Clearing update 14 August: EU students seeing largest rise for now

The first UCAS daily clearing analysis was published yesterday.  The 2013 equivalent is here.  Tables with figures extracted from these are at the foot of this post. [Update: The Herald has done its own analysis: here]

This post compares the position on accepted applications (acceptances for short) across the two years at this stage in the process.  Since the publication of figures just  for Scotland  on 5 August, there have been some shifts.  Scots in Scotland are still showing a rise slightly over 4% (with a minimal drop in the percentage change since last week).  However, comparing at this point shows a drop in Scots going to the rest of the UK, compared to last year: on last week’s initial figures, the increase was by contrast 6%.  This brings the total change in acceptances for Scots at this stage down to 3.7%.

The 5 August figures did not show non-UK EU students separately, but these latest ones do.  This group is currently showing the fastest growth of any group in the UK, with a particularly large rise in Scotland, where the number of accepted EU students  is 10.6% higher than at this point last year.  EU domiciled students account for a quarter of the year-on-year growth in acceptances in Scotland so far and explain why the rise in non-Scots is higher than for Scots in Scotland. Among those eligible for free tuition in Scotland  (Scottish and non-UK EU domiciles), EU students at present are accounting for 13.3% of acceptances.

Students from rUK in Scotland are increasing more slowly for now, at 3.2%, though with clearing just started for this group this figure may still be subject to change.

Looking across all parts of the UK, among the home nations students from Wales are currently showing the fastest increase in acceptances (4.9%) and those from NI an overall drop (-1.5%).

Acceptances from outside the EU are also up by 4.9% across the UK so far.   Surprisingly, for Scotland the increase in the figure for students accepted from outside the EU  is currently standing at only 0.5%: this is so much lower than for other parts of the UK that a recording or processing issue shouldn’t be ruled out.  Though earlier figures on applications showed Scottish institutions seeing the lowest increase in non-EU applicants this year (Table I.5.24 of Deadline Analysis: Institution country and tariff group (pdf) (319.6KB)) at 6% this was only slightly below the average of 7% for the UK and for England (34% for NI and 13% for Wales).

As before, in this fluid process, all these figures have potential to change.  UCAS will publish its final set of daily figures at the end of August and a complete final analysis at the end of year.

However, the particularly high increase in EU students across the UK and especially in Scotland seems likely to hold.  Indeed, the relatively high presence of EU-domiciled students seems to be becoming a further distinctive feature of Scottish higher education, with acceptances for EU-domiciled students in Scotland equating for now to 15% of the total for Scottish-domiciled student acceptances, compared to an average of 6% across the UK as a whole.

Background tables

Source: UCAS first daily clearing analyses for 2013 and 2014, linked above.