HEAS stats spell great news for politics departments

Politics departments around the UK can revel in the latest statistics provided by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HEAS) on subjects favoured by students over the past 15 years. Times Higher Education (THE) provide a neat analytical breakdown of the HEAS stats in an article published online in January. The article illustrates how the boom in student numbers pursuing higher education in the UK has disproportionately favoured many established humanities and social science disciplines - with politics being a major winner.

“The number of politics students has grown by 125 per cent”, the articles’ author David Matthews writes. This in contrast to economics, which has recorded a 75 per cent expansion since 1996-97. The rise in student enrolment numbers for politics has since 2007 actually exceeded student numbers for its social science counterpart’s economics and sociology.

Bearing in mind George Osborne’s surprising announcement in December 2013 that the cap on undergraduate places would be removed by 2015-16, allowing for potentially 60,000 extra students to enter into higher education, these statistics should provide very welcome reading.

Read the full article ‘At the heart of the higher education debate’ on the THE website.