AS far back as April, universities were predicting applicants would drop by a third this year due to coronavirus.
The resulting glut of places is expected to be skewed towards the best universities, as they will be disproportionately affected by a loss of overseas student fees.
So what was the point of downgrading this year’s A-level results? Even if teachers have over-estimated them by a third (as might have happened in England, although less so in Northern Ireland) universities will not be swamped. Some protection for shuffling offers around might be necessary, but that would be it.
Across the UK, education officials are citing the need to avoid “grade inflation”, yet every university and future employer will always know the class of 2020 was a special case.
The true explanation, hinted at by mentions of ‘comparability’, is that bureaucrats just want exam statistics to keep following the neat series by which performance of the system is judged.
It is a cold reason for so much needless heartbreak.
**
Belfast's Chinese consulate has retracted a claim that Arlene Foster and Michelle O'Neill endorsed Hong Kong's draconian new security law during a conference call last month.
The first and deputy first ministers denied the claim, saying they support Hong Kong's 'one country, two systems' freedoms as guaranteed by treaty.
However, they have still stopped short of condemning the new law.
A Sinn Féin MEP has subsequently said "colonial" Europe has no moral authority to oppose it.
Delicacy on both sides is perhaps understandable, as the row came hours after Hong Kong's leading pro-democracy publisher, Jimmy Lai, was arrested at dawn in front of his family on ludicrous charges and detained for lengthy questioning, while 200 police officers barged into his newspaper's offices and rifled through files they had no right to examine.
This is exactly what happened in 2018 to Belfast journalists Trevor Birney and Barry McCaffrey and their news website The Detail. They might feel Northern Ireland and Hong Kong are two countries, one system.
**
Belfast City Council has rejected a Sinn Féin motion alleging bullying of staff by other parties on the grounds that no evidence has been provided, no complaint has been made and a motion is not the way to address bullying regardless.
Last week, other parties rejected a Sinn Féin claim that "there is a perception within the Catholic, nationalist, republican community that Roselawn (cemetery) is not a welcome place for them", again because there was no evidence and no complaint has ever been made.
Some councillors suspect Sinn Féin is trying to regain the initiative after the fallout from June's IRA funeral row.
If so, victimology would be a pathetic first recourse. How long can the largest party on the council play the downtrodden martyr?
**
Souring relationships at Belfast City Hall make it even more telling that all five executive parties have held the line at Stormont over school reopening.
Teachers' unions are unhappy with the reopening plans from DUP education minister Peter Weir.
Sinn Féin would usually side with public sector unions, especially in a row with unionists. Alliance is increasingly more union than unionist and of course the SDLP basically is a teachers' union.
However, every party realises the extent to which most of their constituents want schools back full time.
It is this year's equivalent of the hospital waiting list crisis that drove last year's Alliance surge and the restoration of devolution.
All else is dinner party chit-chat, at least until a second wave arrives.
**
In news of other things even Sinn Féin cannot support, Newry and Mourne District Council has backed an Alliance call for a universal basic income (UBI) in Northern Ireland.
The SDLP seconded the motion, the UUP agreed, the DUP abstained and only Sinn Féin voted against.
This remarkable outcome might have been seen as republicans sparing the blushes of Sinn Féin's finance and community ministers at Stormont, to whom the call was addressed.
But South Down MP Chris Hazzard made his feelings clear online that a UBI is "flawed thinking" and "a gift to the rich".
Certainly, it cannot be considered more than an interesting thought experiment at Stormont's current level of resources.
One dissenting voice is Sinn Féin activist and former Belfast City Council leader Jim McVeigh, who in March called on people to "take to the streets" if a UBI was not introduced by the British and Irish governments.
**
The Northern Ireland Ambulance Service has been missing response time targets and needs 335 extra staff to meet them, according to figures uncovered by the SDLP, relating to the four months preceding lockdown.
The 999 system is also overloaded, with excess calls being handled via Scotland.
This is ominous news for Stormont's planned restructuring of the NHS. The case for fewer hospitals depends on patients being safer in an ambulance en route to a large hospital than being admitted earlier to a small one.
Ambulance-only admission to A&E is being considered, while regional specialist centres would mean chronically ill patients travelling longer distances.
None of this will work without a massively beefed up ambulance service plus a major investment in the road network. Unless there are signs of that happening, reform will be an impossible sell.
**
Most American politicians want to highlight Irish roots but Kamala Harris may be an exception.
The Democrats' vice presidential nominee has been taunted for months for being descended from an "Irish slave owner", after her father - a Jamaican-born academic - wrote an article saying he was a direct descendent of Hamilton Brown, a 19th century plantation owner originally from Antrim, who struck even contemporary observers as a bitter opponent of emancipation.
There is a short gap in the family record but the connection appears solid and deeply unwelcome for Harris, a mixed-race candidate at a moment of fraught racial tension.
Eleven US presidents have had a Co Antrim lineage. Harris could easily be the twelfth - she is running mate to Joe Biden, at 77 the oldest presidential nominee in history.
The Tourist Board may want to ask her before putting up a plaque.
