The Times: Mother’s data-mining algorithm knows best

Ms Allas said that the exercise made her wonder how many girls were using future earnings data when making their university choices.

A director at the world’s most successful strategic consulting firm has brought the data-mining techniques of her day job to a decision with which many parents wrestle: how to help offspring choose a university course.

Tera Allas, director of research and economics at McKinsey and a self-confessed geek, said that it came as “no surprise” to her family when she launched a fact-based analysis and created a “prioritisation algorithm” to help her daughter weigh up courses.

She was thrilled with some of the data sources she discovered, including the government’s statistics on graduate salaries, Longitudinal Education Outcomes, which charts earnings for every degree course at every university in the country up to five years after graduation.

She also used the National Student Survey, a vast annual study of undergraduates’ views of teaching, quality of assessment and facilities at their universities as well as university league table rankings.

However, universities’ own websites “leave a lot to be desired”, Ms Allas said. Basic information such as the ratio of lectures to tutorials to independent work on courses was hard to find, as was the method of assessment — exams versus coursework.

The full online article can be found here.