There’s a storm brewing in UK higher education and, if we’re honest, it’s been brewing for a while.
We all know the pattern. Predicted grades continuing to be, well, predicted. Students stacking their UCAS applications with at least one high-tariff choice. Those same high-tariff universities making more offers, at lower grades, and confirming more students than ever before.
Confirmation charts that had us saying “wow” in 2024 are jaw-dropping in 2025 and by 2026 we’ll need new numbers on the Y axis just to keep up.
On their own, you could shrug and rationalise these shifts: post-pandemic turbulence, demographic rises and dips depending on where you regionally look, financial pressures. But together? Here’s your perfect storm.
Grades remain overpredicted because schools and colleges know universities will flex at offer stage and, in all likelihood, at confirmation. Universities flex because grades are overpredicted, and because half-empty halls of residence don’t pay the bills. Students expect both to continue, because so far, they have.
This is not harmless drift. It’s a cycle. And it’s reshaping the market in ways that don’t serve students, teachers, or institutions well.
What’s really at stake
Sure, more students in their first-choice university sounds like a win. But scratch beneath the surface and the consequences are real.
For students, it’s about mismatched expectations. That ABB prediction might have got you a BCC place confirmed, but the reality of lectures and labs can feel a whole lot tougher. The thrill of “getting in” can be followed quickly by the grind of “catching up” and not everyone has the support infrastructure available to bridge the gap.
For schools and teachers, it’s a lose–lose. Predict realistically and you risk disadvantaging your pupils against those down the road with a more generous hand. Predict optimistically and you fuel the cycle, while the workload and stress keep piling up.
For universities, tariffs are being squeezed like never before. If ABB, BBB, and BCC are all getting the same outcome, what does “high-tariff” even mean anymore? And what happens to long-term planning if your recruitment strategy rests on quietly bending standards just a little more each year?
And for the sector as a whole, there’s the reputational hit. “Falling standards” is a headline waiting to be written, at a time when the very value of HE is under political scrutiny, that’s not the story we want to hand over. It doesn’t matter how nuanced the reality is, because nuance rarely makes the cut
How long can we keep this up?
The uncomfortable truth is the longer we let this run, the harder it’ll be to unravel. Predictions that don’t predict. Offers that don’t mean what they say. A confirmation system that looks more like a safety net than a filter. Right now, students get good news, schools celebrate, universities fill places. everyone’s happy…until they’re not.
We all know the ideas that surface. Post-qualification admissions. Post-qualification offers. The radical stuff. I’m not convinced they’re coming back, that ship feels well and truly sailed after multiple crossings.
Sector-wide restraint sounds great in theory. But let’s be real, who’s going to blink first at a time when most of the sector is unlikely to welcome a restraint on numbers of entrants.
And then there’s regulation. Hard rules on entry standards, offers, or tariffs. Politically tempting, practically messy, and likely to create more problems than it solves. Do we really want government second-guessing how universities admit students? I’m not sure we do.
None of this is easy. But pretending nothing’s wrong is also a choice and, in both the short and long-term, not a very good one.
Time for a proper conversation
Please don’t take this as a “booo, high-tariff unis” article. These are some of the best institutions in the world, staffed by incredible people doing incredible work. But we can’t ignore the loop we’re stuck in.
Universities want stability. Teachers want credibility. Students want fairness. Right now, we’re not giving any of them what they need. Because if offers don’t mean what they say, and predictions don’t accurately predict, what exactly are we asking applicants to believe in?
Unless we start having the grown-up conversation about how predictions, offers, student decision making and confirmation intertwine and interact, the storm will keep building.
We often see and hear about specific mission groups having their own conversations about admissions, recruitment-type topics but, very rarely, do you see or hear anything cross-cutting in the sector which I think is a missed opportunity. Anyone want to make an offer?
A really good article. The share of students at higher tariff providers is only going to continue to grow as the financial crisis continues to bite and places are freed up by reductions in international student numbers.
Not sure what the answer is on encouraging schools to make more accurate A-level grade predictions or at least making it easier for universities to critique them. Perhaps bringing back modular A-levels would help? Or could data be published by UCAS about the accuracy of grade predictions made by individual schools to support providers?
Absolutely agree with the above comment. The UCAS Historic Entry Grades data now provides insight into the grades universities actually accept. Adding a layer to show the predicted grades those students received would be very interesting.
Additionally, data showing the extent to which each school / college over or under predict grades would be extremely useful for university admissions teams who are trying their best to make offers in a fair and transparent way, with predicted grade data which may (or may not) be sound.
Agreed. There are also potential social justice and equality issues here, if different types of schools differ in willingness to overpredict: e.g. one might ask whether independent schools are more prone to tweak their predictions under pressure from fee-paying or donating helicopter parents. Perhaps that’s not a thing at all, but it would be nice to know for sure. I’m not quite clear to what extent this behaviour will show up in statistics, though: uniform overprediction of everybody would clearly be easy to see, but it might be harder to spot e.g. targetted overprediction of exactly those students whose true… Read more »
If we see (as probably expected) the fall in international students be sustained over time, then there is probably too much capacity in the sector and it will end up being reduced somewhere. We can have High Tariff institutions take lower tariff students, and then that capacity will one way or another be removed at the lower tariff end of the market. Or, we can prevent them doing that and then that capacity will be removed from across the market. Its a fairly simple trade off. The government perspective seems to be that reducing capacity at the least competitive lower… Read more »