Category: Higher Education

Cross post from HE Insight.

An update to our modelling of the English undergraduate tuition fee cap’s real terms value decline, based on the Bank of England’s latest CPI forecasts.

The BoE expects inflation to fall faster this year than it previously thought, though news today that CPI in March unexpectedly remained the wrong side of 10% may give pause for thought.

Of course, the C in CPI stands for Consumer. This rate represents costs for individuals, not universities. Whilst we might expect the two to move together fairly closely, a significant factor in the revision to the BoE’s forecasts for this year is the government’s changing interventions in residential energy costs. The Energy Price Guarantee doesn’t cover the commercial energy market of course, so these interventions won’t have a direct benefit for university balance sheets.

Cross post from HE Insight.

UCAS provider-level end of cycle statistics out today. As we already knew, entry rates for all UK nations have fallen along with total UK applicants accepted. It’s the higher tariff third of the sector driving this drop as they regain control over their intake and reduce offer making.

Cross post from HE Insight.

No matter their grade, the real value of HE sector workers’ pay has been drifting downward for years and crashing since the pandemic.

Cross post from HE Insight.

UCAS’s October deadline statistics, released this week, show that the total number of Medicine applicants has fallen by 9.7%, with the number of UK applicants having fallen by 10.8%.

This represents the first time that the number of Medicine applicants has fallen year-on-year since the 2017 cycle. You’ll recall that last year the number of new UK applicants decreased slightly but were outweighed by a surge in ‘reapplicants’. This cycle, these reapplicants have fallen back slightly and the drop in first time applicants has been much more substantial.

Note however that reapplicants still remain a significantly larger proportion of the total UK Medicine applicant pool than they did prior to the pandemic.

All other things being equal, we might expect the uptick in the number of 18 year olds in the UK population to manifest in growth in the number of Medicine applicants. First time applicants are however falling as a proportion of total 18 year olds, having hit their peak in the 2021 cycle.

Cross post from HE Insight:

Recently released UCAS data confirms what many have suspected throughout this cycle – higher tariff providers have further reduced their offer rates for UK 18 year olds again this year as the demographic surge delivers ever greater numbers of applicants to institutions still grappling with two years of oversized intakes.

Cross-post from HE Insight:

The Office for Students has released new data today on grade inflation at English universities. Take a look at our charts showing the rising proportion of graduates achieving first class degrees across the sector and the rising number of these first class degrees that the OfS consider ‘unexplained’.

Read the full OfS Analysis here.