Non Oxbridge early application - good, bad or neutral?

[GnomeDePlume]

DD has asked me to ask this of you wise folk.

DD is applying to Russell Group universities but not Oxford/Cambridge. If her application goes in early is that an advantage or is there a risk that her preferred unis will assume she is applying to Oxford/Cambridge and discount her application?

She is applying for physics/chemistry subjects and is predicted A*AAA.

Any advice please?

I have no opinion on when to submit an application, but can anyone clarify this please. If a university normally makes 100 offers on a course, and offers 15 of those to "early" applicants, then 85 are remaining. How do they know that vast numbers of excellent applicants will not be applying later? Are the number of offers very flexible? Do they think the early offers will go elsewhere? I am interested because this question comes up every year.

Bubbles

Several things - mainly because although you think your kid is unique, they're not. The number and 'quality' and timing of applicants each year doesn't actually change massively. So your quadruple A star kid who applies before the Oxbridge deadline is the same as the quadruple A star kid who applied before the Oxbridge deadline last year.

You know you're going to get 1200 applications (your HEI might target you at 1400), you know that you need to make 600 offers (700 in you're in expand mode), to meet your target of 200 (or 250) acceptances.

Of the 600 applications you can confidently offer 100-200 early applications to really strong applicants because you've still got 4-500 left to go. It's really quite easy!

titchy is right - and if you assume that applicant patterns are going to be the same year on year, you can decide your criteria for offer and start making rolling offers, on the assumption that what happened last year wil also happen this year - and it usually does.
In addition, the precise number of offers made doesn't have to be exact. The way most of us work is that we would plan to have fewer applicants achieving the terms of the offer in August than we need, and then fill up with people who've just missed the offer. So if you get a few more excellent applications than usual, that just means that you will have fewer near misses than usual. For big courses with hundreds of places and thousands of applicants absolute precision is also difficult because conversion rates (how many people accept the offer) can vary depending on factors outside your control.

At the Bristol open day last weekend the course leader told everyone that because of investment in the uni anyone who applied with the correct predicted grades would get an offer.

I guess it depends on the course and its popularity. The course DD wants to do is very specific but requires high grades - the supply may be limited but so is the demand and the price is high (in grade requirements) so everything balances out.

Well yes up to a point Gannet but titchy is over egging it rather with the 4 A example since plenty of DC going for the extremely competitive courses but much lower predictions (eg 1A) get early offers too. You're making it sounds as though there are oodles of places for every course. That may be truer these days than several years ago, but the most competitive courses are still.... very competitive :)

Anecdotally my early application DC had vastly more success than their cousin who left his application until January (applying in the same year as one, the year after the other) for the same course (History) at the same places (UCL/ Durham/ Bristol etc), despite the cousin having better GCSEs. The only obvious difference was that the cousin went to independent schools not a state grammar, as mine did, but the independents were not top of the pops, so I doubt that was it.

I agree with the PP's its usually not that difficult to hit the target number of students year on year. We make early offers to students who will be at the top of the pile what ever happens and early rejections to those who are never going to make the cut off and keep the rest until all the applications are in. We then effectively stack them in order of merit and cut off the pile at the point that gives us the right number of offers. The conversion rate of those offers into students is roughly the same every year so we end up with more or less the target number of students. It doesn't matter when you apply, you will be in the same place in the pile, either above or below the cut off.
If this goes wrong and we end up with too many students, as happened to us a few years ago, you just have to get on and teach them! So if we make early offers and it becomes clear they are pitched too low, we have to continue on the same basis all the way through the UCAS process, giving everyone with those "too low" qualifications the same offer.

It won't make a difference and even if they did think she was, they're not allowed to not offer her a place for that reason. All applications have to be considered fairly.

goodbye stranger - of course very competitive courses will be in a different position, which is why they will usually not start offering until later in the cycle.Courses which start offering early, however, are doing so because they are confident that patterns repeat themselves year on year. These are the majority of courses - the number of highly competitive courses is really comparatively quite small.
I don't know what the difference is between your DCs application success and their cousin, but it won't have been timing. As I, and others, have said, penalising later applications that come in before the deadline is against the rules of UCAS and they won't do it. It would also be stupid - if they are looking to select the best possible cohort of students, why would the timing of the application, which is often not determined by the applicant, be in any way relevant? In my discipline, the institutions you mention are ones that will tend to save up applications and make the bulk of their offers later in the cycle when they look at them all together, and they tend to pay more attention to personal statements, so maybe your DCs personal statement was more impressive than their cousins?

Yes Gannet, I only make the point because as the years have rolled by we've seen plenty of early offers for the top end competitive courses, which slightly contradicts what you say.

The cousin difference, if what you say is correct, could only possibly be the personal statement - but so many other admissions tutors on here say they aren't read.

At the Bristol open day last weekend the course leader told everyone that because of investment in the uni anyone who applied with the correct predicted grades would get an offer.

It's not because of investment; it's because they aren't filling a lot of their courses! Bristol is more valued on MN than it currently is in league tables.

Ohhh that makes sense @GnomeDePlume and it sounds like a really good course. Some students with good honours get to move straight to PhD when they stay at the same uni and if your dd is passionate and has some unique and wonderful interests in her field than a Russell group uni may well be the perfect place to be.

Btw Bristol is an excellent uni too and I love the City too although it's a bit way too trendy for me these days.

User is probably right about the numbers game but not at all about the value comment. Uni's fall in and out of fashion so the demand fluctuates but Bristol is a high calibre uni and is always going to be in the mix.

Same thing happened to St Andrews a few years ago and Manchester before that and lots others I haven't heard about.

What is your evidence that Bristol is of higher calibre than other "high tariff" universities? I never understand why so many people on MN seem to put Bristol just behind Oxbridge and consider it "excellent" "high calibre" etc.

Because thirty years ago it was! I don't think it's gone downhill, I just think a lot of other universities have upped their game and there are lots competing at that 'second tier' now. You only have to look at the league tables and the REF to see that, but some people here only like the facts when they back up their own biases

DD likes the look of the course at Bristol because out of the half dozen or so unis offering chemical physics with a year in industry (the year in industry is important to DD) it is the one which most meets what she wants to study.

Sheffield is next to visit. We have already been to Glasgow and UEA.

Since the cap came off student numbers, you can understand what Bristol are saying. If you meet the grade requirements, you will get an offer (excluding courses such as medicine etc). Nearly all the top universities, incl. Warwick, Exeter etc most of their courses in Clearing this year.

. Warwick, Exeter etc most of their courses in Clearing this year.

really Jeanne? Both seem rather conspicuous by their absence for most of the official clearing list published in the Telegraph. Happy to be corrected though.

A lot of recruiters will be of an age when Bristol, UCL and Durham were the highest tier below Oxbridge. Most employers of arts graduates will not differentiate much about the nuances of the degree or student evaluation of teaching which is Bristol's problem. They are not hand holders and some students don't like that. Employers do though.

I tend to subscribe to the view that PSs are read by the better universities. In fact Bristol says, on a number of courses, that weighting is given to them. At least applicants have to think about what they write rather than writing something for the sake of it. Any university that does not read the PS really tells the student they don't have to bother too much which is not good prep for a job.

goodbyestranger If early offers are being made for courses that are genuinely competitive, then, as others have said, the quality of the application must be such that the admissions staff can be very confident that it is at the top of the pile and will certainly merit an offer. Alternatively, the courses may not be as competitive as you think they are. On personal statements, practice will vary but they are more likely to be read and used for the most competitive courses. For UCL, one of the institutions mentioned, you can find their policy here: www.ucl.ac.uk/prospective-students/undergraduate/application/selection
And I know that Bristol and Durham also pay attention to them.

The equal academic consideration rule is an actual contractual rule of UCAS and is in University's published admissions policies. You seem to be using anecdote to accuse well reputed institutions of breaching contractual terms and acting contrary to their own policies, which is really not on. Obviously no-one here can comment on the individual anecdotes you are sharing, but the notion that timing of application is a factor in the success of an application is one of the most persistent mythologies about university admissions, and causes some young people and their parents a lot of unnecessary stress, and the admissions experts on this thread are saying it simply isn't true.

Boys3. The day before the A level results came out, I was worried about my DSs Offer, so I went onto a number of unis own sites. Both Warwick and Exeter had their own listings of courses that were in Clearing. As far as I could make out, Warwick listed practically every course, except Maths and Economics. Of course it was not clear how many places there were and I did wonder if they were advertising for Adjustment applications, more than Clearing.

What it confirms for me is that since the numbers cap was removed, the universities are competing for 'bumbs on seats'. None of this bodes well for the kids who then can't get jobs with their degrees.

Neither Warwick nor Exeter were in clearing for Law, I don't think.

And, as you acknowledge, some courses are not always in clearing to fill lots of places, or because they need to be.
But remember - we are currently in a demographic dip, so there were fewer 18 year olds applying to university this year. That's one of the reasons clearing activity has been heightened over the last couple of years- not about a raise in numbers but needing to keep the same numbers. Plus the A level reforms created unpredictability this year, particularly in sciences, which are less competitive anyway.

It is an even bigger problem for the lower tariff universities because they just do not have enough bums on seats and that will cause a funding crisis. If a young person cannot get a job from Warwick or Exeter, they would struggle even more from X university at the bottom of the league tables. It is clearly dog eat dog for the AAB level of students and the better universities will probably win that battle. Differential pricing for some less prestigious universities could help but, as a well qualified 6th former, choosing a high quality university is important for future career.

There is also such a thing as early rejection. My DDs friend was rejected from Leeds to read English and she had also applied to Cambridge. Clearly she met the academic requirements for Leeds so the rejection was surprising. Another friend was rejected from all 5 universities to read English (one very early rejection) and had to go through adjustment. Again, a very well qualified applicant and an academic scholar at the school. Some decisions are bizarre.

I think it is very course specific. The course leader for chem physics at Bristol clearly said they weren't interested in personal statements and that all applicants with the required predicted grades would get an offer. But this is a niche course. There were only 20 students in the course talk and a number of those were sheltering from the rain waiting for the chemistry talk which was immediately after.

I have suggested to DD that she gets her application in as soon as it is ready then concentrates on getting her A levels.

Gannet what you say is always interesting but I tend to know a properly competitive course when I see one! I think you're approach is spot on Gnome. It's worked a treat to get all of my DC early offers, even those lacking predictions of 4A*, which titchy implied was needed. It's very cheering to have an early offer, even if it's not the very top of their list. If everything is ready on the form there seems no reason to wait.

I didn't say 4 A stars were needed at all I was using that as an example of a very very highly predicted applicant who you might think was unique, but in reality those sorts of applicants apply in broadly the same numbers as previous years which makes offer making quite straightforward regardless of where in the cycle they apply.