Do one in ten students enter university without a single A level?
David Kernohan is Deputy Editor of Wonkhe
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One in ten new university students does not have a single A level.
That, at least, is the claim made this morning by Nicola Woolcock in the The Times. She uses this as a springboard to launch into the debate about student number controls and a minimum entry requirement – drawing on recent comments made by University of Birmingham vice chancellor Adam Tickell (“we’re investing so much money in people who … we are not really capable of graduating”) and friend of the show Andy Westwood (“most entrants without qualifications were joining private providers operating under franchise agreements”).
The Universities UK position, as reported, is:
Universities will take a range of factors into account when considering whether a student is well equipped to succeed on a course. Many students go to university later in life, and arrive with other valuable skills. It is not in the interests of a university to admit a student they don’t believe can succeed.
But it is the “one in ten” claim that makes the headline – and I’m looking at HESA data to try and figure out how she’s got there. Here’s a quick plot of HESA student table 47, which shows the entry qualifications of new students by subject, mode of study, and level of study.
She tells us that 75,000 new students (9 per cent of the total) did not have a “single A level” or equivalent, while 50,000 of these did not have a GCSE or equivalent. She’s looking (for some reason) at all students (undergraduate and postgraduate).
She is using all new students as a basis (despite the fact that entry for postgraduate students are more likely to include non-traditional qualifications such as professional qualifications) and all modes of study (despite the fact that our largest provider of part-time study, the Open University, was explicitly set up to serve a population that may not hold traditional entry qualifications.
If we look at undergraduate students (those who traditionally apply using A levels) and full time students (thus avoiding the OU issue) we can see that 43,845 (8.07 per cent) students entered university with no formal qualifications, and a further 13,270 (2.44 per cent) entered with qualifications at level 2 (GCSEs and equivalent). This figure has risen as a proportion of entrants over the last decade.
Why might that be? One possibility is the rise in enrollment among UK residents born overseas, who may have qualifications that are difficult to assign levels to. Another is the growth of foundation year programmes, which may function as a replacement for level three qualifications. HESA notes that students on Foundation Degrees (a technically focused level 5 qualification) do not have to supply entry qualification information.
We then have the world of accreditation of prior experiential learning – many mature learners enter from industry with a great deal of experience that prepares them for a degree but without formal qualifications.
Undergraduate students that enrol at university without formal qualifications do not attract funding in the student premium, and have not done so since 2006. As non-traditional students are less likely to have suitable qualifications, and would perhaps need more support in the transition to higher learning this has always surprised me.
Two thirds of the increase in the number of UK-domiciled students starting full-time undergraduate courses without A-levels since 2019/20 is accounted for by UK residents who do not have British nationality, with many from one particular EU country.
Most of the increase is accounted for by students who are on franchised business and management courses at a very small number of providers. There are widespread reports of fraud in such provision, with weak attendance controls and people exploiting the system to gain access to maintenance loans and grants like the Parents Learning Allowance.
Is this really a good use of a finite higher education budget?
Worse than this, the most prominent (and, admittedly, transparent) private provider, Global Banking School, made profits of nearly £90m last year with its income almost entirely made up of tuition fees paid on behalf of these students with no level 3 qualification or no formal qualification at all. And the full tuition fee – minus the cut given to the likes of Canterbury Christ Church, Bath Spa, Suffolk, Brookes to validate the degrees – gets these students a far from “full” university experience, as the dramatically lower overheads and academic staffing costs show. It appears to be classroom learning in off-pitch secondary office buildings.
Adam Tickell has been the first to put his head above the parapet and question all of this, which is often justified by “wider participation”. But it isn’t serving cold spots; these courses are delivered in the major urban areas where there a numerous large universities. These providers are simply actively out on the streets and social media recruiting whoever they can get to sign up. If many of these mature students, a number of whom will not have the aptitude for higher education, will never earn enough to pay the loans off, these companies are effectively syphoning significant profits from taxpayers.
Why is the OfS allowing this?
I think it is important to distinguish between different types of provider and focus action on tackling poor quality provision and fraud/misuse rather than stopping students without A-levels (i.e. 60% of young people) or with low grades in their A-levels from accessing higher education.
There is a long history of high-quality open access provision through institutions like the Open University and others that have been very effective in helping mature learners have a second chance to access and succeed in higher education.
Minimum entry requirements as proposed by Tickell is a very blunt tool that would deny access to many who can and would succeed in higher education. This is what the last government ultimately decided when it proposed them in 2021.
So is the Times article deliberately misleading? Can most of this increase be attributed to mature learners, foundation courses, and part-time learners, rather than underqualified international students, have I understood that correctly?
The data proves that the percentage of students being admitted to University without formal qualification is increasing. That doesn’t however equate to Universities admitting students that they don’t believe can succeed. To prove that point a good journalist would map the same cohort data against completion rates.
Whatever the ‘true’ figure, I’m glad that these claims (originally in Times Higher Education I believe) are making the system come under scrutiny. Universities are business’s who will try to seek new customers as their main commercial aim, so very often will not care too much about the academic ability of the candidates, and whether the course is going to do them any good. And when the Govt is doling out maintenance loans to students, and course fees to HEI’s , you are bound to get ‘fake’ students & ‘fake’ courses that seek to illegitimately tap into this money flow.
There needs to be some sense of proportion. British universities are far above the OECD average for on-time completion (and still well above average once you factor in late completion) so if there’s a problem of recruiting unqualified students, it must surely be a smaller problem in Britain than in the average OECD country.
In relation to quals on entry data, everyone who was working on HESA data at the time knows how much the established universities upped their game in response to student number controls and the implications of the AAB policy. Before then qualifications were systematically under-reported and I would expect that qualifications are systematically under-reported at many new providers too.