Finding Uni admissions a nightmare!

[FiveFoxes]

DH and I both went to University in the 90s. My memory was choose 6 universities by looking at the UCAS book, fill in UCAS form and wait for offers. Accept a firm and insurance offer. Get A Level results. Apply for accommodation and start.

DS wants to do either Maths or Computer Science. He is getting high grades in his tests and did excellently at GCSE and therefore is looking at Oxbridge, Russell Group and similar.

Wow. Things are HARD these days and so complicated!

First off Open days where you have to register for each talk you want to go to and places are very limited so you have to get in early.

Secondly is all the admission tests. There are so many! And you have to pay for them it looks like? And some courses need them and some don't? Some might need more and interviews?!

And personal statements where they want you to have done other tests in the subject and attended conferences, entered competitions etc (all of which require you to know about and have the ability (not academic ability) to enter.

Not to mention Oxbridge colleges and how you choose that and (something I just read on MN) you can't apply to same ones as others from your 6th form..

And then there's student finance and accommodation and probably other things I haven't thought of.

Honestly it's as far away from an inclusive application process as I could imagine. It has been made as complicated and difficult as possible - it puts off those who don't go to proactive schools or have proactive parents. I feel overwhelmed by it all and I went to uni myself and am proactive! I don't know how other people manage.

I went to Oxbridge in the 90s and it was like that then. The only difference was I sorted it out myself through school rather than getting my parents involved. It worked out fine. These days the parents are so involved - that is why it became so overly competitive. They are the ones competing with each other almost - if everyone just backed off it would not be such a nightmare. The unis are then responding to these kids who have been pushed by their parents into all sorts and that raises the standard.

Yeah and it also makes no difference!
Oxbridge consider any additional effort the same - it's how the candidate talks about it. And expresses their thoughts.
They won't hold an international competition, however difficult, in higher regard than someone just watching YT videos because the former requires a level of privilege and financial backing.
We are not the US although a lot seems to think so.

And I registered for and attended open days myself back in the 90s with my friends and my parents had zero clue what I was up to. Kids need to work it out themselves. If they want to go to Oxbridge they should go on StudentForum and work out what they need to do themselves. The place will be full of self driven self starters with an inherent passion for their subject who are also super organised. So if they cannot do it themselves, I would not be sending a child there. I also applied for work experiences, multiple jobs etc all myself and I expect my DC to do the same. It is part of the learning process to become an adult and to then thrive and be organised later on. Better to make a mistake and not learn from it now. Whether you end up at Warwick Maths or Cambridge etc, it does not really matter anyway for jobs these days. The courses themselves at all the top unis are so competitive, the employers know that and don’t seem to care anymore which one you attended (some are even blind to it).

These days the parents are so involved - that is why it became so overly competitive. They are the ones competing with each other almost - if everyone just backed off it would not be such a nightmare

Agree. For parents with plenty of money who can no longer compete in the old fashioned industrial revolution way, by commissioning a special dinner service etc, their DCs' educational achievements do seem to be the modern currency in which to compete. It's very unhealthy compared to paying a craftsman for a dinner service. It starts with which school and moves on to Oxbridge/ Harvard/ Yale. Not great for the DC at all, especially those at the lower end of the ability range at these top schools or for those who don't thrive under pressure and would far rather go somewhere less intense.

I think that’s looking at it the wrong way round. It’s got a lot more competitive because there’s loads more kids applying! Pushy parents have always steered their kids towards Oxbridge, but it’s that much more difficult now to get in now, hence the increased angst.

In general I feel these sneery remarks about over-invested parents aren’t helpful. Yes, I have been more involved in my kids’ uni applications than my parents were with mine, but things have changed in the last 30 years. Everything is much more competitive, expensive and less certain of future success, and the very fact that so much info is available online nowadays (and needs to be sifted through) makes it all the more daunting.

The application process isn’t complicated and need not be costly. Both my DC navigated Oxbridge applications with support (but no expertise) from DH and myself. One DC is super organised, the other very last minute - both approaches were successful.
The difference now I think is the plethora of information about applying and sheer competition for places which can make it feel a bit more intense, especially in schools where many kids apply. DH and I encouraged our DC to have a solid plan B - a course and university combination that they were just as keen on and to keep that as important as Oxbridge throughout the process.

I think the posts are more observational than sneery tbf. Also cautionary: it can be enormously counter productive being too intrusive with a DC's education and that's probably increasingly true as the DC progresses through the year groups.

@BiancaBlank@ofteninaspin I agree that there's more information but that's not the OPs complaint. Quite the opposite. And she's only complaining about applying not all the prior research.

Personally I think research isn't the issue here. If these are bright DC aiming for top universities they should be capable of doing it independently. Parents should be aiming to support, and advise in narrowing choices down , not aiming to provide 'expert advice'.

Oxbridge should always be a bonus not plan A unless you're applying for something with high barriers to entry like Classics or Music. @ofteninaspin your advice is pretty good a lot of DC get demoralised after an Oxbridge rejection.

Oxbridge should always be a bonus not plan A unless you're applying for something with high barriers to entry like Classics or Music.

Not the point of this thread… but there are no subject prerequisites or entry barriers for Classics. Students don’t need to come with any knowledge of Latin or Greek (and it’s been that way since the mid-90s).

Music is slightly different as students do either need an A Level in music or to have done Grade 7 theory.

The problem with re-jigging the grading to put another grade on top is that you don't want getting that grade to depend on who makes the most silly errors on the day. That means you can't just say 95% gets an A-double-star. You'd need to have more tough questions so that the papers really distinguish between the top candidates - and then the paper becomes harder for the rest of the candidates.

There used to be S-level papers, set by the exam boards, which were on the same syllabus as the A-level, but challenged the top candidates. Those went after Cambridge introduced their own version (STEP), but then Cambridge dropped STEP except for maths. We could do with the top universities getting together to rationalise the extra papers - but they'd have to agree on whether to have them in October or June. There's arguments for and against each. There is some cooperation - Imperial use Oxford's, and Warwick will accept either.

DD's school paid for hers.

I agree @lanthanum, a return to S level papers might help, though we need to remember times have changed. I sat two humanity S levels. You took them at the very end of the A-level exams. There were fewer A level subjects offered (I think), so it would have been relatively easy for exam boards to cover the full range of subjects and relatively few markers would have been required to cover all the potential S level candidates.

A point to bear in mind is that whilst I sat Oxbridge exams in Y13 (as most do today), the majority of Oxbridge entrants back then sat them post-A level, in Y14 (a reflection of the stronger skew to private schools back then). This meant Oxbridge tutors could see candidates' S level results before deciding on their filtering. Certainly I did not have predicted grades for S level in my UCCA (pre-UCAS) application.

The questions on my S level papers were very expansive, allowing you to be quite creative, and more akin to what I experienced at university. You didn't prepare for S level and there was no separate syllabus or mark scheme. Where a reintroduction of S level could work would be if the entire system was rejigged to focus on unis issuing offers after A levels are published.

But tuition was free as you say and that made a massive difference!!! Also it was far more inclusive then - education offered social mobility in a way I don't believe it does anymore. I got a full grant + no tuition fees at a RG uni as did others from my working class area comp. Plus things like bursaries to do placements and no expectation to work term time as grant was enough to live on. Compare that to a student from a low income family now - they are looking at significant student debt (£60k+ for a 3 year undergrad) with no hope of family support to help them, they pretty much have to work throughout + added pressure of COL crisis hitting low income families hardest. Honestly it's not even close let alone comparable.

@PerpetualOptimist
I have no clue what an S level is. Will it be more challenging than the STEP exam?

This Wikipedia page provides an overview of S level papers, which were phased out in the early 2000s:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholarship_level

Brings back memories. I did S levels in the early 80s though I always thought the S stood for Special not Scholarship. I'm not sure why I did them really , I just got told I'd been entered so showed up and did the exams. I did Chemistry and Biology and got a 1 and a 2. Totally meaningless for me, but they were quite fun as I knew I had nothing other than pride to lose and the questions were interesting. I guess they could make a useful differentiator in some circumstances. I thought the A star grade had made them superfluous but maybe not.
I suppose they were good practice for me as when I arrived at University there was an actual Scholarship exam that had questions on similar lines, more reasoning than factual recall, though you also had to answer questions on subjects you weren't studying, like languages and humanities. But I got proper money for doing well in that one so that was the S that really mattered to me !

Thanks. It's a pity the scholarship scheme got abolished.

This is literally the truth. My DC wants to study one of these and the offer grades for decent Russell top 10 universities were ALL higher than offers for friends studying humanities at Oxbridge and even sciences in the same universities.

I don't see the issue about grades. Oxford in particular has held to its policy of making lower offers but fewer of them. Other top unis don't want their offers to be used as insurance if at all possible but at the same time quite naturally want very strong applicants - while stopping short of using the same much more in depth admissions process. The higher grades requirement makes complete sense.