How have university admissions changed due to major world events?

As a university and career counsellor, I have been tracking my school’s university applications since 2017: what countries our students applied to, what universities they chose to go to, what they chose to study and how many decided on gap years.

When I enter the data for our class of 2024, that will be eight years’ worth of information. Over these eight years, there have been major global events, such as Covid-19, political changes and ongoing wars.

I recently decided to look and see if there has been any correlation between these events and trends in university applications.

University application trends: Covid-19

In spring of 2020, the number of university applications to Switzerland (where our school is based) were consistent with previous years, and the number of students taking gap years was also consistent with previous years.

Then lockdown happened and, once it was clear that the situation was not going to change very quickly, the majority of our gap-year students applied at the last minute to Swiss universities, making our application percentage to Switzerland higher than ever before and our gap-year percentage the lowest ever.

I assumed this trend would be a pandemic blip. But, ever since then, while our gap-year numbers have gone back to pre-Covid proportions, our applications to Swiss universities have continued to increase.

People often ask me why. The answer is that I don’t know. Is it because the pandemic has left people with residual anxiety about moving abroad for higher education? Is it because Swiss universities have become more internationally recognised and are therefore seen as good educational options? Is it because of the cost of living: are the affordable tuition fees of Swiss universities attracting more students and their families? It could be all of these reasons – or none.

Brexit

Post-Brexit, everyone without a British passport was considered an international student by British universities and was therefore expected to pay the highest tuition fees. No more home fees for European/EEA passport holders. International students are also no longer able to bring family members with them to the UK.

As expected, our school has seen a rapid drop in the number of applications to UK universities because most families say that it is no longer affordable. Instead, they’re looking towards more affordable countries, such as Switzerland, the Netherlands, Denmark and Germany.

This decline in UK applications isn’t just at our school. Recent data published by THE show that overall UK applications are lower for the third year in a row.

What is going to happen as a result of this decline in numbers? Will this decline continue or will the trend change? Again, these are questions I am only able to ponder on.

Cost-of-living crisis

Climate change, the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine have all contributed to a worldwide cost-of-living crisis. In 2023, global prices rose by an average of 7.4 per cent.

It is therefore no surprise that families are looking towards more affordable higher education pathways. Many families are now saying that they aren’t prepared to pay for undergraduate degrees in America – only master’s. Other families are looking at countries they wouldn’t have considered in the past, such as Switzerland or the Netherlands.

Mitigating international student trends

More often than not, it is a combination of all of the above three events that has caused a change in university application trends. While we don’t know whether or not these trends are here to stay, what we do know is that there have been negative consequences – and that it is likely that these consequences will also affect university application trends.

Take for instance the increase in the number of international students applying to study in Switzerland. Swiss university ETH Zurich is ranked 11th in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) is 33rd and the University of Zurich 80th.

So Swiss universities are now getting a lot of global recognition. The number of students in Swiss first-year classes is overflowing and, in many popular subjects, only one in four students will be allowed to move on to the second year.

The increase in international student intake in Switzerland has caused EPFL to consider putting a cap on the number of international students. ETH changed its entrance exam so that it’s held once every two years instead of once a year, and is making its master’s degrees more restrictive. And the University of Zurich just announced that it is pulling out of the THE rankings, citing disagreement over the data collected – but, I wonder, is this just a way to reduce visibility within the international student community? 

Similarly, universities in the Netherlands have introduced a package of measures reducing international access to English-taught programmes, outlined in a recent paper, as an apparent way of reversing the current student housing crisis. And Canada has also announced that it might be restricting its number of international university students.

These restrictions may seem unfair, but what else can universities do when students are struggling to find seats in the lecture hall or cannot find anywhere to live in the country where they are studying?

In this ever-changing, unpredictable world, it is very important to encourage our young people to be adaptable. A student in Grade 10 (Year 11) might plan to apply to university in Switzerland when they reach Grade 12 (Year 13) – and they might have an academic profile that suggests they would have been successful in 2024. But we don’t know what the criteria will be in 2026 – it might be harder to gain a place, or easier or, indeed, the same. There is no longer any possibility of making a safe prediction.

As a university and career counsellor, I believe it is essential to support my students and their families in making future plans that include a number of different options. I do this by keeping them informed of the range of opportunities in the world, encouraging them to be open to different ideas and, above all, supporting them in being adaptable in our unpredictable world.