Uni offers - working out likelihood of an offer

[Ferrer]

Is there a way of working out how likely it is your child will receive an offer from a given uni?

My DS has five unis he loves and wants to apply to for Politics. All 5 have a standard entry requirement of AAB. He doesn’t want to apply to any of the unis that have lower standard requirements.

He is predicted A star, A, B. He thinks he will definitely get some offers at AAB unis as he has the A star prediction in politics. Is he taking a big risk that nobody will offer? His GCSEs are below average for his highly selective grammar school (4x 6, 3x 7, 3x 8). He has no EPQ but a predicted B at AS French.

Is there any way I can find out how likely offers are at Bath, Leeds, York, Nottingham and Birmingham? I see Birmingham has a handy offer predictor calculator but nobody else seems to.

I prefer CUG rankings for Politics. The link doesn’t work. There’s better places to go. Many. Getting a job in Politics after is the challenge. Few manage it. Unless you know someone. Contacts matter.

Sadly I also wonder whether the statement put out by Hull is a bit misleading? I imagine one of their students has once been such an intern. That’s great. But so have many students from many universities. Probably most universities, in fact.

The headline suggests a pathway but the specifics of the wording are unclear. Often there is a reason for this

Not that it applies to my DDs but often a year abroad at a uni or an internship with a partner company or in politics is competitive. The expansion of student numbers has led to this. A friend’s DS got nowhere with a political placement. Decent enough RG uni. Students are probably better off belonging to a local party/charity/pressure group and helping out.

The Hull-Westminster programme is a very well-established formal partnership that has been running for more than 30 years. Every year about 20 students do a year long placement through it as part of their course and some MPs just take one intern after another on a rolling basis through the partnership. There are also shorter placements offered. I suppose they are very dependent on finding enough MPs who are willing to offer their internships through the programme.

It's certainly not the only way to get an internship in Parliament though. There are always random students attached to particular MPs or peers or their staff at meetings and events in Parliament. For this reason I suspect that while having had an internship is interesting and useful, and it being part of a formal, monitored programme hopefully maintains the quality of the internships so they aren't just hanging around photocopying and making tea, it is no guarantee of future employment in politics.

That’s great, @Phphion Thank you.

Thanks also to @titchy

My first comment was a bit cynical. What @Phphion wrote sounds interesting. However it is frustrating that the Westminster placements are the eye catching headline on the course programme page at Hull, with no mention for 18 yr olds who are still learning how the world works that there are only (a relative term, to be sure) 20 places p.a.

I have a feeling that the BPLS course at Hull (which is the one that is specifically part of the Hull-Westminster partnership) may actually be very small. Possibly there are only 20 students in each year doing that specific course.

I know 3 students who did the specific course at Hull. They all get internships. It isn't smoke and mirrors.

It's not a league table , and the link works for me.

It simply shows where MPs went to university.

Hull is top 10.

Try this

ds is currently studying politics and IR.

I think that list is risky and a bit foolish simply because they all want AAB. That means that if your ds got A*BB he wouldn’t have met his offer and could find himself in clearing (and facing accommodation stress) He needs a better spread of offers so that he has an insurance.

Out of those I’d think bath might not offer. It’s simply supply and demand sometimes. DS was predicted three A stars and As on both core maths and EPQ and was rejected from St Andrews.

@Piggywaspushed MPs are a ridiculous employment stat! It’s out of reach for the vast majority. It’s the jobs the majority get that matter. No uni should ever be judged on where MPs went. That’s goes for Oxford too. It’s a shame we don’t expect MPs to have studied something useful and actually worked in a professional role for the job of running Britain. Politics as a single academic subject followed by a job in politics fails us.

Oh, OK, whatever. I thought it was interesting.

It’s a tiny tiny sample. More pertinent is that only 17% of MPs have a stem degree. Many issues we face are stem related. So 83% with humanities degrees is very worrying.

Phphion is right. The Hull politics course is well established and well regarded. One of their Westminster interns, a friend of a friend, stayed with us for four months when she did her Westminster placement.

She loved it, and it seemed to be a really valuable experience. Not perhaps because she wanted a career in politics, but just being there in the thick of it was fascinating for someone who had chosen Hull because her parents expected her to study at the local University. The work, helping out in a busy MPs office seemed interesting, and she got to attend events etc. She had several friends doing the same, so it is not just one or two.

I will still stuck by the league table. Well regarded by whom? Not employers judging by stats. 20 students is a drop in the ocean for placements. It is clearly offered for Politics. I would say it wasn’t of much value though. Oxbridge is still the way in!

@TizerorFizz op’s DS won’t be applying to oxbridge though with AAB. I believe Hull was suggested as an insurance option.

@NotDonna Yes. I know. I was talking about MPs. Plenty of options for Politics elsewhere but if you look at MP stats, Oxbridge is 20%. No uni is 15%.

My argument is how do you decide which uni is worth applying to if placement opportunities are over-stated and shouldn’t students take grad jobs into account ? Working is usually the goal and some unis have better stats for this and aren’t 56th in the CUG tables for Politics. Other insurance options look better.

I don’t think this will be helping the OP

Thanks all and sorry for slow response to some really useful explanations from those who have been through similar and even those who have worked in admissions. Thank you!

DS and I have talked and he’s clear he would prefer to take a gap year and reconsider his options than go to a uni he’s not really excited about. So he’s going with applications to 5x AAB offer unis (although he’s swapped Birmingham out for Newcastle but that’s also AAB). Let’s see what happens. His school won’t check and enter the form for weeks annoyingly so we won’t know for a while.

@Ciri Considering work after a degree matters to most students in the end. At 17 it’s often neglected but it is begininning to account for a drop off in applications for humanities subjects and more competition for others such as economics and CS in particular. How you get work is pretty vital really.

The vast majority of kids who study politics don’t want to be politicians and I suspect most politicians don’t have politics degrees. But it was more that not every HE needs to turn into an argument..

My son applied to study politics at Durham, Exeter, Warwick, Bath and Nottingham. He was predicted 3 A stars (and had all 9s but in the TAG year so not really comparable).

He received five offers but I think only one was lower for an EPQ - from memory, that's was Exeter but only if you firmed them, not an insurance. However, his EPQ was politics related so I suspect was probably the main reason behind his offers. But it was a lot of work and most pupils abandoned theirs before the end.

Generally, most of his cohort (selective private school which probably didn't help in some ways) received around three offers of the five. I think it's a lot harder to get five offers than it used to be.

The other piece of advice I'd give is to only pick a second choice option that you actually want to go to. Quite a few of my son's friends didn't when push came to shove and took a year out instead.