I spend a lot of time in my job looking at university data and I can tell you that the lowering of grades at confimation (based on actual results) is a new phenomena . Some universities may have done this by a grade on some courses in the past but this has been happening a lot more in the last two years in particular and this year has been particularly bad year for it
This is all a direct result of introducing the student loan system, tution fees that barely risen in over ten years along wth a catastrophic drop in in international stuents.
Universities cannot continue to deliver an undergraduate education of the quality expected, along with providing all of the additional support needed with the income they have. To try to save themselves financially they are being reduced to just taking all the students they can, with much less regard to their A Level qualifications than in the past. Not every university on every course (it will be more on humanities courses than STEM ones), but even the Russell Goups have started to do this in larger numbers on some of their less popular courses now as the finances are starting to bite them too.
To be fair, there is evidence that A Levels are not the best indicatior of who will do well in university but they are what we have and it is difficult to predict who will do well at university regardless of school exams. It is the first time for most young people that they choose for themselves what they want to do and that has a big effect on motivation, which means that there is some justification for sometimes dropping A Level grades for entry to university for some students.
However the major driver for grade dropping at he moment is that universities are getting desperate. UK universities delivered an absolutely excellent edcation until a few years ago. Covid was the beginning of the end of that but mostly because it coincided wth the perfect storm of circumstances I listed above.
We get the education system we deserve. If you tell universities they have to act like businesses in the 'product' they deliver, that they must meet ever increasingly onerous standards and legal obligations to students 'the customers' but give them absolutely no control over what they can charge to deliver that product - (in fact refuse to allow a raise in prices for 13 years), and at the same time reduce access to income from intenational students, this is what you get
As for paid apprenticeships - everyone says. 'At least you get paid', but completion rates are pretty low and satisfaction rates with them are lower than with degrees. Frankly I'd be less satisfied having to work and study at the same time, usually to gain a very narrow set of skills set by an employer that don't always translate to other jobs. Degree apprenticeships require that you commit to job at a very early, that you know what you want to work as at a very young age. At least a lot of university degrees teach transferrable skills
In any case the number of Degree apprenticechips have grown considerably in the last few years but who do you think delivers a lot of them? (a clue is higher education providers) . They are complicated to set up as employers drive much of the curriculum so difficult to run and not necessarily very lucrative for the providers unless they are of pretty poor quality
I wish I had the answer but I don't I'm afraid. What options do universities have other than to keep their student numbers up to plug the finance leak? People say let them go bust, then we would have fewer providers but If universities do go bust, there will be a lot of students on degrees, including degree apprenticeships that will not be able to complete their courses. Having to stop in the middle of a programme of study having paid for 1 or 2 years with no outcome is pretty awful. The Govt is unlikely to step in to help, universities are incredibly unpopular as a recipient of Govt support, you only need to look at the media to see that.
It is a big mess at the moment