Tag: UCAS

  • Podcast: International, UCAS data, student finance

    Podcast: International, UCAS data, student finance

    This week on the podcast the government has finally unveiled its new International Education Strategy – but with no headline target for international student numbers and a clear shift towards education exports, what does it mean for the sector?

    Plus the latest UCAS end of cycle data and what it reveals about entry qualifications at high tariff providers, and a new NUS campaign on student maintenance that’s turning the spotlight on parents.

    With Mike Ratcliffe, Senior Advisor at UWE Bristol, Richard Brabner, Visiting Professor of Civic Engagement at Newcastle University, Jen Summerton, Operations Director at Wonkhe and presented by Jim Dickinson, Associate Editor at Wonkhe.

    You can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Spotify, Acast, Amazon Music, Deezer, RadioPublic, Podchaser, Castbox, Player FM, Stitcher, TuneIn, Luminary or via your favourite app with the RSS feed.

    On the site

    UCAS End of Cycle, 2025: access and participation

    UCAS End of Cycle, 2025: provider recruitment strategies

    Graduates are paying more and getting less

    A new international education strategy

    Transcript (auto generated)

    It’s the Wonkhe Show. The long-awaited international education strategy finally lands, but where’s the numbers target? There’s UCAS data out, latest on who’s doing the hoovering, and NUS launches a new campaign aimed at mum and dad. It’s all coming up.

    “Yes, we think this is important, but this is definitely framed as the solution to your financial worries is to not bring more international students into this country. But it is still framed as international students are being valuable, what they bring, the globalisation. And then I thought that I’m annoyed that soft power boils down to how many presidents and prime ministers we have.”

    Welcome back to the Wonky Show, your weekly roundup of higher education news, policy and analysis. I’m your host, Jim Dickinson, and I’m here to help us make sense of it all. As usual, three excellent guests.

    In Oxford, Mike Bratcliffe is Senior Advisor at UWE Bristol. Mike, your highlight of the week, please.

    “It’s starting block. So we’ve got students back. They’re doing their programme-level induction, which is lovely. Having students run a campus game is particularly lovely because it means that catering feel confident enough to reopen the salad bar.”

    And in Newcastle this week, Richard Brabner is visiting Professor of Civic Engagement at Newcastle and LPD Place Fellow at the University of Birmingham. Richard, your highlight of the week, please.

    “Thanks, Jim. Well, I’ve actually based in South East London in Bromley, but my highlight of the week was actually going up to Newcastle on Monday and Tuesday, the first time in my visiting role, to talk to the senior team and various colleagues up there about our Civic 2.0 campaign, which is looking at the next steps for the civic university movement and how we can have more of an impact on policy and the incentives in the system. So that was all very fun and very exciting.”

    Lovely stuff. And near Loughborough this week, Jen Summerton is Operations Director at Wonky. Jen, your highlight of the week, please.

    “Thanks, Jen. My highlight of the week, workwise, is launching the Secret Life of Students programme yesterday because I’m really excited. We’ve got some great content in there. I’ve just got to cheekily add another one, which is that yesterday was my birthday and my daughter made me some chocolate covered strawberry demi-gorgons which were absolutely delicious.”

    Oh that reminds me, someone gave me some chocolate at Student Governors yesterday. I think that’s melted in my pocket anyway.

    So yes, we’ll start this week with international education. This week the government published a long-awaited refresh of its strategy. Jen, what is in it and perhaps what isn’t in it?

    “Yes, so I think we were told in autumn 2024 that we were due for a refresh of this, so it is long-awaited. Tuesday. Unsurprisingly, though, missing our headline target numbers on international students, which turned out to be a bit of a hot potato last time. I think in 2019 we had a 600,000 international student target.

    “So what we do have this time is a £40 billion target on education exports by 2030. And that’s up from 35 billion in the last strategy, although perhaps worth mentioning that the methodology has changed and obviously inflation’s in quite a bit since then. I think really the focus this time is on exports, and transnational education gets plenty of warm words.

    “There’s also a slight difference in terms of the strategy being co-owned by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and the Department for Business and Trade along with the DfE. So the reference to education as a soft power tool, lots about influencing. And there’s a focus on student experience and support for international students as well, infrastructure, housing, that kind of thing.”

    Well, this is interesting now. Richard, on LBC this week, actually in written form, despite the fact that it was on LBC’s website, Jackie Smith said, “If they are to survive, universities must maximise the opportunities and expand abroad.” That’s a signal of intent, isn’t it?

    “Absolutely. I think whether it’s the correct signal of intent will be depending on your perspective on these sort of things. I think this document reflects political reality and it’s essentially quite a small-c conservative document in a way. I personally think its pragmatism should be welcomed in the sense that it’s not telling the sector something it might want to hear but isn’t able to deliver on.

    “There’s clearly been some mixed reaction. I think there are some organisations that have clearly been involved in shaping this strategy, have really warmly welcomed it. But you’ve seen various other commentary from people, particularly from the international student recruitment market, that are more negative towards it because I don’t think it’s ambitious enough.

    “The shift in emphasis towards TNE is really interesting. It reminds me of the coalition government, where international students were included in the net migration target, but there wasn’t a cap on numbers. There were mixed messages, but they did shift emphasis towards TNE thinking it could be the answer to all our prayers.

    “But what’s challenging for Jackie Smith, and why the £40 billion target is arguably quite ambitious, is that it doesn’t really reflect the internal challenges universities are under at the moment. Are they really able to capitalise on this moving forward? We know some really positive examples of TNE overseas and they’ve highlighted that in the strategy, particularly in relation to India and so on.

    “But how difficult it is not just to build campuses but deliver effective partnerships when you’re restructuring your institution internally and investing overseas when there’s so much challenging change at home, I think is quite difficult. So perhaps it won’t be institution-led. It’ll be tech and other innovation in the system that might lead this.”

    Now, Mike, when I was planning the study tour this year, I was thrilled to be reminded that Premier Inn operated in Germany. When we got there, without going into detail, I think it’s fair to say they’re struggling to maintain quality. If there’s a massive expansion in TNE, there’s actually not been much regulatory attention on it. Are there a set of quality risks?

    “Well, there are. I think there’s a lot of scope to think about TNE and its opportunities. If you go back to a UUKi report last month, it shows how much growth we’ve had. But it also makes the point that there’s a distinction between TNE actually delivered in country and TNE done by distance and other flexible means.

    “There’s an artefact in the report, that picture of them all in India with the Prime Minister, and you think, well, that’s a big ‘let’s build a campus’ kind of TNE. That’s the big slow burn stuff.

    “We don’t know. OfS continue to threaten English providers with expanding the scope of what they’re going to do and then going quiet on it again. What would be really good is some kind of backup that says, this is the kind of thing we’re going to be doing over the next three to four years, so institutions know they don’t go and set up provision and then fall foul of some new rule applied to people in a completely different country, which no one knew was coming.

    “The report talks about taking out red tape. If we’re going to start to put more red tape onto TNE, that’s not going to work.”

    Well, that’s interesting, isn’t it? Look, Jen, one of the things that strikes me is the Foreign Office’s logo is on this time, but the Home Office’s logo isn’t. We still have this split between immigration policy and what amounts to an export policy. How much joint government is going on here?

    “I mean, it’s an interesting one because in a sense, the new strategy is seeking cross-government commitment. We’ve got the Foreign Office and we’ve got the trade and business side involved. That’s quite a big ask.

    “In one way, Jackie Smith is saying if they are to survive, universities must maximise opportunities. Actually, she’s also saying it has to be done meaningfully and with purpose. Doing all of this in the right way at the same time as universities facing the financial constraints they’re under is a hugely ambitious task and it will be a lot easier for some institutions than others.

    “We need to be careful that the sector can support all institutions to do this in the right way and with purpose. And thinking about home students as well, how do we create opportunities overseas that benefit students in the UK? How can we make this across the board beneficial and valuable for everybody and greater than the sum of its parts?”

    Back on the main international recruitment stuff, Richard. A lot of other countries have national-level initiatives around experience, mental health, emergency financial support, housing, and so on. There’s very little here that moves the dial beyond warm words on urging institutions to offer the best experience.

    “Yeah. I think it does mention infrastructure and housing, which I’m not sure it did previously. Small steps forward, you could argue.

    “There are two things I’d pick up on. Firstly, it says it supports the sector-led agent quality framework, which is welcome, but I personally don’t think it goes far enough in protecting students from bad practice. There’s plenty of that out there, and it presents a reputational risk. It could be strengthened, perhaps through a co-regulatory approach with government and sector together.

    “Secondly, there’s a cursory mention of outcomes, but in a limited way. When we ran the Student Futures Commission a few years ago, there was a sub-commission looking at the international student experience. Graduate outcomes and employability were a major theme. The UK sector needs to get better at facilitating opportunities not just in the UK but also in the countries students come from and may return to.

    “I think there might be a role for government, not necessarily funding lots of things, but facilitating pooling resources and knowledge-sharing, particularly around graduate opportunities overseas.

    “And from a civic lens, another missing piece is utilising international students intentionally to support economic and social growth in towns and cities beyond their spending power. How could we facilitate their expertise and knowledge with small businesses that want to grow export-led approaches overseas, including in their own countries? That could support graduate outcomes and business in this country.”

    But Mike, this is part of the problem, isn’t it? When you’ve got a strategy separated from the trade-offs the Home Office has to make on immigration policy, you end up with an international education strategy that doesn’t really rehearse whether we want international graduates, whether we need immigration, ageing population, sustainable migration. That framing ends up missing and it reads like export promotion.

    “I suppose that framing of ‘we support the sustainable recruitment of high quality international students’ is sat there on the face of the thing, which is fine. There are clearly paragraphs there to show the sector they’re paying attention. That framing of genuine students, that’s a concern because the Home Office is sitting on a lot of casework suggesting it is concerned that some people who come here are not genuine students.

    “There’s something weird in how the Home Office, on the one hand, is activist in this area, but on the other hand it hasn’t used the CAS system where it allocates the number of students a place can recruit. It’s not done anything to deal with what sometimes looks like boom and bust in recruitment.

    “So that’s the tension. Yes, we think this is important, but this is definitely framed as the solution to your financial worries is to not bring more international students into this country. But it is still framed as international students are very valuable, what they bring, the globalisation.

    “And then I thought I’m annoyed that soft power boils down to how many presidents and prime ministers we have. Wouldn’t it be marvellous to have procurement managers spread across the world with British degrees? Because that would be far better for an industry than the occasional president, who is subject to international whim.

    “What could we do to say that’s where we get value by having a lot of people who have an experience of British education? But also, increasingly, we come back to the TNE thing, a British education that they haven’t had to fly halfway around the world in order to get.”

    I mean, on the target thing, Jen, we should note there isn’t an explicit numbers target, but there also isn’t a cap or a cut of the sort being played with now in Canada and Australia.

    “Yeah, and to be honest, it doesn’t take people in the sector who know how to do these calculations to work that up into a numbers target if they want to. Individual institutions will be required to do that. They have to plan what proportion will be overseas, what will be TNE, what might be English language, whatever, and diversify it.

    “And obviously the majority will still be international students coming to the UK. They have to decide where they want to prioritise efforts and finances. We’re hearing this from government all the time. They’re putting the onus back on institutions to be creative about how they can make more money and diversify their offer.

    “If we don’t do it, other countries will do it. So we have to be in it to win it.”

    I was at student governance yesterday and ended up talking with four of them from a particular part of the country who said they don’t think their own university could sustain a campus abroad, but the four of them could probably collaborate on a multidisciplinary degree abroad. Are there opportunities for collaboration in the TNE space that aren’t being taken?

    “Yeah, I’m sure there must be. If institutions are going to be creative and innovative in this space, you’d think so. And that’s where there could be a role for government in developing this strategy, whether nationally or regionally, easing out tensions and creating partnerships that could be effective abroad.”

    And finally, Mike, one of the things that strikes me is there often doesn’t seem to be much interaction between students studying similar subjects on a TNE campus and back home. Academics fly backwards and forwards. Is there more opportunity for internationalisation at home, maybe a semester at the TNE campus, or mixing without requiring someone to spend years abroad?

    “Yeah, we’ve definitely seen that with places with fixed scale campuses abroad. The opportunity to continue your course but do it in China or Malaysia is part of the offer.

    “There are American universities that bring their students here for a semester and get an experience but stay on course, and have the opportunity to mix with different people.

    “What will be interesting is whether you can do that with technology. If you’ve got your VLE set up and you’re teaching the module, what opportunities are there to make that module available to people in two or three other countries at the same time as people are doing it in the UK? Opportunities for group work, sharing resources, getting global perspective without anyone moving an inch. There’s lots more we could develop. There are good examples already of how people are making their TNE enrich the experience of UK students.”

    Well, fascinating. Now, let’s see who’s been blogging for us this week.

    “Hi, I’m Common Miles and this week on Wonky I’ll be writing about why universities struggle to act on early warning data from their analytics systems. Many of us have seen this, universities investing heavily in learning analytics. The OfS sets clear continuation thresholds, yet when dashboards flag at risk students, institutions often can’t respond effectively.

    “My article explores why this is an organisational challenge rather than a technology problem. The issue is that universities are structured for retrospective quality assurance, not proactive support. When analytics identifies a struggling student in week three, most institutions lack clear protocols for who should act and how.

    “Successful institutions solve this by building explicit governance frameworks and creating tiered response systems that bridge the gap between regulatory requirements and teacher judgment. You can read the full piece on Wonky.”

    Now, next up, UCAS has released provider-level end-of-cycle data for 2025, and it’s thrown up some interesting patterns, Mike.

     

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  • UCAS End of Cycle, 2025: access and participation

    UCAS End of Cycle, 2025: access and participation

    While one end of your university is focused entirely on the number of undergraduate students that get a place (and pay a fee) each year, another equally important driver is who these students are and where they come from.

    A part of the initial quid pro quo offered to the sector when we lost the last vestiges of student number control and managed expansion in 2012 was that some of this new capacity would be made available for students from non-traditional backgrounds – and that this would happen from everywhere: from the poshest ancient university to the most practical and locally-focused further education college.

    Though regulators all over the UK do keep an eye on how providers are doing at making this egalitarian dream a reality, in England at least the focus has been more on what providers are doing to widen access (and how they know it is working) and less on the actual numbers or entry rates.

    Deprivation

    UCAS has always provided data on what proportion of main scheme UK applicants from major demographics end up with an offer. Because of some smart choices by UCAS in its data design, I can also offer you an main scheme acceptance rate: the proportion of applications that end up with an accepted offer.

    (UCAS main scheme? That’s the one where an applicant applies to up to five courses before the 30 June deadline. It doesn’t include stuff like direct entry to clearing, or records of prior acceptance – where someone applies directly to the provider.)

    We don’t get as many metrics as we used to (what’s happened to UCAS’ own Multiple Equality Measure, or MEMs, I wonder) – and I’ve chosen to look at indices of multiple deprivation as a common way of thinking about participation from economically disadvantaged small areas. There are four of them (SIMD, WIMD, NIMD, and IMD – one for each home nation) and it makes no sense to see them all on one graph. By default we are seeing England (more data points!) but you can also choose to see Wales, Scotland, or Northern Ireland using the “nations/regions” filter.

    You choose your quintile of interest at the top (default is one, the most deprived 20 per cent), a year (default is 2025), chosen measure (offer rate or acceptance rate) and Age (default is “all”). This changes the display at the top: an ordered plot of providers, with the size of the dot showing the number of accepted students. Mouse over a dot to show annual proportions by quintile for main scheme applications, offers, and accepted applicants.

    [Full screen]

    By default you can see the proportion of applications that end with an accepted applicant – but a low score does not mean a provider is terrible at widening access. Recall there are a lot of variables here, with as much to do with student choice (or portfolio) and performance as what the provider does. For this reason the offer rate (how many applications end with an offer being made) is a more popular measure.

    Entry qualifications

    I feel like I keep saying this, but you can’t really talk about access without talking about what qualifications an applicant is likely to be bringing with them. A level performance is a spectacular proxy for how rich your parents are and how nice your house is – even the choice to take A levels is less common among disadvantaged groups.

    On the first issue we still don’t get data on actual (A level or tariff) points at provider level as structured data. The data exists – it’s on course pages at an individual course level, but supposedly it is far too commercially powerful to publish openly in a structured way at provider level. It feels like a policy from another age, and it doesn’t make anyone look good.

    The best we get is a provider-level look at the types of qualification held by accepted applicants (and those that get offers). I’ve not plotted this to enable comparison, but it is fascinating to find individual providers slowly moving away from recruiting A level students only and into the “other” qualification that suggest mature learners, and (less clearly) local rather than national recruitment.

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    Unconditional

    Back at the end of the 2010s there was a great deal of policy concern around the idea of unconditional offers. This was eventually refined into the “conditional unconditional offer”, a situation where a “firm” commitment from an applicant was rewarded with a lack of insistence on a particular set of grades or tariff points.

    Though there were often valid reasons given for direct unconditional offers (for example, when admission to an arts course was by portfolio, or where – rarely – a provider set its own entrance exams or used a detailed interview process to inform selection) nobody ever really managed to convincingly defend the conditional unconditional offer in a way that stopped being banned (with the briefest of blips when it was accidentally unbanned for a month or so in the 2022 cycle). It was odd as the best available evidence showed that such offers didn’t have an impact on student outcomes.

    I’ve been starting to hear stories about a growth in other forms of unconditional offers in this last cycle – the pressure to lock in applicants may be prompting usual academic requirements to be suspended or lowered. The available data suggest a very slight growth in “other unconditional offers” that regulators may want to keep an eye on, but only back to roughly 2023 levels from a slight dip last year.

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    In England, at least, we’ve rather taken our eye off the ball when it comes to participation metrics – they exist, but there’s very little (other than the required existence of an access and participation plan for those who want to charge higher fees) to connect them to regulation. There have been some suggestions from ministers that this may change, and if you are in planning or strategy you may wish to get yourself reacquainted with the state of the art in 2025.

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  • UCAS End of Cycle, 2025: provider recruitment strategies

    UCAS End of Cycle, 2025: provider recruitment strategies

    On the face of it, running a successful recruitment round is fairly straightforward.

    It’s a bit like making a salad. Everything needs to look fresh and appetising, and you don’t want too much of one thing in case people don’t like it.

    I mean, it’s not rocket science.

    The provider level data from UCAS nicely illustrates the other, less straightforward end of the equation. We know surprisingly little about what applicants actually want to do, and where they want to do it.

    Sure, there’s near-certainties – medicine at UCL is unlikely to want for well-qualified applicants any time soon – but some things are rather less expected. Computing and IT focused courses, which have been growing in popularity for years, appear to have hit a wall. Is it the onset of generative AI “vibe coding” hitting employment prospects? Is it a change in the public perception of technology companies?

    We pretty much know it is affordability (and the slow atrophy of the student maintenance system) that prompts applicants from less advantaged socio-economic backgrounds to choose to study locally. But we don’t know why selective providers that have historically recruited nationally have decided en masse to move into this very specialised market, or what changes they have made to their standard teaching (and indeed offer-making) approach to make this work.

    It’s questions like these that make the insights available from this year’s UCAS End of Cycle data so fascinating, and the choice of data that is released so frustrating.

    The Russell Group ate my students!

    There’s been a lot of talk (and a lot of quite informed data driven evidence) to suggest that traditionally selective providers have been accepting students with uncharacteristically low grades in greater numbers than in previous years.

    A couple of unexpected new additional data tables shed a little more light. This last (2025) cycle saw selective (high tariff) providers recruit more students with 15 A level points or below than in any previous year – while medium tariff providers are doing less well in students with between 9 and 11 points than any year outside the pandemic, and low tariff providers had their worst year on record for between 10 and 12 points, and their worst year since the pandemic for between 8 and 6 points.

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    A level points? Yes, for reasons best known to UCAS this is not the same as tariff points (so only includes A level performance, not vocational qualifications or grade 8 piano). You get 6 points for an A*, down to 1 point for an E – and only your best three A levels count. So 12 points means three Bs or thereabouts.

    The counter story is that this change in behavior hasn’t shifted the overall averages by that much. For high tariff providers the average accepted applicant has 13.9 A level points (down from 14 last year or 14.3 in 2016 – that’s round about AAB. Medium tariff is about BCC (10.4), Lower tariff is near enough CCC (9.4 – up very slightly on the historic average).

    [Full screen]

    Usually I’d suggest that this stasis is down to a regular recalculation of tariff groups – but I know that the last time UCAS allocated providers to groups was back in 2012. We’ve also never been told which providers are in which tariff group – this is a different split to the DfE or OfS variants, unhelpfully. And we don’t get data on A level (or tariff) points by provider, which would offer a much more helpful level of granularity to this point of sector-wide interest.

    A peep at provider strategies

    There’s been a welcome update to the release of the provider level End of Cycle dataset: previously we used to get offermaking only within a rather vestigial dataset known as “equalities” – 2025 adds the offermaking data plus a range of new equalities parameters to the main provider level release.

    For all tariff bands or sector-level data is interesting, the increasing diversity of (and increasing competition within) the sector means that provider-level changes in behavior are by far the most interesting component of this release. The new information means that the chart that you lost your morning to last year is now looking very likely to make you lose your entire day.

    This is a complex but powerful dashboard, which shows the difference between the most recent year (2025) of data and a comparator year you can choose (by default last year but you can choose any year since 2019) across two dimensions (you can choose from applications, offers, and accepted applicants for each). I’ve added filters by domicile (UK, international, or all) and subject group (the familiar top level – CAH1 – list).

    It’s a lot of data on one chart, so I’ve added a group filter, which by default removes some smaller providers from the display – and there’s a highlighter to help you find a provider of interest.

    A dot being further up or further right means that measure has grown between the comparator year and the current year, further down or further left means it has shrunk.

    [Full screen]

    There’s a nearly infinite number of stories to tell from this chart. Here’s some notable ones.

    Firstly Canterbury Christ Church University has accepted substantially fewer applicants in 2025 than in 2024. A dig around in the data suggests that decline is focused on UK domiciled applicants studying business subjects, which suggests to me that this shows the end of one or more franchise or partnership arrangements. I asked Canterbury Christ Church University for a comment – nothing yet but I’ll add it if it comes in – I’d imagine that this is the most visible of a wave of providers calculating that the increasing regulatory risk (with both OfS and DfE taking action) is not worth the hassle of running such provision – I’m tentatively pointing at Buckinghamshire New University and Oxford Brookes University as other similar (but smaller) examples).

    Not all of the Russell Group is following the same recruitment strategy – there are instances (Nottingham, Glasgow, Cardiff) where fewer applicants have been accepted than in 2024. Some Russell Group providers (for example Leeds, York, Southampton, and Cardiff) have seen fewer applications than in previous years – the first three in that list have nevertheless increased acceptances over last year. Because we can now see the number of offers made using the filters at the top, it is apparent that the entire group (excepting Cardiff and Southampton) made more offers than last year.

    League leaders

    If you are playing along with the dashboard you’ll have spotted that University College London accepted nearly 2,500 more applicants than last year (after making a genuinely startling 12,000 more offers) . The majority of this increase (2,290 accepted applicants, 10,650 offers) related to international applicants – with growth in pretty much every subject area contributing to this performance.

    That’s not the largest growth in accepted applicants, however (it’s the second largest). For the league leaders, we look to the University of Wolverhampton – which accepted an impressive 3,625 extra applicants compared to last year. Unlike UCL, these are all UK-domiciled students, and nearly all (2,970) are studying business subjects. To me, this suggests a new partnership – I asked Wolverhampton about this, and am waiting to hear back.

    But who made the most offers in 2025? For international students, it’s UCL and it isn’t even close. But for home students it was the University of Exeter, which made 7,130 more UK domiciled offers this year than last year (a total of 37,515 offers in the 2025 cycle!) across a mix of subject areas. Exeter wasn’t able to get me a comment before publication – I’ll add one if it comes in later.

    And I did promise a look at computing recruitment. It is a decline in both applications and acceptances pretty much across the board – with the exception of an 800 student growth in accepted applicants at Bath Spa University. UCL did recruit 40 more students than last year, but this is against a 1,520 decline in applications. There’s still a bit of growth at the University of Manchester, and the University of York – but note also Escape Studios (a growing independent visual effects specialist that was once known as Pearson College, which delivers degrees validated by the Coventry University).

    School leavers

    I’ve also put together a version of this chart that shows only the recruitment of 18 year olds. The direct path between school or college and university is no longer the dominant one in the UK, and hasn’t been for some time – but in policymaking and political discussions it is still where minds tend to go.

    [Full screen]

    Focusing on UK 18 year olds, we can see that the University of Exeter has grown most spectacularly compared to last year on applications, offers, and acceptances. Large amounts of growth in this part of the market tends to be concentrated in more selective providers, but we can also see credible performances from big civic providers like Nottingham Trent University, Manchester Metropolitan University, and Liverpool John Moores University.

    Conversely we can see smaller but notable declines in applications and acceptances from providers including the University of the West of England, Birmingham City University, and the University of East London. The noticeable pattern is that there is no pattern – recruitment among school leavers can go cold anywhere at any time it would seem. And there are some ways around this – both the University of York (up 1,285) and the University of Leeds (up 3,180) upped school-leaver offer making despite a small decline in applications

    A sense of the sector

    Competition is clearly heating up. For those who have hit on a winning recruitment formula, the challenge becomes a need to ensure that every additional undergraduate gets the high quality experience they have been led to expect. An increase in fee income is almost all going to go to investment in capacity (be that more staff, retaining existing staff, or providing more resources). If your expansion has been into applicant groups you have little experience in teaching, the need to invest rises.

    Conversely, for those who have yet to hit upon the way to attract applications reliably there will already have been internal discussions about what needs to be done or what needs to change. Recruitment can and does figure in portfolio review and course revalidation questions: all of which comes down to whether a provider can afford to do what it would like to continue doing. Losing resources or capacity is a very last resort – once you wave goodbye to a course or department it is very difficult to spin back up.

    There will also be attention paid to sector trends – the kind of stuff I plotted back in December when we got the first phase of the End of Cycle release. Is it something your provider is doing, or a more general societal change, that means recruitment is growing or shrinking on a particular course. These are difficult, painful conversations, and need careful, considered, responses.

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  • UCAS End of Cycle sector level data, 2025

    UCAS End of Cycle sector level data, 2025

    There’s any number of stories that can be told from UCAS’ sector level end of cycle data release.

    UCAS itself, for instance, focuses on the new data on student residence intentions – 31 per cent of 18 year old applicants in 2025 intend to live at home (rising to 46 per cent in Scotland).

    If we add in information on deprivation (IMD) and acceptance route, we learn that 50 per cent of the less advantaged quintile of students aged 18 intend to live at home while studying, compared to just 18 per cent of their peers in quintile 5.

    And there are interesting regional variations – two thirds of the least advantaged 18 year old accepted applicants in Scotland intend to live at home (mouse over the map to see the regional breakdowns – and of course UK wide IMD isn’t a thing so treat that as indicative only).

    Likewise, 75 per cent of the least advantaged group applying via main scheme Clearing will be living at home.

    [Full screen]

    Tariff wars

    But you know and I know there has only been one recruitment story this year, and it is one that is best described via a very familiar chart:

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    Higher tariff (what we once called “selective”) providers are recruiting more 18 year old students than ever before, a trend that has become more prominent since the end of pandemic restrictions. The chart above shows acceptance rates, demonstrating that – simply put – as an 18 year old you are now substantially more likely to end up at a high tariff provider if you apply there.

    One of the commonly proposed explanations for this phenomenon is the way in which applicants are using the “decline my place” functionality (on the UCAS platform since 2019) to trade up to a more prestigious provider. But the data neatly disproves this – movement tends to be within rather than between tariff bands:

    [Full screen]

    So what else might be going on?

    We also get data by tariff group and acceptance route in this release – and from that we can see some very interesting underlying trends. Here the thick bars are the proportions and the thin ones the raw numbers, with the colours showing acceptance routes.

    [Full screen]

    Gradually higher tariff providers have been taking a lower proportion of their 18 year old students via firm acceptances, and a higher proportion from other main scheme choices (including clearing). But this shift needs to be set against enormous expansion in numbers across the board – high tariff providers took more 18 year olds overall this year than their entire 2019 intake, and more firm or insurance 18 year old applicants this year than their entire 2023 intake.

    In contrast, proportions of 18 year olds by route have stayed broadly similar by proportion in medium and low providers, with medium tariff numbers staying steady and low tariff numbers slowly falling.

    More data please?

    So, even though high tariff providers have been slightly more active in clearing than in recent years (and even then, it is not outside of historic proportions) the growth comes simply from making offers to more applicants who apply to them, and then accepting them.

    What I really wanted to know is on what terms. There’s already a fair amount of circumstantial evidence that high-tariff providers are making low tariff offers – and I was hoping that this release would give us the data we needed to be sure.

    But UCAS has always been very coy about the association between tariff groups and the actual grades they accept. I can kind of understand the commercial in confidence arguments about detailed data at provider level (but the more I think about it the less I do…) – I cannot see any reason why we are not allowed to see grades by tariff group.

    So I am taking a roundabout route using the data we have got, and we start by looking at the relationship between achieved A level points and POLAR4 quintiles. I’ve generally held the opinion that A levels are a fantastic way of telling how middle class an 18 year old applicant is so there are no surprises that people from better off background are more likely to apply, more likely to be accepted if they apply, and more likely to have better grades than their peers when they do – here’s that in graphical form.

    [Full screen]

    Outside of the years of the examnishambles proportions remain pretty stable, even though numbers have increased in all cases. Roughly a third of POLAR quintile 5 (most advantaged) accepted applicants get AAA or above, roughly three in ten of POLAR quintile 1 (least advantaged) accepted applicants get CCC or below.

    We run into another wrinkle in the UCAS data here: we don’t get tariff group acceptances by POLAR, though we do get it by IMD (and we don’t get A level points by IMD, but we do by POLAR). I’m pretty sure UCAS invented the multiple equality measure (MEMS) for precisely that reason, but we don’t appear to get that at all these days.

    So here is a plot of acceptance applicants by IMD quintile (note that you can only really look at one home nation at a time due to differences in methodologies). And what is apparent is the familiar slow steady growth in less advantaged 18 year accepted applicants attributed to widening access initiatives.

    [Full screen]

    Unfortunately this is a case of what we don’t see. There’s a potential happy ending where we learn that high tariff providers are massively expanding their recruitment of applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds, and that this explains both the rise in numbers and any decline in average offermaking. The growth in high tariff recruitment from low advantage quintiles is welcome, but not anything like huge enough to explain the growth in numbers.

    We are left to conclude that the expansion is in all groups equally – and given that most of the best A level scores tend to go to the top of the league tables anyway, it is hard to dismiss the idea that tariffs are falling. Perhaps January’s provider level release will offer us more oblique ways to examine what should be a very straightforward question – and one (that given the influx of less academically experienced students into providers that have not historically supported students like that) may well attract regulatory interest.

    Bonus charts

    We randomly got a really lovely dataset showing entry rates by Westminster constituency – and I could hardly resist plotting it alongside the 2024 election results. There is a mild correspondence between a lower entry rate and a higher Reform UK vote.

    [Full screen]

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  • Podcast: AI and jobs, provider closure, UCAS figures

    Podcast: AI and jobs, provider closure, UCAS figures

    This week on the podcast we examine the challenges facing UK higher education as another tough academic year begins

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  • Behind the scenes at UCAS on level 3 results day

    Behind the scenes at UCAS on level 3 results day

    In Cheltenham they call it “UCAS Christmas” and it’s not hard to see why. Months of preparation, a whole lot of expectation riding on a single day, highs and lows of emotion, and more snacks than you can shake a stick at.

    Level 3 results day at UCAS HQ has the kind of jittery manic energy that comes when a lot of people have been anticipating this day for months, and half of them have been up since 2.00am the night before. By the time I arrive, the marquee moment – the national release of admissions decisions into 700k-plus inboxes at 8.00am – has passed without a hitch and the main business of Clearing, fielding queries from anxious applicants (and their parents), is under way.

    Nerve centre

    At the heart of the building sits Joint Operations Centre, or JOC for short, a room humming with the quiet buzz of people making sure the right things are happening. Courteney Sheppard, UCAS head of operations, explains that today, most UCAS people who have decision-making power on results day convene in this one space so that if anything happens that needs speedy resolution the right person is on hand. Those with deep subject expertise are housed temporarily in the office next door, ready to jump in to address issues as they arise.

    All along one wall there are massive screens – at least twenty and probably more like thirty, all monitoring different data in real time. One screen simply shows the current time (because in the critical two minutes before 8.00am release there are actions that are coordinated to the second); others track web traffic, database capacity, maximum wait times for calls, social media traffic, applicant behaviours, and much more besides. Opposite the screens is a flipchart where there are already a ream of jotted notes about ways to improve for next year.

    It’s easy to underestimate the logistical and technological challenge facing UCAS on results day but consider how rare it is for any system to have to cope with close to simultaneous login of every possible user. All over the country at 8.00am on the dot applicants’ UCAS results portal goes live and they can login to see whether they have secured their preferred course and higher education institution. Simultaneously they receive an email from UCAS with the same information. And, I’m told, UCAS creates a static web page for each and every applicant with the same information so that if there is any delay at all in getting into the portal, even of only a few seconds, the applicant can be redirected to the information they are looking for.

    “The 8 o’clock moment is always hairy,” says Lynsey Hopkins, UCAS director of admissions. “The preparation is incredible, and takes months, because there are so many moving parts. The tech is really complex and is getting more so all the time. You always worry that if any applicant wasn’t able to see their outcomes that could ramp up their anxiety on one of the highest stakes and most stressful experiences of their young lives.”

    But getting information on admissions decisions out to applicants is only the beginning. The vast majority – in fact the highest number on record this year – will have a place confirmed at their first choice of institution. Most of those will segue seamlessly into celebrating and looking forward to taking up their place. But a substantial number will pass through Clearing – and not only because they have been unlucky enough not to receive an offer from their preferred institution. Some applicants’ plans will have changed since they made their application through UCAS and will wish to decline their place in favour of a different option; others don’t even start applying until the Clearing period. Where UCAS holds data on applicants’ previous choices and qualifications the system will suggest possible matches for applicants to help them begin to sift their options.

    “The largest group of people in Clearing are those who have actively put themselves there,” says Ben Jordan, UCAS head of strategy. “Clearing doesn’t have negative connotations among young people at all – it’s just a brand.”This year 92 per cent of all higher education providers are offering courses through Clearing, and there are more than 30,000 courses available, offering an enormous degree of choice to applicants.

    Holding hands

    In theory, applicants contact institutions directly, and once they have secured an offer, are able to update their applications via their UCAS portal and have the application confirmed by the institution, without active intervention from UCAS. In practice, many applicants still need help and support from the central admissions service.

    Over in the “west wing” there’s the traditional call centre staffed by a mixture of UCAS’ customer service team, volunteers from across the business, and temporary staff, all sporting UCAS t-shirts, headsets and query cards they can wave to summon a senior staff member to help them answer the more complicated questions. On a normal day, UCAS has 50-60 people working on customer services; today it’s around 200.

    It’s not uncommon for calls to simply consist of an applicant saying, “My UCAS portal says I got in. Did I get in?” To which the correct answer is, “Yes, you got in, hurray!” Job done to everyone’s satisfaction. But it’s much more likely that applicants have more complicated questions – predictably many lose their login information, don’t fully understand the process, and generally need a bit of hand-holding at a stressful time.

    “We don’t just handle questions, we handle emotions,” says Jordan Court, customer call handler. “There can be so much riding on this day for applicants, they can get so anxious, it’s understandable they can sometimes lose the ability to deal with administrative stuff.” Every call handler, especially those volunteering receive detailed training, with a strong focus on emotional intelligence. “We tell people, ‘Imagine how you would want your child or your sibling to be treated’” says Courteney. “Nine of ten times what people want from the call is reassurance or validation, especially if they’re not able to get support from a school or college.”

    While the calls come in steadily, in this day and age much of the queries are via social media or the UCAS chatbot, Cassy, which is able to resolve the more transactional questions, reducing the overall call load by around 30 per cent. Some issues require intervention: Jordan is able to resolve one query by noticing from a screenshot that an applicant is trying to access his UCAS portal via a web browser that has been designed for gamers – advising the applicant to try again with a more mainstream browser.

    Without fail, everyone I speak to talks in glowing terms about their experience of being “on the phones” for Clearing. It’s clearly a formative experience for many UCAS staff, giving them a strong sense of purpose and of the importance of the work they do to connect applicants to higher education, as well as occasionally throwing up useful insight about how to improve the applicant experience.

    Lines to take

    Elsewhere in the building Jo Saxton, UCAS chief executive, is fielding media appearances and questions alongside minister for skills Jacqui Smith, who has the day before recorded a special message of congratulations to applicants from UCAS’ very own professional recording studio.

    UCAS director of data and analysis Maggie Smart talks me through the extraordinary process of data analysis that underpins the talking points everyone is reading in the morning papers. As a voluntary signatory to the UK Statistics Authority’s code of practice for statistics, Maggie is responsible for making sure that anything UCAS says about what the data indicates should be verifiable with actual data published on its website.

    Results day for the UCAS data team starts at 11.00pm the night before, capturing live operational data at 12.01am, wrestling it into a format that is publishable as public data, creating different datasets to inform governments in each of the UK Nations, and analysing the key insights that will inform the press release and briefing to the senior team until 5.00am. The press release covering the agreed talking points is signed off and released at 7.00am.

    Following results day the team will track and publish daily Clearing data, updating the public dashboards by 11.00am each day. One innovation for this year will be publication of weekly data on use of the “decline my place” function, seeking to understand more about which applicants are more likely to take up that option.

    In recent years the media around results day has presented something of a mixed picture, with celebratory stories of achievement and advice on securing a university place mixed with more critical queries of the value of higher education. For UCAS, engagement with stakeholders in government and in media is partly about giving confidence in the robustness of the system and partly about landing messages about the continued importance of higher education opportunity, in line with the emphasis on breaking down barriers to participation in UCAS’ recently published strategy.

    In its next strategic period, UCAS will focus on the 250k-odd individuals who register for UCAS but never get to the point of making an application. Understanding the experiences, hopes and aspirations of that cohort will help to inform not just UCAS, but the whole HE sector on how to meet the needs of those of that cohort that could potentially benefit from higher education.

    Given the complexity of the policy landscape for HE it’s invigorating to spend a day with people who share a core belief in the power of higher education to change lives, of which Ben Jordan is possibly one of the most heartfelt. As the policy narrative on access to university takes on a more regional and skills-led flavour, Ben argues that the enormous diversity of the higher education offer needs to be better understood so that students can truly appreciate the breadth of the options they have.

    “I’ve seen purpose-built factories, I’ve seen racing car courses on university campuses,” he says. “These days the majority of applicants aren’t those with just A levels, it’s a much more mixed picture, and it’s so important that they understand not only what is opened up or closed off by the choices they make but how much higher education has to offer them. It’s our job to get that message out.”

    This article is published in association with UCAS.

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  • Number of Chinese undergrads accepted to UK unis surges by 13%

    Number of Chinese undergrads accepted to UK unis surges by 13%

    According to UCAS data released today to coincide with A-level results day, the number of international students accepted to UK institutions has risen to 52,640 – up 2.9% on 2024 when this figure stood at 51,170.

    In just a year, the number of students from China accepted into university via the UCAS system went up a whopping 13% – with a total of 12,380 acceptances.

    Meanwhile, 2025 has proven to be a year of success for domestic students in the UK – with 28.3% of all grades being A or A* for students across England, Wales and Northern Ireland, according to the BBC.

    Commenting on the numbers, UCAS chief executive Jo Saxton pointed out the huge achievement of this year’s students, whose education was hit hard by the Covid-19 pandemic.

    “This year’s students were just thirteen when the pandemic hit, and their secondary schooling was turned upside down,” she said. “It’s great to see these applicants securing a university place in record numbers, seeking more education and investing in their futures. I am equally delighted to see how universities across the country have responded to their ambition.”

    Undergraduate international students have also found success this year despite some universities prioritising domestic students due to a focus on financial stability.

    According to a recent BBC article, Saxton explained that some UK universities were focussing on enrolling domestic undergraduates because of “uncertainty” around international students.

    She also pointed out that some institutions could accept a greater number of domestic students this year even if they did not meet the exact conditions of their offer because offering places to UK students, as opposed to international students, was more likely to result in financial stability for the institution.

    It’s great to see these applicants securing a university place in record numbers, seeking more education and investing in their futures
    Jo Saxton, UCAS

    It comes amid a turbulent time for the international education sector in the UK – with upcoming compliance changes forcing some universities to stop recruiting for certain courses or from some countries rather than risk falling foul of tightened BCA metrics.

    Many UK universities are currently facing financial difficulties, with around four in 10 universities currently at a deficit, according to a report by the Office for Students.

    Of the courses chosen by students, the most popular in the UK this year were Engineering and Technology, up 12.5% from last year at 30,020 acceptances, Mathematics with 9,220 acceptances and Law with 27,150.

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  • Podcast: AI and jobs, provider closure, UCAS figures

    Podcast: AI and jobs, provider closure, UCAS figures

    This week on our final podcast before the summer break, we unpack the mounting panic about graduate jobs – is AI really to blame, or are today’s students simply paying the price for a sluggish economy, a stalling skills strategy, and shifting recruitment practices?

    Plus we discuss new figures from UCAS that show a record number of 18-year-olds applying to university, and we look at a major new report on how provider closures are affecting students, and what the sector should do next to avoid chaos when courses collapse.

    With Hillary Gyebi-Ababio, Head of Public Affairs at Jisc, Hugh Jones, independent consultant and higher education postcard maestro, Michael Salmon, News Editor at Wonkhe, and presented by Jim Dickinson, Associate Editor at Wonkhe.

    UCAS applications and offer making by June deadline, 2025

    Student protection through market exit is not a compliance exercise

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  • UCAS applications and offer making by June deadline, 2025

    UCAS applications and offer making by June deadline, 2025

    The UCAS 30 June application deadline is the last point an applicant can apply outside of clearing.

    Though most applications (particularly from UK 18 year olds) happen by the January deadline, the June figures allow for a complete analysis of application behaviour in the UCAS main scheme.

    The number of 18 year old UK applicants has reached a record high of 328,390 (up 2.2 per cent on last year) – with the total number of applicants at 665,070 (up 1.3 per cent on last year).

    Application rates

    As always it is salutary to compare the often-pushed narrative that young people are being tempted away from expensive/poor-value/woke (delete as per your personal preference) higher education with the actuality that numbers are rising. You could even be tempted to imagine what the application rates might be like in a sector with a realistic student maintenance offer.

    I mention application rates because this is what declinist commentators will seize on. For UK domiciled 18 year old applicants, the application rate is 41.20 – down from 41.80 per cent last year. This fall is visible across most measures of deprivation: in England, for example, every IMD quintile but quintile 5 (the least disadvantaged) sees a falling application rate.

    [Full screen]

    In part, this could be a function of another year where the dominance of higher tariff providers in driving applications has increased: higher tariff providers disproportionately inspire applications from (and recruit) better off young people.

    This chart shows the number of applications to each of three tariff groups. For UK 18 year olds the default is fast becoming an application to a high tariff provider. We don’t (unfortunately) get application numbers by deprivation and tariff group.

    [Full screen]

    These number of placed students is likely to rise too: UCAS and Ofqual have suggested that there are 28,000 places available in Clearing this year.

    Offer rates

    One innovation in this year’s release is information on offer rates – the proportion of applications that result in an offer being made. We get three years of data, which demonstrate that offer rates are rising across the sector – and that (as you may expect) high tariff providers are less likely to make offers than lower tariff providers. The growth among high tariff providers is driven both by rising application numbers and a rising offer rate.

    [Full screen]

    For believers of the other recruitment myth (that universities load up on international students and are less keen to take even very able home students) we get a timely corrective. It turns out that 98.5 per cent of UK 18 year old applicants have an offer, compared with 89.7 per cent of international students.

    [Full screen]

    Subjects

    Finally, it’s always fascinating to look at applications by subject area – a plot by CAH1 groups shows a sharp rise in the popularity of business, subjects allied to medicine, engineering, and law: with an intriguing drop in applications to computing subjects. There may be a generative AI effect on computing applications – the rise of “vibe coding” and other uses of agents in software development may mean that the attraction of learning to programme computers properly may be waning.

    That’s the best explanation I have – and it is curious that law (a domain where predictions of AI tools eating entry level roles are ten a penny) doesn’t appear to be experiencing a similar phenomenon.

    [Full screen]

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  • Reflections on the demand for higher education – and what UCAS data reveal ahead of Results Day 2025

    Reflections on the demand for higher education – and what UCAS data reveal ahead of Results Day 2025


    This HEPI blog was kindly authored by Maggie Smart, UCAS Director of Data and Analysis

    As we pass the 30 June deadline for this year’s undergraduate admissions cycle, UCAS’ data offers an early view of applicant and provider behaviour as we head into Confirmation and Clearing. It also marks a personal milestone for me, as it’s my first deadline release since rejoining UCAS. I wanted to take a deeper look at the data to reflect on how much things have changed since I worked here 10 years ago.

    Applicant demand has always been shaped by two key elements: the size of the potential applicant pool, and their propensity to apply. Since I last worked at UCAS in 2016, these two factors have continuously interchanged over the better part of the past decade – sometimes increasing or decreasing independently but often counterbalancing each other. Let’s take a look at how things are shaping up this year.

    Overall, by the 30 June there have been 665,070 applicants (all ages, all domiciles) this year, compared to 656,760 (+1.3%) in 2024. This is an increase in applicants of over 64,000 since UCAS last reported in January, although the profile of these additional applicants is very different. At the January Equal Consideration Deadline (ECD), over half of the total number of applicants were UK 18-year olds, who are the most likely group to have applied by that stage in the cycle. They represent just 8% of the additional applicants since January, among a much larger proportion of UK mature and international students.

    As we saw at January, the differences in demand for places between young people from the most advantaged (POLAR4 Quintile 5) and most disadvantaged (POLAR4 Quintile 1) areas at June remain broadly the same as last year – with the most advantaged 2.15 times more likely to apply to HE than those from the least advantaged backgrounds, compared to 2.17 last year.

    UK 18-year-old demand

    Demand for UK higher education (HE) has long been shaped by the 18-year-old population – the largest pool of applicants. Despite the well-known challenges facing the HE sector at present, at the 30 June deadline we see record numbers of UK 18-year-old applicants, with 328,390 applicants this year – up from 321,410 (+2%) in 2024. This trend was almost entirely locked in by the January deadline, given the vast majority of UK 18-year-old applicants have applied at this stage in the cycle.

    During my previous tenure at UCAS, the size of the UK 18-year-old population had been falling year on year but from 2020, it began to increase. This continued growth drives the increase in UK 18-year-old applicant numbers we have observed in recent cycles. But when we look at their overall application rate to understand the strength of demand among this group, the data shows a marginal decline again this year – down to 41.2% from 41.9% in 2024. The historically strong growth in the propensity of UK 18-year-olds to apply for HE, which we’ve observed across the last decade, has clearly plateaued.

    This could be due to a range of factors, such as young people choosing to take up work or an apprenticeship, or financial barriers. We know that cost of living is increasingly influencing young people’s decisions this year, with pre-applicants telling us that financial support – such as scholarships or bursaries – ranks as the second most important consideration for them (46%), followed closely by universities’ specific cost-of-living support (34%).

    Interesting to note is the number of UK 19-year-old applicants. When separating the data to distinguish 19-year-olds applying for the first time (as opposed to those reapplying), there has been a decent increase – from 46,680 last year to 48,890 this year (+4.7%). For many years, the number of first-time UK 19-year-old applicants had been falling year on year, but since 2023 this trend has started to reverse. This suggests that demand among young people may be holding up as they decide to take a year out before applying to university or college.

    Mature students

    For UK mature students (aged 21+), the picture looks very different. The number of mature students applying to university or college ebbs and flows depending on the strength of the job market, so since I was last at UCAS, we have typically seen applications decrease when employment opportunities are strong and vice versa. Alongside fluctuations linked to the employment market, rising participation at age 18 means there is a smaller pool of potential older applicants who have not already entered HE. The falling demand from mature students continues in 2025, although in recent years there have been small but significant increases in the volume of mature applicants applying after the 30 June deadline and directly into Clearing. 

    As of this year’s 30 June deadline there have been 86,310 UK mature (21+) applicants, compared to 89,690 (-3.8%) in 2024, meaning a fall in demand compared to the previous year at this point in the cycle for the fourth year in a row. However, whereas at the January deadline mature applicants were down 6.4% compared to the same point last year, at June the figure is only 3.8% down showing some recovery in the numbers. This is another indication that mature students are applying later in the cycle. While it remains too early to say whether we will see continued growth in mature direct to Clearing applicants in 2025, last year 9,390 UK mature students who applied direct to Clearing were accepted at university or college, an increase of 7.4% on 2023 and 22.7% higher than 2022.

    International students

    When looking at the UCAS data through the lens of international students, the landscape has changed significantly since 2016. Brexit led to a sharp decline in EU applicants, offset by strong growth elsewhere, the pandemic caused disruption to international student mobility, and we’ve seen intensified global competition, shifting market dynamics and geopolitics which are increasingly influencing where they choose to study. This year we’re seeing growth once more, with 138,460 international applicants compared to 135,460 in 2024 (+2.2%) – although this stood at +2.7% at January. It should be noted that UCAS does only see a partial view of undergraduate international admissions (we tend to get a more complete picture by the end of the cycle) and we don’t capture data on postgraduate taught and research pathways.

    Interest among Chinese students in UK education has held firm since my time at UCAS, and this year we’re seeing a record number of applicants from China – 33,870, up from 30,860 (+10%) in 2024. This year’s data also shows increases in applicants from Ireland (6,060 applicants, +15%), Nigeria (3,170 applicants, +23%) and the USA (7,930 applicants, +14%). 

    Offer-making

    We are releasing a separate report on offer-making this year, alongside the usual data dashboard for applications. This additional data covers offers and offer rates over the past three years, from the perspective of applicants according to their age and where they live, and from the perspective of providers by UK nation and tariff group.

    What we’re seeing as the natural consequence of increased applications this year is an uplift in offers. Universities have made more offers than ever before this year, with 2.0 million main scheme offers to January deadline applicants overall, largely driven by the rise in UK 18-year-olds applicants (who are the most likely to use their full five choices while applying). This record high surpasses the previous peak of 1.9 million offers set last year (+3.8%).

    While the main scheme offer rate has increased across all provider tariff groups, the most notable uplift is for higher tariff providers – up 3.2 percentage points to 64.4% this year.  Despite the increase in offer rates, higher tariffs do still remain the lowest, partly due to being the most selective institutions. Offer rates by medium and lower tariff providers have also increased, by 0.9 percentage points to 77.0% among medium tariff providers, and by 1.5 percentage points to 81.7% among lower tariff providers. This means that, among those who applied by the Equal Consideration Deadline in January, 72.5% of main scheme applications received an offer this year, also a record high, and 1.8 percentage points higher than in 2024.

    It’s worth noting that we’ll be updating our provider tariff groupings in time for the 2026 cycle, to reflect changes in the higher education landscape.

    Looking ahead

    For students who are intent on going to university or college, it makes this a very good year, with more opportunities than ever before. A record 94.5% of students who applied by the January deadline will be approaching the critical summer period having received at least one offer. High levels of offer-making by universities and colleges typically translates into more acceptances, which should give applicants plenty of confidence heading into results day. 

    I’m delighted to be back at UCAS, and my team will continue to dig further into the data as Confirmation and Clearing draws nearer to see how demand translates into accepted places come results day.

    UCAS

    UCAS, the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service, is an independent charity, and the UK’s shared admissions service for higher education.

    UCAS’ services support young people making post-18 choices, as well as mature learners, by providing information, advice, and guidance to inspire and facilitate educational progression to university, college, or an apprenticeship.

    UCAS manages almost three million applications, from around 700,000 people each year, for full-time undergraduate courses at over 380 universities and colleges across the UK.

    UCAS is committed to delivering a first-class service to all our beneficiaries — they’re at the heart of everything we do.

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