Chat to anyone involved in sector admissions and you will hear a similar story.
And the story appears to be true.
It is now clear “high tariff” providers have been lowering their entry tariff (often substantially) in order to grow recruitment – meaning students with less-than-stellar grades have been ending up in prestigious institutions, and the kinds of places students like this would more usually attend have been struggling to recruit as a result.
In other words, the 2024 looks a lot like a lockdown cycle (without the examnishambles and Zoom pub quizzes).
Any major dude will tell you
We noted, at a sector level, the rise in the number of offers made by high-tariff providers – it was the highest number on record. There was no parallel rise in A level attainment, which suggests a strategic decision, made early on, to widen access.
Today’s release of UCAS End of Cycle data for 2024 at provider level illustrates that this picture is a generalisation. Some high-tariff providers have acted in the way described above, others have pursued alternative strategies. And other providers have hit on other ways to drive undergraduate recruitment.
Starting with my favourite chart, we can think about these individual strategies in more detail. This scatter plot shows the year-on-year change in the number of applications along the horizontal axis and the year-on-year change in acceptances on the vertical. There’s filters for gender, domicile, age group and subject group (at the top level) – and I’ve provided a choice of comparator years if you want to look at changes over a longer term. The size of the dots represents the total recruitment by that provider in 2024, given the parameters we can see.
In essence this illustrates popularity (among applicants) and selectivity. What we can see here for 2024 (defaulting to UK 18 year olds applying to all subjects compared to 2023) is that pretty much the entire Russell group has made significant (c500 or above) increases in recruitment, whether or not they saw a corresponding growth in applications.
It’s not the full story – the picture for other pre-92 and post-92 providers is more mixed, with some providers able to leverage popularity (or desperation) to find growth.
My old school
We can’t look directly at provider behaviour by tariff, but we can examine what qualifications students placed at the provider have – here a key indicator might be an increase in the number of students entering without A levels (a group that tends to have lower tariffs overall).
The trouble is, A level entry rates have also increased – pretty much anyone who wants to and can do A levels is now doing A levels. With the decline in BTEC popularity, and the still uncertain interest in T levels, this is to be expected. All this means most providers have seen an increase or steady state in the number of students entering with A levels (when you include that A level plus project options). In Scotland – and recall we don’t get the complete picture of Scottish applications from UCAS because of a wonderful little thing called intercalation – it’s SQA pretty much all the way.
Everything you did
If you are wondering whether a change in age groups placed as undergraduates could also have an impact on recruitment patterns, it looks as if the pattern of low and slowly falling mature recruitment continues for most providers. For larger universities most of the action is around 18 year old home recruitment – and specialist providers that focus on mature students (often via part-time or flexible study) tend to struggle.
The other key factor is domicile – the changes to visa arrangements this time last year had a huge impact on international applications (particularly from countries like India and Nigeria that have become important for lower tariff providers) and coupled with some of the changes described above this has resulted in some providers seeing undergraduate international admissions fall off a cliff.
As always, undergraduate isn’t the full story – we’ve still no reliable way of understanding postgraduate recruitment in the round until we get the HESA data long after the academic year in question has finished. I just hope that regulators with new duties to understand the financial stability of the sector have more of a clue.
Any world that I’m welcome to
With some providers stuffed to the seams and beyond with students they wouldn’t usually accept – many with support needs it is unclear whether they are able to meet – it is unclear who exactly benefits from this new state of affairs. The claim we regularly hear is that universities lose money on educating home students, and that these must be cross subsidised by international recruitment.
The corollary of this is that in times where international student recruitment is restricted you would expect to see the number of home students at providers reliant on this income fall – after all, if you lose money on every home student the more you recruit the more money you lose. Though measures to widen access and participation are important (and indeed, we see welcome evidence of contextual admissions at selective providers in the chart below) the fact of it is that you need to spend money to support students without the cultural capital to succeed.
The rather painful conclusion I reach is that the only way to make this year’s sums add up is a reduction in spend per student – and, thus, most likely, the quality of the student experience among precisely the students who would have been overjoyed to get a place at a famous university. We should keep a close eye on continuation metrics and the national student survey this year.
