Thursday, January 23, 2014

Wine per head of student population

Following the publication of this, giving the amounts spent on wine by the different Cambridge colleges, I thought someone ought to compare it to this, the number of students in each college, and do the maths. Here are the results:


College Number of students Total spent on wine Per head
King's 677 £338,559 £500.09
St John's 912 £260,064 £285.16
Jesus 814 £212,256 £260.76
Trinity 1044 £223,291.98 £213.88
Pembroke 668 £141,692 £212.11
Peterhouse 412 £82,133 £199.35
Trinity Hall 641 £127,186 £198.42
Emmanuel 709 £131,127 £184.95
Sidney Sussex 581 £97,507 £167.83
Corpus Christi 490 £79,254 £161.74
Magdalene 542 £68,192 £125.82
Gonville and Caius 829 £96,994 £117.00
Christ's 614 £71,055 £115.72
Downing 675 £77,798 £115.26
Queens' 987 £111,112.64 £112.58
Churchill 801 £87,685 £109.47
Clare 768 £79,989 £104.15
St Catharine's 695 £62,432 £89.83
Selwyn 583 £49,498 £84.90
Robinson 556 £44,722.39 £80.44
Clare Hall 236 £17,400 £73.73
Murray Edwards 518 £32,917 £63.55
Girton 699 £30,051 £42.99
Wolfson 927 £39,647.10 £42.77
St Edmund's 459 £19,304 £42.06
Newnham 656 £27,263 £41.56
Fitzwilliam 767 £23,028 £30.02
Darwin 674 £17,510 £25.98
Hughes Hall 594 £14,033.58 £23.63
Homerton 1342 £27,974.55 £20.85
Lucy Cavendish 341 na na

Both sets of figures are based on the 2012-13 academic year. Figures per head are rounded to the nearest 1p.

There's no particular reason to suspect that the amount spent on wine would correlate particularly well with the number of students. Other factors are likely to be much more important: perhaps size of endowment, age of establishment, etc. And we shouldn't pretend that the students and staff actually get to drink all this wine for free. Many colleges actually sell their wine to the students for formal dinners. I suspect also that these figures include wine bought to be served at conferences hosted at the colleges, in which case the colleges will likely be making a hefty profit.

Still, when the data are presented like this, some small colleges (Peterhouse, Trinity Hall) come off looking spendthrift, and big colleges like Queens' don't look quite as bad. It's interesting also to note that colleges for a) graduates/mature students and b) women are clustered at the bottom of the table; too bad we don't have data for Lucy Cavendish, which is both.