The number of university applicants who haven’t secured a university place is the highest it’s been in a decade, thanks, in part, to the lockdown policy. The Telegraph has the data:
Almost 43,000 teenagers did not have a university place or an offer after A-level results were published, up 35% on last year. It comes after record demand from teenagers was met by a squeeze on places at certain universities.
The group, which represents 14.1% of all applicants, is the highest number since 2011, the last year when there were full controls on student numbers.
Why is this? My guess is it’s a combination of rampant grade inflation during the pandemic and large number of university students deferring their places in 2020 and 2021. A-level grades in 2020 were much higher than normal because they were based on teacher assessments rather than externally-moderated exams, meaning many more pupils than expected met their conditional offers and secured university places. That, in turn, meant universities encouraging successful applicants to defer for a year, in some cases offering them a cash bribe to do so. And large numbers of applicants were prepared to do that because they didn’t want to spend their first year at university locked in a hall of residence watching lectures on Zoom. But that just kicked the can down the road. The same problem recurred in 2021, with large numbers of applicants deferring again. But now the chickens have come home to roost – with the above average number of deferrals last year taking up their places this year and fewer being willing to defer until next year because the risk of being locked in halls of residence has receded. To adjust for the anticipated lower number of places this year, universities raised their conditional offers – and the combination of that, and A-level students sitting externally-moderated exams for the first time in three years, meaning fewer top grades, has resulted in fewer students being offered places.
In effect, this year’s A-level cohort are paying the price for the Government’s mishandling of the pandemic.
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I’m not sure I agree with the ‘deferment’ explanation given above.
Students who defer a year have known grades (and other qualities) and will thus already have an accepted place at their chosen institution.
Ie, if a course has 100 students per year and 14 deferred from last year, the institution knows that it will only have 86 places available for this year’s candidates, and it won’t act as though it had 100 places re this year’s offers.
If there are more students that have to go through clearing it can only be because they didn’t meet the grades expected of them.
Sure, this could simply be because of the ‘grade disinflation’ that we’ve seen this year (although it still hasn’t normalised to the pre 2020 levels), but the intention to go through this disinflation process was well telegraphed by the government and exam bodies and I can’t imagine that the HE establishments based their offers on the relative %age grades seen in 2021.
I suggest that the problem is actually that this year’s candidates didn’t sit any GCSEs, but university places were offered with some consideration of the GCSE grades that were gained based on teacher assessment (ie, the teachers guessed). Thus the problem has resulted from a fair number of children having much higher GCSE results than they’d deserved (even taking into account the crazy grade inflation that occurred during 2020), and then getting worse A-levels than their GCSE results might have suggested.
I imagine that there will also be a similar number of pupils who in the end gained far better A-level results than their GSCE results suggested, only because they were ‘the quiet workers’ who the teachers didn’t even realise were capable. We, of course, won’t see the impact of this because the individuals concerned will have simply been happy that they got their first choice.
I’d like there to be an assessment of how much harm this stupid process (‘Guess the result’) caused these young adults, but like everything else related to our mad Covid response it’ll get shoved into the weeds and those whose lives will have been affected will never get any acknowledgement that it occurred.
Elephant in the room is that universities no longer even have a moral duty to preferentially consider domestic students. If a British undergraduate can only be charged a maximum of £9250 per year in tuition fees but their wealthy overseas classmates can be charged £24,000 for EXACTLY the same service, a self respecting, bottom line chasing vice-chancellor would be a fool not to prioritise overseas students.
For example, Imperial currently recruit 61% of their students from overseas.
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/admin-services/strategic-planning/statistics/trend-analysis/student-nationality/
Why, when many bright UK students are left without university places?
Not only tuition fees, but overseas students will pay higher accommodation fees as they tend not to return home in the holidays and they will also be more likely to rent the more luxurious penthouse rooms.
“Show me the incentive, I’ll show you the outcome.” Munger
This is also relevant to today’s other education story, about how medical school places are back down to 7,500 a year.
The excuse given, as it always is, is that they can’t simply magic up medical school places — but of course they can — all they have to do is stop overseas medical students studying in the UK. Sure, the medical schools would complain (they make lots of lovely £££s from them), but our nation’s requirements are more important. Anyway, if we said that the medical schools had to meet the home demand before they could start training others then I’m sure they’d suddenly find that it was possible all along to increase training places.
The other excuse given is ‘but it is expensive’ — sure but:
I was really shocked recently when an article in these pages told me that the number of doctors in the NHS had gone from 85,000 30 years ago to 250,000 now. The narrative is always that we need more and need them faster, but it would appear that the problem is how we get the existing doctors to apply themselves to their worklist better.
I have felt for a long time now that the National Health Service had become the National Wellness Service, pandering to all our hypochondria’s and minor ailments and wishes. Certainly the range of treatments and who they are applicable for has mushroomed over time. I’d be interested to see how the average patient visits to the NHS have changed over the last 30 years. Are we just trying to use it more and more.?
Wouldn’t it be really weird if it turned out there was plenty of trained people and funding for them to provide us with a decent health service, but the whole thing was fucked up by legions of non-jobs and unrequired levels of managers getting in the way just to justify their expensive existences..?
The number of medics working part time might partly explain the change in doctor numbers.
The nation’s requirements stopped being a concern of the universities a long time ago.
Recruiting students from overseas could also increase the number of ethnic minority students at a university which will be a huge advantage in the eyes of some vice-chancellors.
Those £400K+ Vice Chancellor salaries have got to be funded somehow
Exactly what I was thinking when I read this article
Trust me, your gov’ts could care less about you. The covid virus is a bioweapon released to do one thing…..depopulate. Very effective so far, more deaths to come. Excess mortality in all countries heavily vaxxed in addition to declining bitprth rates.
Where the hell is Whitty et al and Ferguson – the designers of this awful outcome. Probably collecting their undeserved gongs from the Palace. And as for the Gormless Johnson, don’t get me started.