Fewer Students at U.K. Universities, Report Says

LONDON — When the British government announced it was tripling tuition fees starting in the autumn, critics said the increase would result in fewer domestic students going to university. They seem to have been proved right.


This autumn, there were 54,000 fewer British students starting classes at U.K. universities, according a report this month by the University and College Admissions Service , or UCAS, which coordinates the application and admissions process for schools across the United Kingdom. The sharpest drop occurred in England, where fees rose from £3,000 to £9,000 — or about $4,800 to $14,600 — in a year, and which saw a 6.6 percent decline in the number of students going to university. The numbers also fell for Northern Ireland. In Scotland and Wales, where governments did not raise fees, student numbers rose slightly.

With 653,600 applicants and only 464,900 full-time places, the process still left 188,700 candidates without a place. However the government can take comfort from the fact that more 18-year-olds from disadvantaged backgrounds applied to, and were accepted by, highly selective universities than before.

“The headline numbers in this report signal the challenging environment for recruitment in 2012 for some parts of U.K. higher education,” Mary Curnock Cook, the chief executive of UCAS, said in a statement. “However, the underlying findings are more subtle.

“The continuing increase in participation from more disadvantaged groups is very encouraging, as is the absence of any signal that they are turning away from higher fee courses,” she said.

The report also underlined the stark differences between the numbers of men and women applying to, and attending, university. Among 18-year-olds living in Britain , women were a third more likely than men to attend university.

“The fact that women remain more likely to enter higher education than men are to apply is a striking and worrying finding,” Ms. Cook said.

David Willetts, the minister for higher education, said to the media that the government expected the total number of students in higher education this year to be higher than any year before 2010. He pointed to the fact that more students ended up at their first choice university as evidence that the government’s reforms “are helping students to make well-informed choices using better information.”

However Shabana Mahmood, the Labour Party’s shadow minister for higher education, said to the media that the UCAS figures showed that the tuition rise “has put a brake on aspiration and has led people considering applying to university to decide against doing so at precisely the time that higher-level skills have never been more important to secure their future.”

- Nytimes.com