40 years of statistics on archaeology students: so what do we actually know?
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2015-01-15

Doug Rocks-Macqueen

Since 1994, when UK archaeologists have needed statistics on our university students we reach for the Higher Education Statistical Agency (HESA) data. But, we have completely ignored HESA’s predecessor, the Universities Statistical Record (USR), which has data from 1972 to 1993. Essentially we only ever talk about the last 20 years of students. This paper takes the first-time step of using both HESA and USR data to look at 40 years of students in UK archaeology statistics. The goal of which is not to reminisce about the past, but to see the long trends flowing through higher education archaeology teaching in hopes of better understanding what the future holds. Like many archaeology papers this one looks at the past to help guide our future. It lays out what we might expect from the next 40 years of teaching students archaeology at UK universities.