Clearing 2012: elite universities likely to enter the fray this year

Student entering Clearing, the last-minute summer scramble for university places, have for years expected to see only the more modern institutions opening their doors. But this August things may look very different. For the first time, applicants are likely to find elite research-intensive universities touting for business alongside their newer counterparts. This is the first cohort of undergraduates paying fees of up to £9,000 a year and uncertainty about how they will behave has been giving university heads some seriously sleepless nights. Early data from Ucas, the central application service, released a fortnight ago, confirmed that so far this year applications to British universities are down 7.7%, with three institutions suffering a fall of more than 20%. This year, universities are experiencing their first taste of freedom on student numbers as well as price. Whereas last year they each had a strict cap on how many students they could recruit, this year a free market is operating for the very best students, with institutions able to take as many of the roughly 85,000 students who secure AAB upwards in their A-levels as they can pull in. Not surprisingly, universities smarting from government cuts to their numbers earlier this year are anxious to woo extra AAB students in order to make up their losses. Competition is fierce. As one head of a research-intensive university explains: "The reason research universities will be in Clearing is that they don't know if they will get their AAB students and, even if they do attract them, they don't know if they will keep them."