Socioeconomic inequalities of access to higher-tariff UK universities in 2020

The UK's most academically selective universities have made slow progress on closing the socioeconomic gap in access over the course of the past two decades. Currently, young people from areas with the lowest rates of participation in higher education enter higher-tariff universities at just one-fifth the rate of those from high HE participation areas. However, this picture may have changed in 2020 as a result of several intersecting factors. First, challenging new widening access targets set by the higher education regulators for England and Scotland are likely to have prompted higher-tariff universities to redouble their efforts to attract applicants from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds, and to make more initial offers of places to these applicants than ever before, including contextual offers involving a reduction in academic entry requirements for disadvantaged applicants. Second, as a means of partially offsetting an anticipated decline in the number of higher-fee-paying international students due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, all UK universities were permitted to admit 5% more UK-based undergraduates entrants in 2020, giving higher-tariff universities greater scope to admit more applicants from socioeconomically disadvantaged groups than in the past. Third, the government's u-turn on the sole use of an algorithm to calculate students' A-level grades, and decision to also honour teachers' predictions where these were higher than estimated by the algorithm, is likely to have significantly increased the proportion of socioeconomically disadvantaged university applicants who went on to meet the academic entry requirements for admission to a higher-tariff university and therefore had their initial offers of a place confirmed, or were able to gain an offer through UCAS Adjustment or Clearing during the August confirmation period. Finally, ongoing uncertainties arising from the coronavirus pandemic, including whether university teaching in 2020 would be delivered in person or online, and the risk of further local or national lockdowns, are likely to have prompted some offer holders to defer or decline places, although it is unclear whether this was more or less common among those from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds. The proposed study sets out to examine the impact of these factors on the extent of widening access to higher-tariff universities in 2020, and to explore the implications of any widening of access to higher-tariff universities on medium-tariff and lower-tariff institutions within what is a highly vertical differentiated UK university sector. To do so, the project will analyse data provided by the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) linked to the National Pupil Database (NPD) to examine the trajectories of university applications made during the 2019-2020 admissions cycle, compared systematically with applications submitted during the two preceding admissions cycles. The analysis will explore each sequential phase of the admissions process including (a) initial applications, (b) initial offers of university places, (c) acceptances of initial offers, (d) confirmed offers of places, (e) acceptances of confirmed offers, and (f) the late-stage securing of places through UCAS Adjustment and Clearing during the August confirmation period. Our analysis will examine the socioeconomic composition of applicants to higher-tariff universities at each of these stages of the 2019-2020 admissions cycle, compared systematically to applicants with the same social background and attainment characteristics in the two preceding cycles. Our analysis will also make use of social network analysis techniques to examine corresponding changes to the wider national system of UK universities, which is already highly stratified with respect to institutional prestige, and may have become even more so in 2020.