by David Craig
The first challenge for the would–be student is how to navigate the pitfalls of the university admissions system. Success is generally dependent less on a person’s intellectual capabilities and more upon years of informed pre–planning and preparation.
Applications
Every year over 600,000 people apply for undergraduate degrees through the Universities and Colleges Application Service (UCAS).26 Each applicant uses the same UCAS form, listing their choices of institutions and degree subjects and their personal data. They all include the dreaded personal statement describing the applicant’s various qualities and the rationale for their choices. The applicant’s school also provides a statement about the student with a prediction of their grades. UCAS sends this information to the admissions departments of the relevant universities. Decisions are made within those departments and offers or rejections sent back to the applicant. The candidate then chooses two offers, one “firm” at the grades that they are expected to reach and one “insurance” offer at lower grades, in case their exam results aren’t as good as expected.
At the point of submission, all potential students are equal. What happens before and after submission, however, is radically different. Securing an offer for the right degree requires the right advice long before the admissions process. Without this, an applicant can find themselves ineligible for desirable degrees, swamped by information, lacking critical information or misled by inaccurate or dishonest marketing. With over 160 universities and higher education colleges, there is now a bewildering array of destinations for applicants. Many universities offer thousands of degrees, often with specific requirements for entry. Some requirements are obvious: to study French at university you need to study the subject at GCSE and A–level. Some are not so obvious: until recently you needed a GCSE in a modern language to apply to Oxbridge. Subject and qualification choices for specialist degrees such as medicine need to start when a student chooses their GCSEs. Students given bad or non–existent advice by their schools may encounter a glass ceiling preventing access to a particular course or university, of which they are often unaware until it is too late. The example below is typical:
“A worried student called the Sutton Trust recently wanting a place on our university summer schools: “I’ve just been told I need maths A–level for computer science at Cambridge – I had no idea,” she said. She had been advised to take information technology instead, despite gaining a good grade in GCSE maths, because she stood a better chance of doing well.”27
Students without a clear idea about a future career face information overload during application. Wading through a vast swathe of online and printed material to choose the right course can be time–consuming and bewildering for parents and students alike. In 2014, the Higher Education Funding Council for England’s (HEFCE) own research in this area identified a “decision paralysis” created by cognitive overload which resulted in worse degree choices by applicants.28
Universities are largely responsible for this situation. They no longer provide objective course information. Instead, they offer promotional material. Many universities have large marketing and schools liaisons departments to recruit students – course fee fodder. This means multiple public–sector organisations spending hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money to compete against each other in a zero–sum game for a limited number students. It is estimated that university marketing departments currently employ over 2,000 staff and that their marketing and PR activities cost a total of £200 million a year.29 In no other part of the public sector are organisations spending so much public money to compete with each other in this fashion. Speaking to the Times Higher Education Supplement about continuing increases in university marketing budgets in 2014, Roger Brown, Emeritus Professor of Higher Education Policy suggested that:
“The truth is that almost all of this (spending on marketing) is a waste of money, as there isn’t really any evidence that students are influenced in making their choices by university marketing strategies…. this is money that could be used to improve teaching.”30
In addition, UK universities also pay around £60 million a year to international agents to help them to recruit students from overseas markets.31
University marketing material generally consists of glossy, corporate branded packs which look much like every other course’s promotional pack. Designed to mimic a travel brochure, they are usually full of pictures of attractive lawns bathed in sunshine, happy students and impressive buildings – heavy on lifestyle elements but suspiciously light on such details as the hours of teaching provided, who will teach the course, the size of seminar groups and the average number of people in lectures. In 2009, the House of Commons Select Committee compared multiple online prospectuses and complained that:
“... little or no information was provided about the nature or degree of contact which students could expect with staff or, for example, how many students would be in a group or who would teach them – academics or research students. Nor did universities appear to give students a clear idea about the work they would be expected to undertake ... in terms of numbers of essays, projects or assignments.”32
The Select Committee argued that course information should be:
“...presented in a consistent format, which facilitates cross–institutional comparisons, the time a typical undergraduate student could expect to spend in attending lectures and tutorials, in personal study and, for science courses, in laboratories during a week. In addition, universities should indicate the size of tutorial groups and the numbers at lectures and teaching by graduate students.”33
There was even less detail about employment prospects for vocational courses such as law. It is also far from certain that students should trust the information that universities did provide. A 2014 analysis of eight randomly–selected prospectuses found many actively misled applicants through a combination of selective data, exaggeration and dishonesty. 34 In 2017, the scale of this problem was underlined by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) upholding six complaints against individual universities. This was over misleading claims in their marketing materials about their performance in academic league tables and the student satisfaction survey. The ASA subsequently required the universities to withdraw material containing these claims. 35
Of course, any negative information such as course drop–out rates or complaint levels were also notably absent from this marketing material.
Comparison websites
In response to this criticism, the Higher Education establishment has attempted to improve the information provided to applicants. By 2012, all universities were required to produce ‘Key Information Sets’ (KIS) for their degrees. These include course data about tuition fees, student satisfaction, assessment methods and employment destinations for graduates.36 The KIS provided the basic information for several comparison websites, such as Unistats and Which University?, which were launched in 2012. These websites were designed to provide access to course information for thousands of degrees in one location, allowing applicants to select and contrast information for different degrees – their workloads, costs and economic benefits. They were intended to provide neutral and accurate information enabling applicants to make informed choices.
In some ways these websites do assist applicants. Rather than spending days looking through dozens of individual university websites and hundreds of degree web pages, it is possible to use one or two websites. The information about course costs and earnings is a step in the right direction and is provided in a consistent format that is easy to read and compare. However, six years after their launch, it is not unreasonable to suggest that the websites have on balance failed in their mission. There are multiple reasons for this failure. The information that the websites provide is incomplete and inaccurate. It can also be misleading. This is especially problematic because this information is now being provided by nominally independent third parties. As such, it implies
a greater level of trustworthiness than if it came directly from a university. At their worst, comparison websites act as a rubber–stamping extension of university marketing departments, validating rather than verifying their claims.
To understand this failure, we need to consider what information an applicant needs in order to make an informed decision about a specific degree. The most basic wish list would include accurate, evidence–based information about the costs and benefits involved in study. Such information should include:
What is the likely starting salary post graduation?
What is the total cost of the course?
What are the chances that a vocational degree will enable a graduate to gain entry to its associated profession?
As an illustration, we can examine the information provided by two of the main comparison websites for a specific course – in this case a Bachelor’s degree in psychology at Derby University. Why this specific degree? There are three reasons. Firstly, the subject has been a huge growth area during the Great University Expansion. Secondly, as a vocational subject, it nominally affords graduates entry into a well–defined career path. Thirdly, the university recruits ‘floating voters’ – applicants who might otherwise have considered not going to university. So, how effectively do the websites answer the three questions about salaries, costs and likelihood of entry to a profession?
1. What is an average salary six months after graduation?
The answer depends on which website we choose to believe; Which University? places the figure at £15,000. But Unistats (Figure 1) suggest £17,000.
Figure 1 – Unistats: Psychology at Derby University
Unfortunately, neither website makes it clear how they calculate their starting salaries. Are these figures of £15,000 or £17,000 created by averaging the reported earnings of all course graduates in work or just those who have jobs directly related to their psychology degree? Moreover, whichever figure is correct, neither website provides any context to these salaries or how they compare to alternative options. For example, a 21 year–old non–graduate, working 37.5 hours a week at the national minimum wage of £7.3837 earns £14,391 a year. This suggests that this degree confers additional earnings of around £600 to £2,600 per year, compared with non–graduates working at the minimum wage. This estimate is likely to be somewhat generous though. If the non–graduate has been working for three years, then a combination of experience and non–degree qualifications are likely to have increased their hourly earnings significantly above the minimum wage. As such, it is entirely possible that many non–graduates of the same age would be earning considerably more than a graduate from this course.
There are three further problems with these figures. Firstly, whilst the survey on which these figures are based, the Destinations of Leavers from Higher Education Survey (DLHE), has a high response rate (around 66%), the 34% of graduates who don’t respond are more likely to be unemployed or in part–time employment. Including data from these non–respondents would probably reduce the starting salaries. Secondly, the salary figure calculations don’t include students who drop out during the course. The information for this course shows that 17% of students drop out in the first year. It is reasonable to assume that additional students will drop out in the final two years. If the average starting salary reflected the earnings of those who dropped out in their final year (having incurred almost the same level of debt as those who graduated) then it would probably be reduced still further. Finally, and most worryingly, there is widespread evidence that some universities are systematically manipulating the DLHE survey data to inflate the salary calculations for their degrees. The universities themselves are responsible for collecting this data and there are numerous reports of university employees being asked to remove or lose returns showing low salaries, not to contact graduates from degrees with low earnings or to mislabel employment categories.38 All of this raises serious questions as to whether the salary information used by comparison websites can actually be trusted.
2. What is the total cost of the course?
Figure 2 is a screenshot from Which University? for the same degree in psychology at the University of Derby.
Figure 2 - Which University? Psychology at Derby University
Here, the main issue lies with how information about cost is presented. In the example from the screenshot, the comparison website notes that tuition fees for the course are £9,000. It could and should be much clearer that this degree incurs three years’ worth of fees (£27,000), that the course fees will possibly increase each year with inflation and that most students will also be taking out the maintenance loans (probably over £25,000 for three years living away from home at this university). All this would make the likely cost for the degree in excess of £52,000. These figures – more than £52,000 of debt for a £15,000 or £17,000 starting salary – slightly above the minimum wage – would frame a decision about applying to this course very differently. These figures on total costs for the three–year course may seem obvious. But these presentational issues are problematic as many parents and students are likely to seriously underestimate the total cost of going to university. In 2012, a survey of prospective parents and students by Push (an independent university guide) reported that their estimates were less than 50% of the actual cost.39
3. How likely is a degree to enable a graduate to obtain work in a specific profession?
A quick visit will reveal that comparison websites and university websites provide little information to applicants about what type of employment they can expect after graduation. Applicants for vocational subjects such as psychology need to know how successful a degree is at providing entry to that profession. This is much more important than a course’s overall employment rate post graduation. A psychology degree with a 90% graduate employment rate means little if 75% of those graduates are working in call centres or sandwich bars.
It is not impossible to provide this information. University psychology departments churn out about 15,000 graduates each year. Anybody intending to practice as a chartered psychologist after graduation has to complete a three–year specialised doctoral programme. The cost of this is prohibitive and, realistically, can only be undertaken via an NHS–funded place. Each year there are roughly 600 such training places available for Clinical Psychology and around 120 places for Educational Psychology.40 Figure 3 shows this in graphic form:
Figure 3 - UK psychology graduates in proportion to funded training places
These funded places will go largely to psychology graduates from Russell Group universities with first class degrees. Graduates with lower degree classifications, degrees from non–Russell Group universities and with diploma conversions from subjects other than psychology are highly unlikely to be accepted onto these funded doctorates. The chances of obtaining one of these places with a psychology degree from Derby University, for example, are remote. Little of this is made clear in university marketing material. Whilst the comparison websites do note that these places are “Incredibly competitive”, they fail to provide any ideas of numbers or that it really does matter where you do your degree if you want to get a place to train as a psychologist.
The problem around providing accurate and useful degree information reflects a conflict of interest between universities and applicants which is often not fully appreciated by teachers, parents and applicants. The primary incentive for universities is to recruit enough students to run their courses, rather than to ensure that the right students are matched to the right courses across the system. For elite universities, this potential conflict of interest is minimal. They simply select the most suitable candidates from a large pool of applicants. Recruitment can become murkier further down the academic league tables. These non–elite universities have fewer students applying, but they also have budgets to meet, staff to pay, courses to run and ‘market share’ to defend. Sharp practice can occur when students or parents
ask about the employment prospects for a course post graduation. Sometimes the response involves the omission of pertinent details. Sometimes carefully–worded course descriptions can be misleading. The fact that a degree has been “accredited” by some professional body does not mean that it will provide students with a passport to a job in this area. Nor does the claim that a course is “designed” to train a student in, for example, forensic science actually guarantee employment as a forensic scientist. In fact, less than one in ten forensic science graduates will find a job in their chosen profession.
The mass–production factory scale of our university system has also depersonalised the university application process. Thirty years ago, nearly every applicant would expect an interview before receiving an offer or rejection. A system dealing with 600,000 applicants makes this impossible. Instead of interviews, universities now have Open Days. Instead of a dialogue with prospective students, there’s a sales pitch to prospective students. Only Oxford, Cambridge and medical schools now require interviews. The rest simply make decisions on the information contained on the UCAS form. The natural conclusion of this approach to recruitment was the imaginative approach to choosing students adopted by Leeds Metropolitan and Huddersfield Universities in 2004. Faced with a massive oversupply of students (twenty applicants per place) applying for physiotherapy degrees, they turned the selection process into a lottery. Applications from students with similar grade predictions were placed into a software package and names selected at random. Leeds Metropolitan and Huddersfield were probably not the only universities which used this somewhat questionable process, but they were the only universities to admit to it.41
“Uni or bust!”
Stepping back from the operation of the university admissions process, there is a wider issue about how it frames the life choices young people make after school. As the Great Expansion has led to nearly half of young people going to university, it has increasingly felt like the only desirable or acceptable route, rather than one possible choice from a range of options. You’d like to start an apprenticeship? Wouldn’t you be better off going to university? You want to set up your own business? Well yes, but after a degree. You’d rather start a band with your friends? But what about your other friends who are going to Uni?
