The latest shouting match about UK universities giving students unconditional offers is drowning out the reality that the system is broken. It also ignores the likely reality that demographics will solve the problem in due course. But for now, and probably in the future, the playground bullies of government and UniversitiesUK will ignore the real victims – the students.
Here are some of the main reasons.
The evidence suggests that A-level predictions have always been a poor way to select students for university. A report, Predicted Grades: accuracy and impact based on the A-level results of 1.3 million young people over three years showed that only one in six A-level grade predictions were accurate. Three-quarters of actual grades turned out to be lower than teachers had estimated, while just one in 10 were higher.
Universities know this but have been happy to play along for many years. Indeed, it was a very useful thing to know when they faced a cap, with financial penalties for exceeding the limit, on the number of students enrolled. Universities could make more offers than they had places for, knowing that a significant proportion of students would miss their grades and could be rejected.
Then the game changed.
The cap was lifted and each individual student was worth more because of the introduction of fees. Universities had been on a major spending spree to build accommodation and so the need to enrol sufficient volume was no longer just an academic matter. And the growth in international students slowed significantly making UK students increasingly valuable.
The remorseless weight of demographics also played its part as the Office for National Statistics graph below shows. The number of UK students of university age has been declining for several years so institutions wanted to ‘fill their boots’ with as many as possible. The need was particularly acute because the decline in university age students will continue to fall for another couple of years.
For universities the ambition was to recruit as many students as necessary to fill the gap while finding ways to ensure that they got the best students possible. One way to manage that was to give unconditional offers to students that are in the A to B range for their A-levels while knowing that a proportion will slip to C or even lower. Students keen to get to the best quality university forsake their insurance offer and may mentally switch off on doing their best at A-level.
Worth remembering here that the first big name to go to ‘unconditional offers’ was the University of Birmingham who would be in search of top-quality students. Also worth remembering that University planning offices are filled with terrifyingly bright people who eat statistics for breakfast. They can predict with reasonable certainty how many students can afford to slip an A-level grade but are still likely to achieve a good degree (because the institution doesn’t want its league table position to slip).
A cynic would add that one of the points about emerging grade inflation in university awards is that the institution has the absolute power to manipulate the grades its students get. So even if the slippage in A-level points for the intake is damaging on one league table measure it can easily be made up for by an increase in the number of students getting a 2:1 or better. When organisations are autonomous and self-governing there is very little to prevent them making the rules up as they go along.
It’s a perfect storm of financial commitments, student scarcity, and a broken application system with poor data that the sector has consistently failed to fix. When you add to that mix the reality that universities can fix the outcomes it is no surprise they choose to game the system. Even if it’s not in the interests of the students.
But time will change these dynamics.
Even if nothing else changes the demographics of the UK will change behaviours. As the ONS data (above) shows the university may not have enough places by 2030 to take all the candidates that want to go. Faced with more students than they need universities will tighten their offer policies and the unconditional offer will become as rare as rocking horse droppings. It’s a situation where the basics of supply and demand provide a market solution.
But that seems to me to be cold comfort to students who have little insight and no voice at all in the way the system runs. Their plight is made worse by the constant changes in Government policy and the responses of self-interested universities. About time somebody set about mending the underlying system and holding people to account.