School leavers collecting their A-level results on Thursday will have an easier time getting into their chosen university than their predecessors in the past two years, experts are predicting.
A record number of 18-year-olds are competing for university places this year, but experts said that many universities hope to fill accommodation and lecture theatres with more UK students, due to anxiety about falling numbers of lucrative international students.
This year’s school leavers, the first in five years to have sat both their GCSE and A-level exams, will also no longer have to deal with the pandemic distorting the number of students universities accept.
Leading institutions that were forced to accept thousands more students than they wanted when A-level grades were inflated in 2020 are no longer being ultra-cautious about offers, because those extra students have worked their way through the system and grades are back to normal.
Mark Corver, a former director of admissions service Ucas who runs DataHE, a consultancy advising universities on admissions, said: “All the signs are there that for 18-year-olds holding offers it will be a better admissions cycle than in either 2022 or 2023.”
Lower and medium tariff universities had their highest offer rate for UK young people this year, according to Corver’s analysis of Ucas data. The offer rate at the most selective high tariff universities climbed back up to 69%, after falling to 61% in 2022.
Corver said the chance of getting a first choice of university confirmed last year was the lowest ever for 18-year-olds in England, with 57% getting into their firm choice, against 68% in 2021 when grades were unexpectedly high during the pandemic.
He argued that this was likely to have contributed to the fall in the proportion of 18-year-olds applying to university this year in England, because many may know someone disappointed by where they ended up.
“In a young person’s limited experience, not having your first choice of university confirmed is quite a traumatic experience,” he said.
Corver said anxiety about international student numbers, especially falls in postgraduate taught courses, would also make many universities keener to take more UK students. “This is a big issue in the [elite] Russell Group, which is extremely dependent on these international students for revenue,” he said. “Universities used to picking and choosing have been very worried by the swings.”
Numbers of international students applying for visas to study in the UK fell by 15% in the past year following rule changes by the Conservative government around bringing family members into the country.
The Migration Observatory said country-specific factors such as the Nigerian currency crisis could also be to blame. Thousands of Nigerians have studied in the UK in recent years.
Although sixth formers won’t open their A-level results until Thursday, universities have been poring over them in secret since Friday evening. Admissions specialists said they would review files of candidates who had narrowly missed their grades.
Nick Hillman, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute think tank, said: “If you missed a grade you might log on to Ucas and find the university has offered you a place anyway. If not, it is always worth getting on the phone.”Hillman said universities were braced to lose up to half their lucrative international students following the family members visa restrictions. He said many institutions now had unexpected space in accommodation and lecture theatres, as well as teaching capacity, which could be filled by British students.
He added that although demand for international places still exceeded supply at the most competitive universities, including Oxford and Cambridge, this could explain why three-quarters of Russell Group universities have some courses in clearing already.
He said: “Another reason is that the Covid bulge has now worked its way through the system. So they don’t need to recruit fewer first years to compensate any more.”
Mike Nicholson, director of recruitment and admissions at Cambridge University, said there may be more school-leavers entering clearing this year who didn’t want to apply at all before knowing their results.
“We know one of the consequences of the pandemic is students are a bit less confident about moving away from home and more reluctant to make decisions with an uncertain outcome,” he said.
Cambridge has no courses in clearing, and Nicholson expects all their places to fill “without issues”. But he predicted many other universities would choose “near miss” candidates with offers instead of the “uncertainty” of taking new people at the last minute.
“If you have quite a small number of vacancies you might decide taking someone who has narrowly missed their grades who really wants to come to your university is a better bet,” he said.
