University admissions arrangements hardly changed at all in the five decades after the introduction of Ucas (then UCCA) in 1961. Before 1961, students applied separately to as many universities as they wished, but there was a clear consensus on the need for a single gateway system instead. Everyone soon became familiar with the routine of a January deadline for most subjects, conditional offers and firm acceptance dates leading up to the mid-August publication of A-level results. A national admissions system combined with central management of student numbers gave the sector stability.

This long-term stability makes the changes of the past half-decade all the more striking, with a number of different factors combining to transform the system. First, the decade-long decline in the number of 18-year-olds means that there will be some 20% fewer in 2022 than there were in 2012. Secondly, the removal of student number caps in 2015 has created what is essentially an open market in recruitment. And thirdly, universities have become more directly competitive with each other. The subsequent volatility in student numbers has created challenges for universities – both for those who have grown rapidly, with impacts on systems, accommodation and group sizes, and those who have struggled, with impacts on balance sheets.

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Many students have learned that university admission is a buyers’ market. As a result, January deadlines for Ucas applications have lost significance. Students have recognised that late application (entering the system in June or July through “early clearing”) does not disadvantage them given that numbers are uncapped, and that adjustment (looking for an offer from a more selective course of study) is possible quite late in the process.

A good deal of this activity is a consequence of the unreliability of predicted grades, which turn out to be wrong in around a fifth of cases. Predicted grades were the currency of the pre-2015 system; they worked for universities as a rough guide to expected attainment, and they helped to keep study and revision on track. Universities have responded in rational but controversial ways. Confronted with an essentially open recruitment market, the unreliability of predicted grades and the vast amount of prior attainment data available on candidates, they have offered various forms of unconditional offers at different tiers of the attainment hierarchy. These approaches have destabilised the traditional admissions cycle.

Both applicants and institutions are keen to maximise advantage. For universities, increasingly this means viewing admissions as a relationship management exercise, using a variety of communications tools to maintain contact with applicants from first engagement. Such approaches matter: given that potential applicants can move at any point in the process, nurturing a relationship is one way universities can seek to avoid losing students who may be tempted elsewhere.

Despite these changes, there are still critics of the clearing system. While the market is more open, it is also asymmetric because not all applicants are equally well-informed about the choices on offer, and also unreliable – predicted grades especially so. Many would prefer a system of post-qualification admissions, in which application is postponed until after A-level results are published.

Almost everyone is in favour of post-qualification admissions until they explore the detail. In 2013, an expert task group developed a detailed map of what such a system might look like. It would mean moving A-levels forward, which would squeeze teaching time (unpopular with teachers); running the entire applications process during the school holidays, which would render school staff less available to support applicants (almost certainly unfair on less privileged candidates); and moving the start of university term back, which would impact on the shape of the academic year (unpopular with academics).

Finally – and critics of unconditional offers should take note – it would remove the incentive of meeting an offer or predicted grades from the whole A-level population. All in all, the practical ramifications have diminished the appetite for change among the admissions tutors, teachers and administrators who would have to make this work.

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We are left with an imperfect system: an open recruitment market grafted on to a centrally managed system with multiple, overlapping deadlines. So much of the way the system operates has been a series of responses to external pressures: demographics, student number control, sharper and more competitive marketisation.

At some point there will be a need for a root-and-branch review of the way the system operates. The 2013 review showed how difficult that will be, and a more perfect system needs to be fit for purpose irrespective of the size of the 18-year-old cohort and external pressures on universities. The next shift in dynamic will follow from the increases in the size of the 18-year-old cohort after 2021. Revising current arrangements for a difficult-to-predict system will prove extraordinarily challenging.