Universities are wooing bright students with ‘bribes’ such as £10,000 cash incentives, tablet computers and sports club memberships amid unprecedented competition to fill courses.
Coalition reforms aimed at unleashing market forces in higher education are turning university admissions into a ‘buyers’ market’, it was claimed yesterday.
Universities, most of them outside the traditional elite institutions, are adopting a range of tactics including offering cash scholarships and other perks to would-be students, regardless of their family income.
They have also made record numbers of unconditional offers to high-fliers who will be able to claim their places in September regardless of final grades.
The scramble for students is expected to intensify next week with the release of A-level results on Thursday and official opening of ‘clearing’, which matches applicants to remaining course vacancies. Record numbers of places are expected to be filled this year, with acceptances likely to exceed 500,000 for the first time.
It follows the partial relaxation of strict recruitment quotas and the creation of 30,000 extra university places this autumn.
Research by the Mail ahead of results day reveals the incentives being offered to appeal to would-be students, mainly by universities outside the traditional elite.
At the University of East London, new undergraduates will be offered a £1,200 ‘progress bursary’ which includes a Samsung tablet loaded with textbooks.
The bursary is paid to students in the form of credits at intervals during their degree, encouraging them to stay the course. It can be spent on anything from campus accommodation to laptops, Oyster card top-ups and sports club membership.
Newman University in Birmingham is offering an academic scholarship worth £10,000 over three years to students who achieve BBB or ABC at A-level.
Meanwhile Surrey is offering a ‘chancellor’s scholarship’ to those with A*AA grades or A*A*B grades – a £3,000 cash award in the first year and membership of the university sports club for the duration of the course.
At City University, scholarships worth up to £9,000 over three years are available to certain high-fliers. But cash scholarships are mainly targeted at those who gain ABB in their A-levels. It follows the relaxation of controls to allow universities to recruit unlimited numbers with these grades.
Greenwich, for example, is offering a ‘high achievement’ scholarship worth £2,500-a-year to students with ABB or better.
The intense competition being introduced to higher education was described as ‘tough’ by one admissions boss yesterday.
Lynsey Hopkins, head of admissions at Sheffield University, said: ‘It’s a shift, it’s a buyer’s market in a sense. Students have a lot more choice where they wouldn’t have done a few years ago.’
Mrs Hopkins also said that previously students might have expected to have received offers from three or four of the five choices they listed on their applications but ‘now it’s becoming much more common to get all five of their choices’.
The research also showed that unconditional offers are being used by growing numbers of universities to encourage applicants with strong academic records to commit. These include Birmingham, Reading and Nottingham. Others operating smaller-scale schemes include Lancaster, Greenwich and Northumbria.