The week in higher education – 9 November 2023

The next time you are asked to sign a document, you might want to do it carefully. Since the 1970s, psychological studies have linked signature size to narcissistic characteristics. And a paper has found evidence that appointing a narcissistic vice-chancellor damages an institution’s research and teaching, as well as its league table performance. Researchers who examined the signatures of 261 UK sector leaders found that institutions deemed to have more narcissistic heads registered declines in key measures such as the National Student Survey and the Research Excellence Framework. The team recommended that universities measure the egotism of prospective leaders using psychometric tests. “There is good evidence that universities, as hypercompetitive and highly stratified organisations, are tolerant of and even incentivise and reward narcissistic behaviour, allowing those who choose to act in such ways to do so with impunity,” said Richard Watermeyer, professor of education at the University of Bristol and one of the authors.

Meeting your first-year college roommate must be a daunting prospect for any US student. But a study might offer them some comfort – if they are bunking up with an international student, that is. Researchers found positive effects on the grade point average of first-year domestic students paired with international roommates, and also observed a significant increase in second-year retention. Hsin-Ta Tsai, lead author from the Georgia Institute of Technology and Georgia State University, said that room sharing exposed domestic students to new cultural perspectives and practices, and allowed them to learn productive academic habits from their international peers during a “critical” year. However, the benefits diminished over the four-year college life cycle, and the study found no significant positive effects on any of the outcome measures for the international students themselves.

The Festive Bake will return to the Greggs Christmas menu on 9 November, going on sale at 2,400 locations across the UK, but which university will be spoiled for choice? To answer this, student news website The Tab has devised a new form of higher education ranking – a league table for the number of Greggs shops within a one-mile radius of campus. It said this was a different form of ranking from the traditional ones measuring student satisfaction, teaching quality or employment prospects. “And, let’s be honest, every time you read them you yawn, don’t you? Because none of that actually means anything,” the website said. Coming out on top was Cardiff University, with a whopping 14 Greggs within one mile. So students there can breathe a sigh of relief – there will be Festive Bakes for all.

It should come as no great shock that higher education can be expensive to pursue, but there was still an unpleasant surprise for 7,500 students of a US university who were misled about the cost of doctoral programmes. The Department of Education has fined Arizona-based Grand Canyon University $37.7 million (£31 million) for advertising course costs that were lower than the sum 98 per cent of students on certain courses ended up paying. While GCU stated that its doctoral programmes cost between $40,000 and $49,000, these calculations did not include “continuation courses” that were required for the majority of students to complete their dissertation requirements, the department said. Some 78 per cent of students had to pay an additional $10,000 to $12,000 in tuition fees – roughly a 25 per cent increase, depending on the programme, over and above the advertised cost. GCU denied wrongdoing, saying it had made details of the additional costs clear.

Bad news for people who got top grades at university, but good news for everybody else. Leaving your institution with a 2:1 has long been seen as the minimum qualification needed to get a good graduate job, but that has been changing in recent years. And a survey by the Institute of Student Employers (ISE) has found that it is now less important than ever. Its poll of 169 large UK student employers found that just 44 per cent set a 2:1 as the minimum entry requirement for graduates – the lowest-ever level, and down from 76 per cent in the first year of data, 2013-14. But Stephen Isherwood, the ISE chief executive, said it did not mean that getting a 2:1 was a waste of time, because it usually meant that an individual was well motivated. So this is not an excuse to start skipping any (more) lectures.