Published on www.researchprofessional.com on 17 October 2021
Aytek Erdil examines what went wrong with university admissions this summer and suggests a solution
This summer, selective universities were overwhelmed with more students than they could accommodate. In some cases, new students were told to find housing in neighbouring towns and were even offered £10,000 to defer their studies or study elsewhere.
Why did these universities, which are meant to be selective, make many more offers than they could reasonably accommodate? Because when universities make their offers, they have no way of knowing how many will result in recruitment. The system is plagued with uncertainty and universities inevitably get things wrong. When uncertainty increases, mistakes can increase. A lot.
Part of this uncertainty has to do with universities making offers based on predicted grades. If Mary’s teachers predict AAB for her, and she gets an ‘offer’ from Ambridge University in April that is conditional on her achieving those grades, neither Mary nor her teachers nor Ambridge know for sure whether she will indeed get them. Nobody will know until mid-August whether this ‘offer’ is valid.
To make things worse, the system forces Mary to gamble. Despite having received offers from her next four favourite universities (Boxford, Cristol, Dimperial and Good Enough), she is required to let go of three of them. While she is allowed to hold two, the second must be an ‘insurance choice’. Good Enough University, whose offer comes with a lower condition, might seem an obvious choice for insurance, but it is a much less attractive outcome for Mary than Boxford, Cristol and Dimperial.
Making life difficult
This strange—and by international standards unique—set of rules is meant to make life easy for universities. But it forces them to struggle with uncertainty too. Ambridge is aware that many of its applicants will receive offers from other universities. But which applicants? And from which other universities? With what conditions attached? Will competing universities try to lure these same applicants with unconditional offers? How many of these applicants will actually pick Ambridge over other offers they may be holding?
Here’s how much guesswork goes into admissions: students (not knowing their grades) rely on their teachers’ predictions when deciding which courses to apply to. Having seen only these predicted grades, universities need to guess which applicants will end up qualified enough to deserve admission. Sought-after courses and universities have many more strong applicants than they can admit. Therefore, they need to select applicants while trying to guess how many of these will meet their conditions and how many will indeed turn up if given offers.
Now multiply this across 700,000 students and thousands of university courses across the UK. And if that is not chaotic enough, how about shaking this all up with a pandemic? Cancel exams, cook up a non-transparent guessing algorithm in a hurry to predict grades once more, and see how things play out.
We wouldn’t start from here
The January 2021 consultation paper from the Department for Education on post-qualification admissions opens with a clear confession: “If we were starting from scratch today, we would not design the higher education admissions system we have now.”
In response, with Battal Doğan, a senior lecturer in economics at the University of Bristol, I have carried out a comprehensive analysis of the existing university admissions system in the UK, starting with the fundamentals of what it would mean for admissions to be fair, efficient and practical. What would it take to widen access, to support student aspirations and to give every applicant the best choice they qualify for?
Our core principles put the stakeholders at the heart of our approach. First: respect students’ agency and protect and promote student choice. Second: respect universities’ autonomy in how they assess applicants and set their recruitment targets. Third: allow all participants to access all the relevant information for their decision-making, whether this is students choosing courses or universities assessing applicants.
We asked how we could create a system that allows students to pursue and express their choices safely and straightforwardly and that ensures universities meet their intake targets with the most qualified applicants possible.
Matchmaking service
The key, we argue, is to use a ‘matchmaker’ (the obvious choice would be Ucas) that privately collects all that information and, unlike in the present decentralised system, coordinates offer-making across universities. This will be a matchmaker that is completely in tune with students’ preferences, with universities’ assessment of their applicants and with universities’ target intake numbers.
In what sense will the match be in tune? Mary will not miss out on Ambridge in favour of William if Ambridge judges Mary to be more qualified than William. Ambridge will not lose Mary to Boxford if Mary says she prefers Ambridge to Boxford. Finally, target intake numbers will be respected and popular courses will not waste any places. This is what market designers would call a stable matching.
Our matchmaker’s problem is not dissimilar to that of matching graduating doctors in the United States with their first hospital posts, assigning high school students to schools in London or New York or matching applicants to university courses in Hungary. And as with all these processes, a satisfactory solution must heed design lessons from both the theory and practice of market design, while carefully incorporating the details of immediate problems affecting individual institutions.
Reform now
If you rely on too much guesswork, you are more likely to be hit by wrong guesses.
The existing university admissions system, with its excessive reliance on predictions, forecasts and strategies, serves neither the students nor the universities. A common response to systemic criticism of any institution is: ‘Sure, but is there a realistic alternative?’ We know there is. We have designed it.
The essence of our post-qualification admissions model is (i) to revise the admissions calendar so universities finalise their assessments of applicants after A-level results, (ii) to allow applicants to privately express their preferences over all their choices, and (iii) to use all this information to coordinate offers via a centralised matchmaking process. You can find the details here.
Aytek Erdil is a professor of economics at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of King’s College Cambridge.