Unconditionally yours

I know what it is like to receive an unconditional offer for university. In 1984, when I took the Cambridge entrance exam, if you passed, you then only had to meet the matriculation requirements of the university, which were two Es at A-level. For someone predicted straight As (virtually all Oxbridge candidates), that wasn’t asking a lot. It was hard not to slacken off a little, to take a mental gap year, or six months at any rate, for the last two terms of the sixth form. I slipped to a B in further maths, which seemed an embarrassment at the time, though I know others who took a bigger plunge. What with a real gap year, too, I never really did get back into numbers. After a year at Cambridge I switched out of the engineering course and have not tackled a differential equation ever since.

Unconditional offers, whereby a university accepts applicants regardless of their subsequent A-level performance, came back into the news with a vengeance in January when the new Office for Students revealed that the number of university applicants receiving them had soared from 3,000 in 2013 to 117,000 in 2018. They now account for one in seven offers. In the case of ten universities, 50 per cent or more of offers were unconditional, while at one institution, the University of Suffolk, a whopping 83.8 per cent of offers were unconditional.

It is only fair to say that those figures do exaggerate the problem. Two-thirds of unconditional offers are made to mature students, many of whom have applied with A-level results already in the bag, so there is no need to place any further conditions on their applications. Nevertheless, the proportion of unconditional offers granted to 18-year-old applicants has risen from 2 per cent to 32 per cent in the space of five years.