the next decade.

Today someone called the Applied Math Group "the Tory party of mathematics".