Danny Dorling: six trends in university admissions

The higher education playing field is changing shape. It is tipping in new directions and is about to undergo its greatest transformation yet as the free market in student numbers is ushered in.

With the first cohort of students to pay higher tuition fees entering their final months of study, and controls on university student numbers due to be removed this autumn, now seems a good time to stop and take stock of changes to the student body and university admissions.

We all know that participation in higher education is widening, but by how much? How have £9,000 annual fees changed students’ decisions and universities’ behaviour? And what might today’s admissions trends tell us about what to expect when the cap on student numbers is lifted?

1. More students are taking up places at university than ever before

This academic year is the first in which more than 500,000 students have taken up the offer of a place at a UK university, a rise of 16,800 year on year. Although most of the growth came from home students, there has also been a jump in the number of successful applicants from other European Union member states, and record numbers are arriving to take up places from other continents, too. Most of the UK students are from England – 382,500 (up 4 per cent, and one-third higher than in 2006) – and are studying in England (433,200, also up 4 per cent and the highest level recorded).

Ucas’ End of Cycle Report 2014 also shows smaller rises in the number of acceptances in Wales and a more stable situation in Northern Ireland. It is harder to judge what is occurring in Scotland because not all acceptances into higher education there are routed through Ucas.

It is England – which has by far the most expensive university tuition fees in Europe – that has produced the greatest surprise. The 2014 intake had just enough warning of what was coming to be able to make alternative arrangements before embarking on their A levels. It turns out that more pupils than ever chose to go to university, especially in England, and from the poorest of areas. Why?

2. The rise of the BTEC – but there are more students with A levels, too

Last autumn, some 30 per cent of all English 18-year-olds were accepted at university through Ucas, the highest proportion recorded at such a young age. Many more will follow just a year later – by the age of 19, more than 40 per cent of young people.

One reason for the increase in participation is that more universities are admitting students with BTEC vocational qualifications. However, the proportion of 18-year-olds entering higher education with A levels also reached a new high last autumn, so the overall increase was not due to any “dumbing down”.

Entry rates also improved for students from poor backgrounds. In 2009, just 10 per cent of English school-leavers who had received free school meals entered university. By 2014, that proportion had risen to 15 per cent. Most of that increase was a result of these students doing much better in their GCSEs. Dramatic improvements were made to poorer children’s schooling during the New Labour years. Between 2005 and 2013, the proportion of children in the UK eligible for free school meals who secured five good GCSE grades at age 16 rose from 18 per cent to 38 per cent. (The Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission highlighted this rise in school achievement as one of the few great recent successes for mobility in its annual 2014 report.) These young people went on to do well in their sixth-form and further education colleges. It is true that in the same period more children became eligible for free school meals – rising from 12 per cent to 14 per cent of all children between the 2010 and 2014 cohorts as poverty and hunger rose across England – but that was not the main reason for the increase in participation.

Trends in entry rates from disadvantaged areas show a similar pattern. For those from the most disadvantaged areas of England and Wales, the chances of entering higher education have increased by a third in just five years. While a lot of this widening of participation is down to disadvantaged young people using BTECs for university entry in larger numbers, more of it is attributable to the dramatic doubling of good GCSE results achieved by the poorest students. Some of the improvement might also be the result of universities’ outreach work in disadvantaged areas.

3. Participation is widening at all levels – but more quickly among the affluent

Not only are more young people from disadvantaged areas going to university, they are also more likely to make it to an elite, high-tariff institution. Ucas calculates that those from the least advantaged areas were 40 per cent more likely to enter the highest-tariff institutions in 2014 than their counterparts were just three years earlier. However, young people from these areas remain an enormous seven times less likely to enter such institutions than students from the most advantaged areas; in 2006, they were nine times less likely to go. Most of the improvement has occurred in the past 12 months and has surprised many analysts, who thought higher fees would deter the poorest.

The 40 per cent headline rise in widening participation certainly looks good, but let’s put it in perspective – it is, in fact, an increase from just 2.3 per cent to 3.2 per cent of the children from the poorest areas of the UK attending the highest-tariff universities between 2011 and 2014. For every 100 children, this is not even a whole extra child. And the rise among the most disadvantaged students attending university is less than half the absolute rise in the number of successful applicants from the most advantaged areas. It is mathematically possible for poorer groups to have by far the largest increase in entry rates while the absolute differences still widen. The English higher education system provides a fine example of just such a conundrum.

Rounding to whole numbers, for every three children from the poorest areas going to the “poshest” (high-entry tariff) universities in 2014, some 21 children from the most advantaged areas also went. Three years earlier, in 2011, the respective figures were two and 19. To put this another way, for every extra child from a poorer area allowed in to a high-tariff university in 2014, an extra two from the best-off areas arrived within the same year.

For every extra child from a poorer area allowed in 2014 into a high-tariff university, another two from the best-off areas arrived in the same year

4. Students are more in demand than ever before – so many more offers are being made

The latest Ucas admissions figures give us a tantalising glimpse of what might happen this autumn when a free market is set to be introduced and universities in England will be allowed unprecedented freedom over the numbers of students they can admit.

The current labour market for the young is appalling. Some 750,000 young people – 17 per cent of 16- to 24-year-olds – are unemployed, according to the official count. Many others are underemployed, working part-time or on zero-hours contracts, or even claiming to be self-employed to avoid the stigma of unemployment. What few jobs are on offer to young adults are mostly precarious, and almost all are very low paid compared with the equivalent Northern European positions. Indeed, the largest real-terms falls in hourly wages between 2008 and 2014 were for the youngest employees in Britain. There are far fewer apprenticeships available than there are young people out of work: some 440,000 people of all ages embarked on an apprenticeship in England last year, 70,000 fewer than in 2012-13. At the same time, across most of the rest of Europe and indeed much of the globe, the Great Recession continues. This means that going abroad to work is a much less attractive option than it used to be. All these factors make university an appealing proposition. There is not much else on offer.

Meanwhile, students are worth more and more to universities because most can charge £9,000 a year tuition fees. In order to attract them, English universities are increasing their marketing spend very quickly. According to a Freedom of Information request last year by Times Higher Education, universities collectively spent more than £36 million on student marketing in 2012-13, a rise of 14.7 per cent on 2011-12 and a 33 per cent rise on 2010-11.

In this context, it is interesting to observe a fourfold increase in the number of unconditional offers being made in 2014 to candidates who did not yet have their exam results. The number of unconditional offers made was still low (12,000 – just 1.4 per cent of all offers made), but it has risen rapidly. Comparing the change in acceptances between universities that started to make more unconditional offers in 2014 and the rest suggests that this increase has had little impact on students’ choices.

What has been more important are the large increases in the total number of offers being made in recent years – almost all of them conditional. In 2014, the number of offers made by higher education institutions climbed by 100,000 year on year to reach a record 1.8 million across the UK. This is a significant shift in the pattern of offer-making: applicants are 50 per cent more likely to get a full set of five offers than their counterparts were just a few years ago.

When the cap on student numbers is removed, it would be surprising if we did not see a further rapid increase in the number of offers of all types being made in the next admissions cycle. After all, it may be more in the interest of the university than the youngster for them to study straight away at age 18. The sooner a person chooses to study, the sooner the university receives payment. Students who defer for a year have longer to think about whether and where they really want to go.

University applicants are 50 per cent more likely to get a full set of five offers than their counterparts were just a few years ago

5. Schools’ predictions are becoming less accurate

Universities’ conditional offers rely on predicted grades. Because schools find it hard to predict how well their students will do, they err towards optimism. In recent years, it has become harder to predict A-level results from GCSE results, so it is not surprising that schools are getting worse at predicting A-level achievement.

Nevertheless, it may come as a surprise to learn from the latest Ucas End of Cycle Report 2014 that: “For English 18 year olds predicted ABB [grades], the proportion attaining ABB+ fell from 32.2 per cent in 2010, 29.6 per cent (2011), 25.9 per cent (2012), 23.2 per cent (2013), to 21.0 per cent in 2014.” It is no coincidence that ABB has recently become the standard minimum requirement in many high-tariff universities. It is hard to believe that only one in five of all school students predicted ABB at A level actually achieved that result or better in 2014, but the figures are there in black and white on page 67 of the report.

Although UK universities have GCSE and other indicators to suggest who might do well at A level, wouldn’t it be so much better to do what is done in the Republic of Ireland and much of the rest of the more civilised world, and make offers based on what young people actually achieve – with them applying after achieving it? More would then be nearer to adulthood, to age 18. More might consider other, cheaper and more adventurous options, such as studying in mainland Europe.

If universities were less insistent on entrants achieving ABB grades in future, schools might be less tempted to inflate their predictions accordingly. Certainly, universities are likely to become less focused on top grades when the student number system changes. From this autumn, they will be able to take any number of students, not just any number achieving ABB or above.

As the system expands, what will become of more interest are the wide variations between different parts of the country in the proportion of students entering higher education with BTECs. At the moment, for example, in the city of Cambridge, just 1 per cent of school-age students who study BTEC qualifications go on to university. In contrast, in Wolverhampton North East, Blackpool North and Cleveleys, and Blackpool South, 17 per cent of all young people who won a university place in 2014 did so via the BTEC route. Did you know that poor youngsters growing up in places such as Oxford and Cambridge have lower chances of getting to university than their counterparts in Wolverhampton and Blackpool?

The latest admissions data show that the higher education sector is a safe haven in troubled times. With few other options available to school-leavers, universities have opened their doors to unprecedented numbers of young people from an unprecedentedly wide range of backgrounds. Higher-tariff institutions have behaved as they have never done before in accepting record numbers of students from disadvantaged areas, especially within the past 12 months – although their intake from such areas remains derisory.

But none (or very little) of the recent change is driven by altruism. The correlation between student numbers rising faster in England and fees rising highest in England is far too much of a coincidence for altruism to be the cause. The financial incentives for institutions to take on more students have never been greater. As universities enrol more students, this inevitably will be followed by the greatest increase in debt ever experienced by young adults in England.

Indeed, more debt has been amassed by young people in England in the past few years than in all the previous centuries combined – a result of decisions made by children about whether or not to go to university. Most had little real choice about whether or not to take on the debt.

But, to corrupt an old line and remain optimistic, while there are seats to be sat in and time to advance, let’s face the music and dance.