This is undoubtedly great news. It seems that young people finally want to engage in the most fundamentally important industry on the planet after years of a declining skills base. The HESA figures suggest that there was a 10% increase in agricultural students between 2009/10 and 2010/11, a vast increase when you consider that other subject areas have suffered declines of a similar amount.
I've been a student at Nottingham over the entire period that these figures by HESA mention. I was one of the 18,920 students that was studying Agriculture or a related subject in 2009, and one of the 20,790 that was revising for their exams in 2010. Personally, I don't think that I noticed a particular increase in the number of people studying agriculture over this period, and having dug a little deeper into the figures, I think I know why.
According to HESA, the number of people who were studying a part-time agricultural course in 2010/11 was an absolutely staggering 25% increase on the year before. This somewhat offsets the more modest - but still respectable - 6% increase in full time students. Couple this with HESA's rather vague description of what constitutes an 'agriculturally related course', and you'll forgive me for questioning whether the claimed 10% figure represents the full story.
What I don't doubt from those figures though is that the numbers of people studying agriculture is generally increasing. There is one main reason for this: agricultural optimism is currently at levels unseen for decades and farming at last appears to offer an exciting working life for those prepared to battle the challenges ahead.
But I suspect that there is also another reason why more people are studying agriculture now than a couple of years ago, and this reason will be noticed in the much shorter term.
The 2011 university intake was the last year of £3250 tuition fees. For those starting this September, this moves up to £9000. There's two reasons why you'd voluntarily currently be on a gap year: you are either a fool or you have recently sown quite a considerable acreage of bungalow seeds.
Yes, the HESA figures only show students who would have enrolled before 2010. But if you think back that far you'll remember that raising tuition fees was hot on the political agenda and I for one wouldn't have wanted to take the risk of a gap year under so much uncertainty.
I suspect that the the true figures will show themselves in a couple of years time. What impact tripling tuition fees will have on the numbers studying agriculture at university remains to be seen.
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