Last week we had a very successful confirmation and clearing week and came close to reaching the very demanding targets set by the University. This is a considerable achievement which shows the dedication of my colleagues in academic schools, to whom I am very grateful.

Here are a few personal thoughts on the process and the implications for the future.

I hope our relative success (we only know anecdotally how others have done) doesn’t blind us to the inherently volatile nature of undergraduate recruitment in this brave new world. We have certainly had to work much harder to achieve this, whereas in the past recruitment just tended to happen. Also the pattern of recruitment is much less predictable and volatile; even now changes are happening to the numbers. Although we have some very strong areas which have exceeded target, we have others which have fallen short. Over time the pattern of provision is likely to shift with all the consequences which are likely to follow from that, doubtless exactly what David Willets wants to see, with provision shifting to reflect demand rather than supply. In many ways this makes perfect sense, but we do need to remember that universities have heavy investments in fixed costs which cannot be reallocated quickly.  We shall need to be quicker to add resources in the successful areas so that the student experience does not suffer, but it is difficult to match resources to demand when the latter is volatile.

These changes require us to adapt in a number of ways.

1. First of all we need to accept that we can no longer predict recruitment levels with pinpoint accuracy, as some still seem to expect. Frankly undergraduate recruitment has always been a tricky business and it’s a miracle we have been able to manage it so well in the past, but in the new regime it’s impossible,
2. The introduction of an open market for the most able students (with ABB or better) has been a game-changer. It provides us with the opportunity to recruit more of the most able students, as there are no longer any limits on recruitment. However, it is a zero sum game; HEIs are all in competition with each other for the same pool of students. So if we have been successful and so has the rest of the Russell Group (so I am told), it must be at someone else’s expense. Competition will become intense. The supply of ABB+ students is also vulnerable to A level reform. It is no longer fashionable to boast about ever improving standards; rather those in power are keener to show rigour. Clearly there may be arguments in favour of this, but it is hard on the students subject to these recalibrations of standards.
3. The flip side for ourselves is that our core quota (the number of students we can recruit regardless of grade) is relatively small. This can make it difficult to meet our widening participation targets or to recruit EU students (almost certainly a deliberate government policy), but it also makes it harder to recruit students in areas where demand is weaker or where selection is based on artistic or musical ability, rather than A level grades. Government insists that we have enough core quota to meet all reasonable demands, but that’s not how it feels. It is also tricky that Government only tells us what core quota we have at the end of the recruitment cycle. We never seem to have quite enough core quota and allocating it in advance to the areas which most need it is also very challenging and would require perfect foresight to do optimally.
4. We shall also have to devote much more resource to undergraduate recruitment at school and institutional levels and this has started to happen. The role of admissions tutor assumes vastly more importance than it once had and is shifting from being a gatekeeper (we used the word “selector”) to being a strategic manager of recruitment. It also needs to shift from being a lone role to a collectively owned enterprise and in the most successful academic units this process is already visible.
5. We are also having to face up to the fact that in the short to medium term our estate constrains the numbers we can accept, and even where there are not hard physical constraints we have to consider how much growth we can cope with how quickly.

A confession – as you can probably tell, I haven’t blogged before and am not used to the medium. My hope in doing this is to be more open with colleagues and others about the challenges we face and to improve communication through using more informal channels. I shall try to keep this up in future weeks.