BS from the FT

The Financial Times (FT) yesterday provided a list of the top 400 employers here. It is based on a joint survey carried out by themselves and Statista. It placed the University of Cambridge at the very top.

Statista is a market research/data aggregator company. Statista itself describes its rankings as “recognizing top employers and helping companies benchmark and promote themselves“. Companies that perform well in their rankings can advertise this, use it in recruitment, marketing or enhance employer branding. Statista explicitly contacts winners with instructions to access award portals and claim awards. They are predatory fauna in the corporate branding ecosystem.

Statista rankings correlate more with prestige than with actual wellbeing. This happens because Statista explicitly combines two different things. The first is a direct score with employees rating their own employer. The second is an indirect score: people rating employers they do not work for.

This second component is distorting. It is a prestige score. A random software engineer is asked about employers in their sector. They are far more likely to recommend Microsoft or Google even if they have never worked there. This creates a feedback loop; prestige → indirect recommendations → higher ranking → more prestige. After all, you can’t recommend a software company that you have not heard of. So Microsoft or Google end up top of the rankings.

How many people did Statista likely survey from Cambridge University specifically? This is an important quantitative question and the answer is very few. The total UK survey sample is ~20,000 employees. The total eligible employers are ~3,000 employers. If evenly distributed, this is ~6.7 respondents per employer. Of course, the distribution is uneven and larger employers will get more responses. Cambridge University employs ~ 13,000 staff directly, so it’s medium-sized. By comparison, a large employer like the NHS employs ~ 1.3 million. So, a plausible estimate is that Statista are relying on 10–30 self-selected respondents from Cambridge.

There are more people currently taking Cambridge University to Employment Tribunal than likely responded to the survey.

Who are these respondents? Is the sample unbiased? This comes down to who in Cambridge University is even likely to fill in an online survey from Statista/the FT ?

Cambridge University has tripled administration spending in 10 yrs. ⁠Most respondents reached by the FT will be highly paid individuals in senior management. Of course, they will state that they’re very happy⁠. ⁠They have few hours, huge pay/bonuses and no really essential duties. The survey will not have reached many academic staff or lower-paid professional services staff, most of whom are highly dissatisfied. Casualised academic staff will also be missing. They often don’t identify strongly with the institution and work part-time or short-term. Yet they represent a very large share of teaching labour in UK universities.

And even if some academics responded to the survey, who might they be? Cambridge has an intense up-or-out dynamics. People who are highly dissatisfied leave academia, or move to other universities in the UK or US or abroad, or move to industry. Those who remain are disproportionately those who succeeded in the system, benefited from it & adapted to it — Heads of School, maybe. So the survey respondents will over-represent the satisfied survivors at the top. This is a classic survivorship bias.

This is a highly flawed methodology by Statista/the FT, with a small sample size oversampling on top levels and management.

Look who else is ranked in their top 400 employers list. There is Cancer Research UK, famous for its repeated bullying scandals. There is Oxford University, which has had highly publicised sexual harassment scandals almost continuously in the press for the last six months. There is the University of Sheffield where the Vice Chancellor has received votes of no confidence due to mismanagement of finances. And most ludicrously of all, there is the University of Dundee, which is facing near financial collapse and is on its third round of redundancies. It is where the former Principal was famously asked whether he was corrupt or incompetent, and replied he was merely incompetent.

The survey is a complete joke. It is designed to measure how happy the top executives and senior managers are. Prof Kamal Munir is very happy.

“Welcoming the recognition Professor Kamal Munir, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for University Community and Engagement, said: “I am very proud of this important recognition in the Financial Times, which reflects the hard work of many colleagues. We are committed to continually improving the working environment and supporting academic and professional excellence”

And now a question for the FT.

There has been plenty of excellent journalism on the scandals at Oxford, Cambridge and other universities from the Guardian, the Telegraph, the Times, Bloomberg Media, The Tab and Cherwell over the last year. Nothing from the FT. Why is that?

You know about all the scandals, of course.

(Varsity is also missing, Why is that?)