Today, UCAS publishes new analysis addressing the following:
- Extended insight about unconditional offers made to 18 year old students from England, Northern Ireland, and Wales, who are yet to complete their qualifications. Unconditional offers accounted for more than 10 per cent of offers made to this age group, at over a third of the 140 largest universities and colleges. This includes offers that are initially made by the university as conditional, then updated to unconditional if the offer is accepted as the student’s first (firm) choice.
- The number and percentage of unconditional offers made by individual universities and colleges, to 18 year old students from England, Northern Ireland, and Wales.
- An analysis of applicants’ backgrounds using UCAS’ multiple equality measure (MEM), which combines several dimensions of equality. This shows progress continues to slow in closing the gap between the most and least advantaged students accepted to start a degree.
- University-level application data for the 2018 cycle, showing the recruitment of students by age, sex, and domicile, as well as equalities data on offer rates and entry rates for 132 of the largest providers. This data helps universities benchmark their progress in widening participation and access, as well as being significant to UCAS’ commitment to transparency in admissions.
- An
update on UCAS’ verification service (393.21 KB), following a report published in May 2018.
This concludes our statistical reporting for the 2018 undergraduate admissions cycle.
Clare Marchant, UCAS’ Chief Executive, said: ‘UCAS’ commitment to transparency for students, teachers, universities, and colleges has seen our most comprehensive analysis of the current trends in undergraduate admissions, during the 2018 cycle.
‘Our independence means we can present a balanced view on the different ways unconditional offers are used, and their impact on attainment, and share students’ opinions on them to enable an informed and nuanced debate.
‘It’s crucial that students can make well-informed choices. UCAS is here to provide step-by-step support, to help them make the right decisions for their future, including advice on unconditional offers. We’ve also issued good practice guides to support universities and colleges to make unconditional offers responsibly.’
All published data can be found in the data and analysis section of ucas.com, and in ‘Notes for editors’ below.
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Notes for editors
UCAS, the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service, is an independent charity, and the UK's shared admissions service for higher education. We manage almost three million applications, from around 700,000 people, each year, for full-time undergraduate courses, at over 380 universities and colleges across the UK.
This report, the fourth and final release of the 2018 UCAS Undergraduate End of Cycle Report, covers patterns of unconditional offer-making by providers, and additional reporting of patterns by applicant characteristics. Six previous chapters of the End of Cycle Report were published in November and December 2018.
Accompanying the final two chapters of the End of Cycle Report are:
- provider-level data resources for the 2018 cycle
- individual equalities reports for 132 larger universities and colleges for the 2018 cycle
- provider-level unconditional offer reports (these are new for 2018, and include data on unconditional offers made to 18 year olds during the 2013 to 2018 application cycles)
- an end of cycle update on our verification service (393.21 KB) and additional data tables (339.44 KB). These tables are also available as
CSVs (9.09 KB).
Scotland
In Scotland, there is a substantial section of higher education that is not included in UCAS' figures. This is mostly full-time higher education, provided in further education colleges, which represents around one third of young, full-time undergraduate study in Scotland – this proportion varies by geography and background within Scotland. Accordingly, figures on applications, and application rates in Scotland, reflect only those applying for full-time undergraduate study through UCAS.