Admissions tutors face squeeze on university places
University admissions is always a juggling act, but never more so than this year. Admissions tutors appear to be squeezed between several rocks and a very hard place: a 20% average increase in applicants this year for 10,000 fewer places, the ethical no-no of raising the academic “price” of a university place by upping grades in the middle of the application process to manage demand and £3,700 fines per extra student recruited above the limit set by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce).
The £250m announced just before Easter to fund 20,000 extra places will help, but, as Jenny Dnes, director of admissions at Leicester University, points out, “this is for science and technology subjects only, not across the board”.
Universities have less than three weeks to apply for the additional funding. But this is conditional on institutions making future efficiency savings.
“The first thing to consider is whether you’ll get the places you ask for,” says Dnes, “and by the time you find out whether you have got them, say in mid-May, universities will have made most of their offers and will be getting fewer applications than earlier in the year. So the situation is still very fluid.”
How are admissions offices coping, and how is the squeeze on places for most courses affecting prospective undergraduates?
“It’s not a comfortable place to be because we’re under competing pressures: our duty to students and our duty to the institution,” says Dnes.
