This article is more than 2 years old
Is there a lockdown and nobody told us?
If you look at placed UK 18 year old applicants by tariff group of providers, you'd think we'd slipped back three years.
Whatever presumptions we made about the capacity of high tariff providers in 2021 - the stories of students sitting on the floor at the back of large lecture halls, the decline in contact hours, the ridiculous pressure on accommodation that saw students living a motorway junction away from where they are studying - we at least could see that the "mutant algorithm" and the provisions of law meant that the providers in question didn't really have a choice (though this would have been scant comfort to the students involved).
The number of UK 18 year old applicants placed at high tariff providers is currently above 2021 levels - and far in excess of the two years after. This still holds if you add in international students and look at all ages, put the "more spaces for our kids" signs down.
And it is still climbing. In 2021 you could see a hard capacity limit kick in at around JCQ+5 - just 10 additional students were placed between day four and day five. For 2024, the comparator is just under 1,000. It feels a lot like a deliberate decision by certain popular providers to expand UK student numbers (we won't know which providers made this decision until we get the end of cycle provider level data in early January 2025).
Elsewhere in the sector, while there are more UK applicants of all ages placed at low tariff providers than at high tariff providers, this represents the continuation of a long pattern of real term drops in low tariff numbers - and the first time on record that there will be more UK students at middle tariff providers than low tariff providers.
Is this a change in the kind of background people applying to university have? Yes, marginally, but perhaps not in the direction you might expect. Since 2015 the proportion of placed 18 year old applicants by Clearing day five from TUNDRA quintile 5 (most advantaged) has hovered around 31 per cent. In 2024 it is below 30 per cent - at 29.8 per cent it is the lowest proportion on record. A lot of the new growth is in quintiles 1 and 2.