Wednesday, February 23, 2022

How to (imp)lie with statistics, part 4533

Have a look at this BBC article ...
It says that US students are 50% up and, in the next sentence, EU students 40% down.
So that's good news for our intake of foreign students, right? The rise in US students outweighs the decrease in EU students following Brexit right?
Wrong. Because MUCH later in the article, it says: "However, a spokesman pointed out that the number of US students is typically only between 4% to 5% of its EU cohort pre-Brexit."
So of 100 US/EU students, 95 students are from the EU - that's dropped to 55. 5 students are from the US - that's risen to 8.
The net change is a REDUCTION of 37%.