It’s a bit early to predict final international student (excluding European Union) recruitment outcomes from the UK undergraduate Clearing season but the first week often gives some direction. There’s also some anecdotal feedback on how institutional and student strategies might be shaping up and what it means for the broader sector. There’s a long way to go with the season largely defined by the last date on which international students can get visas to study.
Looking at international students who have been ‘placed’ there has been a slightly surprising decline in year on year (YOY) growth over the first week. On A-Level day (Day 0) 6.7% (2,120) more students had been placed than in 2018 and the number holding an offer was up 5.6% at 16,860. By Day 8 the placed YOY increase was only 5.2% at 1,900 although offer holders were up 9.5% at 12,120.
Table 1 – Year on Year Differences In Place Students
Source: UCAS
NB: Each bar reflects the difference on the year before i.e. bars for 2016 reflect the difference compared to the corresponding UCAS reporting days in 2015
The deeper context is strong growth in international student application growth measured at 8% at the 30 June UCAS deadline with a particular surge in applicants from China. There are suggestions that the growth in applicants has allowed institutions to be more selective which seems likely at a point where there is more demand than supply. An alternative, or perhaps complementary, take is that students are also being choosier and taking the opportunity to shop around before accepting an offer.
Plenty Still To Play For
While conversion tends to slow very quickly after the first week of Clearing the pool of 12,120 offer holders suggest that there’s plenty to play for. Trying to project numbers forward it may be reasonable to take last year’s outcome as a guide. In 2018 the pool of those holding an offer on Day 8 was 11,070 and by Day 28 of clearing the total number placed had grown by 18.8% of that number.
A similar result in 2019 would mean that Day 28 in 2019 would see 40,430 placed students which would be a growth of 5.5% YOY. It’s a rough and ready calculation and at Day 8 there were still a record number of over 30,000 students free to be placed in Clearing. Whichever way you cut it this looks like a good year for the sector.
Another factor is that the numbers published by UCAS only cover the main scheme applicants and do not reflect those who might have used a Record of Prior Application* (RPA) to bypass the system. As I noted in a blog in December 2018 this route has been growing quite rapidly, with just over 6% of the total number of students using the RPA route in 2018 compared to 3.9% in 2014 and just 4.8% in 2017. Further growth would bring even more upside in recruitment for universities.
A Good Year But Beware The Fog
There may be even better news for the sector because there is reasonable feedback from some pathway operators and sixth form colleges suggesting that they are having a bumper year. One commentary has suggested that students unable to get direct entry into well-ranked universities of choice are choosing to take pathway courses at those universities. Even more encouragingly the buoyancy seems widespread and there is likely to be welcome relief for some universities that have seen significant declines in international student volume in recent years.
The undergraduate numbers are the smaller part of the international recruitment picture but there is no reason to believe that postgraduate numbers are not doing at least as well and probably better. All this before the likely reintroduction of a more powerful post-study work option and the removal of international students from immigration statistics. It bodes well for the near-term future of the UK sector at a point when the US seems to be mired in difficulties that are unlikely to be corrected quickly.
Against this background experienced international recruiters will remember Clausewitz’s dictum that, ‘the factors on which action..is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty’ – it’s the basis for the popular phrase ‘fog of war’. Brexit continues to loom over the sector with no real clarity over long-term decisions on the fee status of European Union students. Concerns must also remain over reliance on one dominant source country when the rise in UG applications was substantially driven by students from China.
*Record of Prior Acceptance – where an application is submitted to UCAS by a provider, when an unconditional firm has been offered and accepted by the applicant. These are not recorded in the daily Clearing analysis and will be reported after the cycle has closed.
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