Durham College Allocation 2025

[WesternPowerHouse]

There is a message on WIWIKAU which suggests College allocation for 2025 will have a different method to this year. It says it's a post by a current Durham student; obviously no idea if it is correct. Says that students will rank only the top 3 and then express a preference for catered or non-catered.

Following for info

Sounds sensible

The update on that post is that the catered vs non catered is a big issue as people ranked one or the other for their top choices and didn't get them. It's a significant price difference. They must be getting a lot of push back on it. The current system is definitely flawed but I think ranking just three isn't enough - why not five? Otherwise if they miss those three then they may still get put somewhere that would have ranked 14-15-16 (I know with the current system that happens, but one hopes they do at least try). The collegiate system is Durhams USP, but they don't have it quite right yet! Their desire for an 'equal spread' of subjects at the colleges may be the roadblock.

DD's friend has been allocated non-catered when one of her main reasons for choosing Durham over another university was that there were catered options. So allowing them to indicate if they have a preference seems sensible (perhaps with the options of strong/mild preference and no preference, rather than have everyone choose one of the two - then if there isn't the right balance, they can avoid disappointing someone with a strong preference.

17 preferences seems unwieldy to deal with, and I suspect most people have fair degree of randomness in their preferences below the top few, so it's not clear how useful it is to know that someone has ranked college A at 10 and college B at 14.

I guess the other issue is that some people have a big preference between "hill" and "bailey". Perhaps the balance of preferences there is such that they can't meet them as easily.