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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Chair of Comp Sci at Princeton is predicting a 25% drop in majors over the next couple of years, for precisely the reasons you identify here. Perhaps a reminder of why it’s so problematic to see education simply as a skills pipeline for near term graduate jobs.
This higher offer making by the higher tariff institutions is a concern. With so many universities in financial distress, is this change in behaviour going to have a disastrous impact on the rest of the sector?