To think that universities giving out unconditionals/nominal offers to everyone just devalues even going or having a degree

[Saygoodday]

DS is applying this year. He’s applied to and got offers from a mixture: 2 RG’s, 2 that require BBC and one post 1992 university that has given him an unconditional offer. Obviously not everyone can be ultra academic and there is a place for vocational qualifications and courses with lower entry requirements within the university system, this is not a case of snobbery or advocating that all universities should require four As. However, Lincoln this year has seemingly given out unconditional offers to literally anyone who has applied, I recently saw another university that would make offers for LLB (hons) Law for 64 UCAS points, etc. Lincoln in particular, it’s about an hour from me, has become a favourite for kids who’ve done no work for their a levels who know they will still get into uni. It’s not just Lincoln there are a big number who will take students basically with any results. To me it doesn’t feel at all fair that those who’ve done no work should get the same qualifications as someone who gets A’s. It feels like it just devalues the whole idea of going to university and getting a degree if you can just get one despite being on for terrible grades in your a-levels. Aibu?

Yes, in all the firms I've worked in, graduate trainees were put on exactly the same training program as 18 year old school leavers. For the day to day work they did in the office, there was no difference at all. The difference was how long they took to qualify, as the graduates usually got exemptions so they took less time to go through the professional exams. That meant that the graduates "qualified" sooner but carried on doing the same standard/type of work for a couple of years before they were promoted to "qualified" level work after the same amount of time and the same "pathway" as the 18 year olds.

Thank you for such a well measured post.

I've been there recently for postgrad and had a fantastic experience, all seriously considering lecturing in the next few years (had an offer but it's not the right timing for my career) and my daughter is seriously considering attending even though we live fairly near.

Lincoln, and in fact many other unis have started to, recognise that A-Level results are not necessarily reflective of ability. Even the most able and hard working students can turn up on exam day and things go badly. Then there are students like my daughter.

She is very able, but has a chronic condition and misses a lot of school so doesn't get the grades she deserves- especially if she happens to be ill in the exam day. Uni will suit her much better and I know she will achieve more. Also, A-levels do not cater at all well for her dyslexia but the support at uni is generally on another level for that.

You can't lump universities in the way some posters are doing on here. Plymouth may indeed be second rate for engineering, but as has been pointed out, it is a go to for marine science. My DD2 is studying marine bio there. She did get an unconditional offer, but we didn't find out about it until results day when we already knew she'd made her entry requirements (which were neither stupid low nor stupid high).

Firstly, I assume you're not male , but thanks for the mansplain...

Secondly, my DS also did not want to do any of the office jobs you mention. I am aware those options exist.

Thirdly , 'everyone' does not have a degree. Basic maths says 50% (which it isn't but it keeps being mentioned so I will stick with that) isn't everyone.

Fourthly, whilst I don't feel sorry for students 'pushed' into uni , I do agree with your final point. However, at least three years of university gives young people more time to grow, mature, and discover. And, as stats show, better life outcomes, on average.

I'm confused about these Level 6s and Level 7s

My colleague did a Level 5 qualification in 5 days. either that or she fibbed. Both plausible, sadly

I think we can all agree that there is a huge differential in schools in England. While the A level exams are the same for everyone, pupils' experience in the years leading up to them can be radically different, and can be affected by a range of factors. These include school life (school expectations, quality of teaching, whether you are taught by subject specialists, peer group pressure, behavioural issues, amount of school support etc) and home life (home environment, supportiveness of parent towards education, caring responsibilities, need for a part-time job etc). This is one reason that universities use contextual information when making offers.

To a large extent these differences are ironed out at university where for 3 (or 4) years students have the same access to lectures, to tutors, to resources such as libraries and laboratories, to student support and so on as anyone else on their course. They are also mostly free of the disadvantages of a disruptive/chaotic home environment. So to that extent degrees are a 'fairer' reflection of a student's true academic ability.

The style of teaching, and of learning, at university is markedly different from school – it's much more independent and self-reliant, which will favour some students over others, and not necessarily those who did best at school. University also allows students to focus in on an area of study which really interests them, and there may be quite a number who are not all-rounders but are very, very good at one specific subject. Such students will benefit from a university education.

A levels are obviously one marker of ability at 18, but they don't actually tell you very much about 21-22 year old graduates. Interestingly, when you apply for a Masters, most universities do not ask for your A level grades, which I think tells you how universities themselves view the relevance of A levels once you have a degree.

I’d assume fibbing. That said, the level of a qualification is different from how substantial it is.

For example, a PGCert, PGDip and an MSc are all level 7 qualifications. The difference is in the number of credits required to award one.

https://www.gov.uk/what-different-qualification-levels-mean/list-of-qualification-levels

Still, it’s unlikely that anyone completed a level 5 qualification in 5 days.

@SquidwardBound exactly. It's open to manipulation just like any other system.

On a different but related point - Universities don't make money from home students - the real money is from Asia and the Middle East. Glasgow Uni (Russell Group) is spending nearly a £billion on its campus over the next decade and where do you think the money for that is coming from? There is investment and money from other organisations etc, but a lot of that is money coming from Chinese and other Asian/ME students. At Glasgow, the Uni gets approx £8000 for a medical student from home - if the student comes from overseas, they can charge what they like. A friend of mine knows someone from Malaysia who is studying medicine there and they are paying £45k a year.

A friend's son was at an RG uni and got a job answering the phone to applicants at admission time. They were all told that if an applicant didn't get the grades they needed, but were from 'overseas', to take their phone number and someone would phone them back. Bums on seats anyone?

Post grad is the same/even worse. The number of home post-grad students in Scottish Unis is the lowest its ever been but the number of middle eastern/Asian post grads is through the roof. You only need to look at the student accomodation in and around the universities- massive new build accomodation blocks with predominantly Asian students. Good luck to them, but the reality is that many of them have English as a second lanaguage and struggle with written work - standards are definitely lower but they will still likely pass. Sometimes the requirement to present written work in 'proper' English is set aside as if it is not in the learning outcomes for the course (like it would be in say, a teaching degree). This means essays with no punctation or capital letters, lots of incorrect grammar etc. can still get a pass grade. You can argue the toss as to whether grammar etc. are important as long as understanding is there (that's a different argument) but there is no doubt that the academic standard at a lot of Universities is falling for various reasons, most of which are because the University is running a business model. Students paying 10s of thousands a year expect to pass!

If a module leader has a lot of fails because the students are poor performers owing to low entry standards (non-equivalence of entry requirements from other countries) or the students have poor English etc., it will fall to them to change the course to help improve student performance. It will not be accepted that some of the students admitted are just not academcially strong enough. It becomes easier just to pass borderline assessments by adding a few extra marks for 'presentation' or 'referencing' or whatever, than to have a lot of fails.

People outside the University system would be shocked to see how shit and abused it is.

Are you coming back OP?

I have a concern that unconditionals are sending the wrong people to university who should have been on a different path, You only have to look at WIWIKAU on facebook to see the anecdotal scale of kids not applying themselves, struggling with the workload and/or having serious mental health issues because they are simply overwhelmed.

I sound like a "back in my day we walked to school barefoot for ten miles in the rain"... but.... back when I applied, I so wanted to do a degree in English but I was deemed not good enough. I talked my way onto an alternative option and it all worked out for me, and probably much better in the end.

But I have a very close relative with some quite severe learning difficulties (brain damage), who secured a place at a Russel Group Uni studying English during the pandemic. I think he would have failed his A-Levels had he taken them. His processing difficulties mean that his essays are largely just lists of facts, they are poorly written and he relies heavily on software to correct it.

I marvel that in spite of his barely GCSE standard writing he is looking like he will skim a third, and this makes me question what is happening with the marking at the university. Have standards dropped so much? This boy will (fingers crossed for his mental health after all this slog), graduate and have debt and will still struggle to find work because of his difficulties. I can't help but think that he should have been on a great apprenticeship from the start.

As someone who dropped out of university, I can tell you there’s a lot more to getting a degree than just being offered a place at university.

@Mothershit

I have a concern that unconditionals are sending the wrong people to university who should have been on a different path

Not necessarily re unconditionals. My son got two unconditional offers from high ranked Unis for courses with AAA entry requirements. He'd already "proved" himself by getting mostly 8s and 9s in his GCSEs and his predicted grades for A level were 3As. Even if he'd ended up with, say 3 C's, he'd already proved his academic ability. Obviously both Unis who give him unconditionals just wanted him to put them down as his insurance choice, which he did for one of them, but in reality, he got his 3As so went to his first choice instead.

I can't really imagine Unis are going to give unconditional offers for students with bog-standard GCSEs and forecast of 3 Ds at A level.

So I think people need to delve deeper into the Unis that give conditional offers, their reasons, the forecast A level grades and the achieved grades at GCSE.

As for entry requirements generally, I do tend to agree that Unis seem to be more interested in filling their courses with quantity rather than quality. All you need to do is look at the Unis' websites during clearing to see courses which were previously AAA showing in clearing as CCC - that's one hell of a difference!

I think grade reductions in clearing is a much bigger concern than unconditionals.

‘Mansplain’? Is that the best you can come up with instead of engaging with my points? Guess I can see why it’s gone over your head completely.

People don’t need to go to uni for 3 years to ‘grow, mature and discover’. You can do that in the workplace too. In fact it is probably a better environment because you’re surrounded by people with various jobs, and you can get ideas of what to look for.

Many people come out of uni still not knowing what to do - and then what? Get a Master’s? It’s just pushing the problem down the road. Even worse many actually discover, once in the workplace they would have rather done something else as a degree but they cannot, because they’ve used their loan up. Had they started work…and discovered this, they could have quit, gone back to uni and then gone into a higher position with the benefit of experience and the degree.

At a systemic level this option as you said isn’t really available or encouraged which is why the default option is uni. The percentage of people going doesn’t really matter, it’s that it’s high enough that there are more degree holders than ‘graduate jobs’. And outcomes - is that because graduates on average may have come from higher socioeconomic groups, predisposing them to achieve ? Or is it the piece of paper, the degree that really makes the difference?

You mean bring back polytechnics?

If we didn't live in such a class-ridden society that respected vocational education as valuable I might well agree with you. Sadly we don't, and judging by many of the views on MN I doubt we ever will. It is one of the worst things about British society, particularly English society.

@thing47

Should we therefore seriously think about the A level system and indeed how pupils are assessed and graded at school? I think the contextualisation point is well made but it does leave the question whether employers should do the same and if so are we in a position of admitting an A level is not a consistent or functional qualification as it was meant to be?

I would have to say there are unfortunately strong correlations between A level performance and general academic success at university of we accept some universities are more rigorous than others. Oxbridge have minimum A level tariffs which are high as well as some other courses. We still accept that in the round A levels are a good indicator of academic ability.

The losers when you essentially have a 'clean start ' with degrees and A levels and institution having limited relevancy are those that highly intelligent but have not made the increasingly competitive Oxbridge cut. We need a system that takes into account the academic ability of these children

Post grad is awful for what you describe @2023forme. And the standards do vary even within institutions.

I taught a masters module at one of the ‘up at the top of the world rankings’ type of universities and many of the international students had very clearly bought their English language results. It was notably worse for the students coming to the module from one of the schools vs all the others.

It was terrible. Half of the class was Chinese students from that school whose language skills were so poor that they could not access the materials. It was so unfair on everyone - the other students (some of whom were Chinese, so it’s not even about national origin) were able to work effectively in English and wanted to engage critically with the concepts and in greater depth. But the classes were stalled trying to explain basic concepts to the other students.

The students complained to their course leader in that school and she tried to have a go at me about excluding them etc. I remember looking at her and saying: we have literally run out of words to try to explain the concepts. Even at such a basic level that they’re largely meaningless. Your students simply cannot speak English. That’s why they are struggling.

Meanwhile, the students who could speak English wanted to explore different perspectives on discourse and to apply them to real world examples and so on. They were angry and frustrated that their lecturers were not able to do this because they were constantly being asked to try to explain things in ever more basic terms. They’d started to get annoyed with the students and were at the stage of responding to the repetitive questions with ‘look. It just means an idea. It’s impossible to make it simpler than that’.

My colleague and I were at a loss. But the university leadership had no interest in not taking money from these students. My colleague was a very senior prof and she couldn’t even get her department to agree not to let students from that school (and degree programme) offer our module.

Out of interest mids, why do you so earnestly believe we need these things? It seems to quite a battle of yours and I can't see why it matters so much.

I for one am not surprised.
At the end of the day … In 2023 l, knowledge is everywhere. People can hop onto their computer , watch video lectures on various subjects. They have forums where they can discuss this with other people all over the world.

Whether someone has a degree or not tell me nothing about their critical thinking skills, curiosity, or way of looking at the world. The reason why people are going ‘university blind’ is because they realise that talent comes from anywhere. Actually a lot of places are also going more to internal hiring and mobility, which is just like when people ‘worked their way up’. It’s not widely known and obvious yet, but it’s starting.

There is no point in trying to level everything by saying ‘uni, oh and they’re all equal’. Especially when people are working long enough to have multiple careers. If is something flexible that can be accessed throughout life.

The government qualifications framework provides some level of comparability generally, but it doesn't suit every and any purpose. If you are looking for capability at producing independent scholarly work then an MSc and PGCert are quite different, for example. Even different masters degrees vary a lot between taught and independent research content for example.

@2023forme

People outside the University system would be shocked to see how shit and abused it is.

I agree. I'm shocked at what my son tells me. Last Summer he did his first "in person" exams (year 2), and he was convinced he'd failed some of them as he said there were some questions he couldn't even start to answer, and others where he knew he'd get barely any marks as he just wrote down random things related to the question subject to try to at least write "something". He was convinced he'd be doing some resits over Summer and was very down-beat about it all.

For one exam, it was just 2 long questions from a choice of 4, choose 1 out of the first 2 and then 1 out of the second 2. He made a feeble attempt (his own words of question 1) in the hope he'd get maybe half marks, but hadn't a clue about either of the options in the second section, so just randomly chose one of them, and wrote down a few bullet points that he thought may be related, but realistically, didn't expect any marks at all for it.

He couldn't believe it when the results were posted. He'd just scraped a "first" score overall and not failed any, so no re-takes required. On the worst exam where he barely attempted half the paper, his scored had been "moderated" up to 78%! He wondered just how badly everyone else had done for them to moderate his score up from the raw score which he thought couldn't have been more than 30% (50% on first and 10% on second section) to a whopping 78%!

Mansplaining was a word to describe your tendency to lecture me, yes, and others as if I know nothing at all and you know more. Also, I did engage with your points

There is abundant evidence that life outcomes are improved linked to the highest level of education, particularly for those from the lower socio economic groups, in fact, with a few anomalies. Social mobility 101.

The strong feeling I get on MN is that there is a swathe of posters who just don't want better access to HE. This is not specifically aimed at you at all.

I still don't understand where people think middle ability 18 year olds with no vocation in mind, and no trade inclinations or talents should go. This is a genuine problem for swathes of 18 year olds.

If anyone puts genuine effort in there is always help to get students through uni

I think it is the automatic idea from parents that kids have failed if they don't go to uni their kids have failed that may contribute to the ideas around unis

She may have done a level 5 qualification with 5 days of teaching strung out over a few months with assessments in between the teaching days.

I’ve done a level 7 module with a professional qualification (but only 30 credits) with 6 days of teaching spread over 6 months. Lots of self directed study and workbook stuff in between taught sessions with 3 essays and an osce at the end.

I must be honest , the students I am most concerned about at 18 are the ones which, still now, have no plans at all. Nothing. Two years of A level and no plans. That is a growing number. Maybe scrounging off parents and doing a few shifts at Sports Direct is a better plan than university but I'm not convinced.

@QuintanaRoo it was 5 days start to finish. Very new to her job and wanted to quickly upskill to try and get promoted.

I wonder if she paid for a £30 course online and thought it was a legit Level 5.

It didn't work. No promotion for her