Top universities ‘reaching the limit’ in ‘harsh year’ for students

There are signs that the rampant expansion of top universities may be reaching its limit despite another year of bumper domestic intakes.

For the third A-level results day in a row, higher-tariff universities have expanded, adding more than 5 per cent to their enrolments at the expense of universities with lower entry grades and smaller, specialist providers.

But a sharp rise in students being accepted to their insurance choices showed the elite group may have “tipped into being a little bit more selective” almost “at the last minute”, according to Mark Corver, a former director of analysis and research for admissions service Ucas.

The proportion of applicants receiving their first-choice offer was down at 79 per cent, compared with 82 per cent last year, while 13 per cent were placed at their insurance choice compared with 11 per cent in 2025.

“It’s an unexpectedly harsh year for young UK applicants,” Corver told Times Higher Education (THE). “There’s a staggering increase in those being placed in insurance choices at this stage.”

“It looks like higher-tariff institutions, which were sitting on a large increase in applications, don’t seem to have followed through [with acceptances],” he said.

Higher-tariff universities, particularly members of the Russell Group, have been under pressure to rein in expansion due to concerns about overcrowding and the impact it was having on the rest of the sector.

A record number of 18-year-olds were placed at universities but the entry rate has dipped overall, standing at 31.6 per cent this year compared with 32 per cent in 2025.

With the proportion of A-level grades marked A* or A rising across the board this year – representing 28.3 per cent of all grades awarded in England – Corver, now a director of consultancy Campus Numerics, said the picture was surprising.

“We know overall applications and offers were up by 8 to 9 per cent for these [higher-tariff] institutions this year, but their entrants are currently only up by half that amount,” he noted.

“There’s something going on,” he said. “Either higher-tariff providers are reaching their limits of what they feel is the share of a cohort they can take in, or after several years of quite large growths at undergraduate level, perhaps some of them are pushing at available capacity for now, particularly regarding class sizes and student ratios.”

Vanessa Wilson, chief executive of University Alliance, the mission group for professional and technical universities, said the situation “does question how long ‘so-called elites’ can call themselves that when they’re fishing in other markets”.

Des Freedman, a professor of media and communications at Goldsmiths, University of London – who has called for the return of student number controls to “equalise the distribution of students across the system” – echoed concerns that quality will dip if expansion continues.

“The most prestigious institutions are not really catering properly, and resourcing properly, for these numbers,” he said.

Senior consultant at dataHE Lucia Costantini was less convinced that a peak has been reached, however. Asked whether the bubble had burst for harder-to-enter universities accepting more and more students, she said: “Not quite.”

“Higher-tariff institutions have grown their placed applicants by 5.5 per cent,” she noted. “While this is a smaller increase than last year, when it was 8 per cent, it needs to be seen in the context of slower growth across the market overall.”

Jamie Bradford, head of recruitment operations at De Montfort University in Leicester, agreed that for all kinds of providers it remained an “ever-crowded marketplace”.

“It’s definitely different to what it was half a dozen years ago,” he said, continuing: “I think it really is cycle by cycle…Predicting the medium term is quite hard because of these huge variances.”

Costantini said that, despite speculation around how visa clampdowns could deter international applicants, demand has instead strengthened, with acceptances up 2 per cent.

“China is doing much of the heavy lifting,” she noted, with the country’s student numbers up 12 per cent. But “other important sources have declined”, she added, including Malaysia, which has dropped 13 per cent, Hong Kong (down 5.5 per cent), and the US (down 1.5 per cent).

This was another area in which higher-tariff providers were most likely to reap the benefits.

“International placed applicants are down 13 per cent at lower-tariff institutions, compared with growth of 3 per cent for medium-tariff and 5 per cent for higher-tariff providers,” Costantini said.

Wilson said there was no doubt that international students still wanted to come to the UK, but that the sector ought not to rest on its laurels as “the Home Office is really ruthlessly looking at every single application from a visa perspective”.

“It is good that that appetite is still there, but we’ve got a long way to go in terms of some of the processes that the Home Office is bringing in which are challenging for all institutions,” she cautioned, referencing new metrics that will see institutions sanctioned if they experience visa refusals above 5 per cent.

Ultimately, providers of every size, however, will soon face the reality of a serious decline in the number of school-leavers in the general population.

“Everyone in the sector knows that with this UK recruitment picture, they’re just burning through the last few years of very substantial population changes,” Corver said. “The entry rate is going nowhere.”

georgia.luckhurst@timeshighereducation.com