Clearing 2024: hurry, hurry, hurry
Everything must go
This week’s instalment of Brand Building should maybe be considered #bonus #content, in that some of it has previously been published elsewhere.
Apologies if you’ve read it already. Taking an opportunity to mention something vaguely topical, and indulge in some minor self-promotion, are two things that are traditionally Not On Brand for me, but here we are anyway.
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An Introductory Note
Tomorrow will be A-level results day here in England and Wales. It’s that time of the year when newspapers publish pictures of photogenic teenage girls celebrating with pieces of paper, famous people post on social media about how youngsters shouldn’t worry about getting bad results because it never did them any harm, and most of the rest of the internet spends its time complaining about the pictures of photogenic teenage girls and the famous people posting advice on social media.
For those who didn’t get the grades they wanted, one possibility is to enter into the clearing process, a kind of manic free-for-all bunfight wherein the carefully considered choices previously made are quickly abandoned in favour of frantically calling up different institutions in search of a last-minute alternative.
On the other side of the table, many universities will likely be setting up their clearing ‘war room’ akin to a call centre and delivering stern instructions to staff about how their actions over the next few days could determine the financial future of their institution.
My experience was that as demand for places started to dwindle with each passing year, the whole operation would become larger and more elaborate in response, as if keen applicants could simply be willed into existence by rows of staff wearing headsets, managers pacing up and down at the front of the room, and some high-ranking wally being present as the lines opened, in order to be photographed by the marketing department taking (or pretending to take) a call along with the rest of us schmoes before buggering off again.
Clearing is the university equivalent of the football transfer window: a final chance to get ready for the year ahead, before the real action begins. But, like a mad dash to bring in a striker at the last minute, it’s unlikely to be the determining factor in their future success, and in both cases, recruitment is a year-round process.
For those working in HE — as I did until a few years ago — it’s a fairly exhausting world of figures, charts and big red alerts that are endlessly reviewed until it becomes obvious that the various targets previously set are not going to be reached, at which point all hopes are pinned on making up the numbers at clearing.
What follows is an edited extract from my book, Our Teaching’s Great, The Admin Sucks: Tales From Inside Higher Education, and was previously published on the book’s website as a brief behind-the-scenes taste of recruitment practices at an English university.
If you like it, the full book is (plug alert) currently on sale at a reduced price of £1.99 via Amazon and other major retailers.
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Extract: The Brightest and Best
At some point in the mid-00s, departmental administrators were summoned to a meeting with the marketing department and the Registrar, at which we were shown a series of PowerPoint slides displaying bar charts that showed large skyscrapers on the left against tiny bungalows on the right.
The skyscrapers, we were told, represented the number of enquiries that the institution was receiving; the bungalows represented the number of enrolments in the corresponding academic year. We were asked for our thoughts on what this data told us.
A hand went up.
‘Does it show that while a lot of people may be considering going to a particular university and make enquiries about doing so, that is likely to be a much more regular occurrence than someone who makes an application, is accepted and enrols, which is, after all, a more significant commitment than making a telephone call or sending an email?’
Incorrect. What the data showed, in fact, was that marketing were doing a great job in generating interest in the institution and its courses, but that this interest was not being converted by academic departments. I suddenly felt as if I was selling double-glazing.
‘We all like working here,’ said the Registrar, rather presumptively. ‘But if we want to continue to work here, then the bungalows on those bar charts need to go up.’
The financial position of the university was periodically dangled as a threat, with briefings from senior management often carrying vague overtones of doom and the sense that a couple of bad years could see us fold up shop.1
The idea seemed to be to keep us worried enough to work hard, but not so worried that we would not be able to do our jobs: indeed, when COVID-19 struck, there followed a swift revision of the prevailing narrative that financial hardship was imminent in a series of briefings intended to reassure staff that we’d be fine, actually. As long as we all kept working really hard.
The apparent emptiness of such threats did little to dispel the notion held by some academics that the university was supposedly ‘sitting on’ large cash reserves, which meant that their motivation to encourage the recruitment of students in larger numbers than they might like was somewhat lacking.
Indeed, there were times when you could be forgiven for wondering whether some departments actually wanted new students to come to study with us at all.
The ideal scenario for the most pompous academics was for the reputation of their department and/or institution to be so stellar as to attract the brightest and best students from across the country and for places to be so limited that they could afford to be picky. Some even acted as if this was the case.
In reality, like their counterparts in the vast majority of other departments and institutions across the country, they would need to take what they could get from the middle-to-low-achieving end of the spectrum, particularly when it came to undergraduates.
At one summit to discuss flagging application numbers, a colleague opined that the fact that her latest research papers had not been added to her personal profile page on the university website could have been a factor in poor recruitment.
It was suggested in response that perhaps the majority of applicants, especially seventeen-year-olds, were not in the business of scouring the web for details of individual academics’ research interests and publication history.
‘I don’t think that’s true,’ she said. ‘When I was choosing my undergraduate degree, it was one of the first things that I looked at.’
It did not seem to occur to her that, as someone who obviously focused on becoming, and then actually became, a professional academic in her chosen subject, she represented a miniscule proportion of the undergraduate student population.
It was the prevailing attitude among academics in some departments: one which assumed that the majority of students wanted to be just like them, and though many would pursue alternative careers upon graduation, it was not through lack of desire, only a lack of ability.
The bar charts of the mid-00s would return in increasingly varied and more detailed formats over the years, showing how long departments were taking to respond to applications and shaming the worst offenders with big red alerts that would cause marketing and senior management to demand a response and urgent action.
If recruitment in that department was generally healthy, these angry summons could be batted away and frankly thin excuses would be accepted. If not, a detailed audit of activities and processes would be required.
Again, all too many academics rather liked the impression that applicants might have to wait to hear from us. However, the received wisdom was that ‘treat ’em mean, keep ’em keen’ was as old-fashioned an approach to admissions as it was in other areas of life.
Eventually, it was decreed that departments could not be trusted to turn applications around in a satisfactory timeframe, and in the interest of appearing more responsive, the Registry would make the majority of ‘standard’ offers based on an applicant’s grades alone.
In other words, if your predicted grades were what the university wanted, you would get an offer, without the academic department ever seeing your application.
The Registrar assured us this was widespread practice across the sector, and that speed of response was considered a positive by applicants. However, it did also mean that admissions tutors would not be reading these applications, especially not the painstakingly constructed personal statements that applicants are told are of vital importance to the process.
(Early in 2023, UCAS announced proposed changes to the personal statement system, which attracted some headlines to the effect that they were being ‘ditched’ or ‘scrapped’. The proposal is, in fact, that from 2024 the statement will be replaced by a series of questions to better help applicants structure their answers. It doesn’t really matter how you frame the written contributions from applicants, though, if no one actually looks at them.)2
Academics made a song and dance about key decisions being centralised and taken away from them, and crocodile tears were shed over compromises to the integrity of the application process.
But they couldn’t deny that this move spared those in busy departments the administrative burden of looking at hundreds of applications, and so it came with considerable benefits to them, too.3
What they really missed was the power: the power to accept and reject applications at will without any oversight. This had previously allowed departments with healthy recruitment to cut off perfectly acceptable applications when they felt they were getting rather too many.
From the central university’s point of view, wresting control of admissions meant they could start sending out offers conditional on lower grades than departments would like. This would either be down to a unilateral decision taken without consultation, or an ‘accidental’ misinterpretation of the department’s wishes.
While the two sides argued the toss, offers would continue to be sent out, and had to be honoured.
The key points in the fight were about numbers and reputation. The interests of the student, or potential student, were secondary, although they could be manipulated and brought into the argument if need be.
Sometimes it would only take a set of poor coursework results in a first-year module, or an academic supervisor having a negative experience with a set of tutees, for a department to convene an urgent review of undergraduate admissions and demand an increase to entry requirements.
But if recruitment ever dropped to a level that threatened the bottom line, hasty drops at clearing – which, incidentally, was the full ‘manic sales team in a call centre’ experience, complete with motivational speeches from a harassed-looking manager and constantly shifting targets written on a whiteboard – would be approved in a heartbeat.
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A Final Word
As previously established, the last thing this nation’s youngsters need right now is unsolicited advice from old people they don’t know via the internet. But in case any of them stumble upon this page, I thought I’d add a few more words from my closing chapter:
‘For school-leavers, there will always be somewhere willing to offer you a place, if that’s what you really want.
But should you want to go to university, at any cost? The only advice I can offer, in the current climate, to prospective students (whom I admit may not want to listen to a man in his forties who ended up working in university administration and management for twenty years) is to think carefully – really carefully, and far more carefully than oldies like me had to – about whether you want to go in the first place, and try to do as much research as possible about your choices and destination.’
In other words, unless you’re trying to get onto ultra-competitive courses at elite institutions, there are lots of universities out there that want you, and you have more options than you think. I wish you the best of luck.
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I generally don’t plan to write too much more about HE, but the rest of this Substack is fairly representative of the kind of thing you can expect to find here in future.
2024 note 1: I couldn’t be certain, but I don’t think that my previous employer is one of the universities that is apparently now facing the very possible threat of going under, and instead still remains at the ‘painful, drawn-out suffering’ stage, during which day-to-day operations take place under a dark cloud, some people have lost their jobs, and those that stay become increasingly miserable.
2024 note 2: Based on recent evidence, the media appears happy to assume that this new format will actually benefit someone, somewhere, without addressing the incorrect assumption that anyone actually takes the time to read these parts of an application before processing an offer.
2024 note 3: I promise you I’m not obsessed with The Guardian — it just happens to be the only national newspaper I consider suitable for consumption — but last month it published a letter from an academic, a former admissions tutor, in response to an admittedly disingenuous piece about the demise of the personal statement, that indicated they were only ever looked at by ‘administrators and bureaucrats’.
(‘Bureaucrat’ is typically a pejorative term, and by the end of my time in HE, the same was true of academics using the word ‘administrator’ — hence my choice of book title. I came to understand how civil servants might feel as government ministers constantly blathered on about the ‘woke blob’ obstructing their important work.)
This letter didn’t, funnily enough, make any mention of the writer’s specific feelings on the matter, allowing the reader to infer that this was yet another example of decision-making power being taken away from those with appropriate specialist knowledge by unqualified paper-pushers.
However, my experience was that admissions tutors largely considered the role to be a boring chore and were delighted to be free of it once they had ‘done their time’. And even if they were keen to be closely involved, on many undergraduate programmes, the practicalities of screening so many applications in detail were often too burdensome for even the most diligent of colleagues.