Jack Whybrow

Jack was reappointed as a Lecturer in Business Statistics in May 2019. Prior to his appointment as a lecturer, he was a Business Tutor between Sept’15 and April’19. Since his reappointment he has been part of the Senior Advising team, shortly thereafter became a member of the Equality and Diversity Committee and recently became part of the NBS Research Ethics Committee. 

Jack completed a PhD in Applied Econometrics and Policy Analysis in 2018 with the School of Economics at UEA and in 2019 a Post Graduate Certificate in Higher Education Practice. Jack became a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in 2020.

This academic year (2022-23) Jack is the module organiser and delivers the bulk of the teaching for NBS-4104B Managing Data in a Digital World. This module is a large first-year undergraduate module for students registered on the business school’s BA programmes. He is also a member of the teaching team for NBS-4107A Introduction to Quantitative Methods for Business, NBS-5102A Quantitative Methods for Business and NBS-7064Y Business Research Methods. The Quantitative Methods modules are for business students, first- and second-years respectively, registered on the school's BSc programmes. Business Research Methods is part of the MSc programme. Jack also acts as a supervisor for several MSc Dissertations.

In previous years, Jack was module organiser for NBS-4009Y Cases in Economics for Business (which will hopefully return in 2024-25) and taught a variety of other modules relating to Economics, International Business and Marketing. He also guest lectured for the School of Economics and delivered seminars for them whilst completing his PhD.

Jack completed his PhD in 2018. This was undertaken with the School of Economics and investigated the determinants of UK Higher Education participation using two birth cohorts and a longitudinal study. His external examiners were Prof. John Micklewright (UCL) and Dr. Jo Blanden (Surrey). 

This PhD research is interdisciplinary but broadly falls under the Economics of Education. Specifically, he assesses the changing cultural and social influences with respect to UK Higher Education participation. To do this he utilises 3 cohorts, namely the National Child Development Study (NCDS), British Cohort Study (BCS70) and Longitudinal Study of Young People in England (LSYPE). In his first chapter, he estimates a logistic model of HE participation for the NCDS and BCS70, controlling for a range of individual (including a measure of cognitive ability) and background characteristics. To this, he added some simple comparable measures (Principal Components Analysis) of Cultural and Social Capital. His second chapter estimates a more comprehensive model for the more recent LSYPE cohort. The main contribution of this chapter is to introduce additional measures of Habitus and contextual forms of Social Capital (at home and at school). His last empirical chapter, which also utilises the LSYPE, estimates a multilevel logistic model (given the data’s two-stage stratified sampling design), with the aim of assessing the role schools and their characteristics play in relation to these capitals and Higher Education more generally. To his knowledge this is the first UK focused study to explore the influences of these capitals on determining who goes on to study in Higher Education. 

Jack is actively pursuing a variety of related research projects. Currently, he is collecting and analysing data relating to academic advising, teaching and school open days. In the future, this will be expanded by also evaluating school employability data.