Students who miss out on their expected exam grades face fierce competition for university places this summer, with fewer vacancies on courses than in previous years.
A week before A-level results are published in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, several popular universities are reported to be full. This means applicants who fail to meet their grade offers will need to act quickly to secure a place elsewhere, the head of the Ucas admissions service said.
A demographic increase has led to a rise in the number of school leavers this year. There has also been a rise in international students.
As of Wednesday, Ucas’s clearing service recorded 22,410 courses available at 130 universities, compared with 23,280 this time last year, according to a survey by PA Media.
Vacancies are scarcer at Russell Group universities, which tend to demand higher entry grades. Nine of the 24 members of the group recorded no vacancies remaining this year, while the other 15 had just over 2,000 places available between them. Last year, 17 Russell Group universities had 2,358 places remaining the weekend before A-level results were published.
Clare Marchant, the chief executive of Ucas, said: “When it comes to results day on 17 August, I think a lot of those highly selective courses at highly selective institutions will go quite quickly. So certainly, my advice to students, our advice at Ucas, is to be pretty quick off the mark if that’s what you’re looking for.”
This year there has been a rise in demand by 18-year-olds in the UK for computing courses; the 95,000 applications mark a 33% increase on the 71,000 applications in 2021.
As a result, computing has rocketed to the seventh most popular subject. Business and management degrees have the top spot, with 184,000 applications.
The increased competition overall has been driven by the larger number of school leavers in the population. The appetite for higher education remains strong despite suggestions by ministers in England that some courses offer “low value” for future earnings.
The government has said it will cap the number of places on such courses in the future, although the restrictions are unlikely to be introduced before the next general election.
The government’s decision to freeze undergraduate tuition fees in England since 2016 has seen cash-strapped universities increasingly turn to international students – who pay much higher fees – for funding, which in turn has squeezed the number of places available for domestic students.
Marchant said: “It’s getting more competitive, which means places are filled up quicker and therefore there are slightly less in clearing and the competitive stuff that is in clearing is likely to go faster.
“Every year it’s going to become slightly more competitive, simply because the demographics of 18-year-olds are increasing year on year and we’re still very internationally attractive.”
This year’s sixth-formers will be anxiously awaiting their A-level and BTec results next week, which are expected to be less generous than any year since 2019.
Results in 2020 and 2021 were awarded by teacher assessment due to the Covid pandemic and saw higher than usual grades awarded, while last year’s results were designed to be midway between the 2021 grades and pre-pandemic results of 2019.
