This blog was kindly authored by Jenny Shaw, HE External Engagement Director at Unite Students. It is based on a presentation given at the Universities UK Annual Members’ Conference on 5 September 2024
As the new academic year gets underway, insight into the attitudes and characteristics of this year’s applicants takes on a new meaning. This blog explores five different data points from the Unite Students/HEPI Applicant Index that could prove significant over the coming year.
The Applicant Index is a representative annual survey of applicants to UK universities. Now in its third year, it focuses on attitudes, confidence and wellbeing while aiming to provide a broad snapshot of each cohort. This year’s headline findings were a mix of the predictable and the surprising. Financial confidence was predictably down, but the need to take on part-time work was associated with an upside in the form of greater employability confidence. Academic confidence was down significantly from last year, a surprising finding that makes sense in the light of the qualitative data.
This year we invited applicants to write about the impact that the pandemic and the lockdowns had had on their lives, both at the time and thereafter. Across all the comments was a strong sense of loss: of social opportunities, friendships and expected milestones. Loss of learning was a common theme, including missed chunks of learning and poor experiences of online classes. For many, this period of time led to ongoing mental ill-health, social anxiety and/or loss of academic confidence. This provides an overall context when interpreting the data points below.
About a third (32%) of applicants thought they might not enrol. I’ve written about this in another blog on the HEPI site, drawing out the more emotionally driven reasons such as lack of confidence, mental health concerns and homesickness. The question now is what’s impact this will have on the first-year experience if, as we expect, many of these applicants do indeed progress to higher education. While some will leave their concerns at the gates others will not, and this could lead to higher attrition rates if the underlying issues are not addressed.
Working-class applicants were significantly less likely to think they would feel welcome. There is a difference of 20 percentage points between those in the most affluent, professional households (socioeconomic group A) and those in workless households (socioeconomic group E). Almost two-thirds of those in group A expect to feel welcome compared to around half of those in group E. This finding likely has little to do with the actual welcome that applicants will experience, but may instead be linked to identity, culture and the way that higher education presents itself to applicants. These issues have always been the ghost in the machine of widening access efforts, but there is a somewhat under-used body of sociological research on the experiences of working-class applicants that I have found to be useful for informing practice. There may also be a need to consult with a wider demographic of students when designing applicant communications, and the diversity of staff is also an important consideration.
36% of school-age applicants missed school or college over the last two years due to their mental health. This has risen by 20% since last year. It is more prevalent among UK-domiciled, female and/or LGBTQ+ applicants, and not confined to those with a mental health condition. The positive news is that over half of those who have missed school or college due to their mental health do not think that they will need to miss lectures or seminars when they are in higher education. However, 43% do think they will need to miss some face-to-face contact, equating to 15% of the school leaver applicant population. Since the Covid pandemic, absence due to mental health has been a rapidly growing trend. If it continues to rise, what could it mean for the application of key academic processes?
19% of applicants have a mental health condition when they are asked in the context of a disability question. This prevalence has not changed over the three years of the survey, which seems counterintuitive when we see growing pressure on student support services. In part, this anomaly can be explained by the way applicants categorise their mental health. When we asked all applicants about their experiences in the last two years against a list of common mental health conditions, twice as many (38%) had experienced at least one of them. Without going into a lengthy discussion of mental health paradigms, a practical consequence is that useful information on student mental ill-health (and disability) may be significantly under-reported depending on how the question is asked.
37% of disabled applicants will need adjustments for assessment. This equates to 13% of the total applicant population, and could be an underestimate when considering the potential for under-reporting outlined above. It is a topical issue in the light of the suicide of Natasha Abrahart and the legal case her family pursued against the University of Bristol. The subsequent advice from the EHRC confirmed that higher education is required to make reasonable adjustments to assessment for students with a disability, whether or not this is diagnosed or even formally disclosed. The percentage of the applicant population who already consider that it will need adjustments prompts the question: at what point is a universal design approach the way forward for assessment? The University of Bristol’s new Assessment and Feedback Strategy provides a good example of inclusivity by design.