Cashback skewing proper choice via UCAS system

melancholly

and being open to reading what people say rather than just seeing poster names and closing up happens too!

either way, i don't care - i'm pleased that more people are understanding the situation thanks to that post. that's a good thing and i hope that bewildered123 continues to add their view so that people can see it is a true reflection of the situation, rather than the same old posters (me included!) saying the same old things. anyone who can help others, such as yourself, who don't seem to have much knowledge of UCAS and universities, understand more than the misreporting in the general media is a great asset to this board.

2sides2everystory

Yeah right melancholly ... posters such as myself who don't know much about anything you think is important. same old same old, eh? You take your road ...

melancholly

well you don't know about UCAS, uni applications or the CSA and that's just things this week that you've been outraged about without googling for any more details and just assuming what you thought was right. i've tried, genuinely, to explain about HE finance, as someone who hates the new system but wants facts rather than rhetoric. i want people to understand but i can't help that happen if all anyone reads is what the papers say. they have reported this badly and, as i have repeatedly said, the uni representatives have been appalling at presenting their perspective. so i'm not surprised that most people are staggeringly uninformed/misinformed about it. it's embarrassing for the HE sector that they have allowed this situation to occur.

BUT, that said, plenty of people have tried to explain things on a multitude of posts and seeing all of the information being ignored repeatedly is frustrating. i don't expect most people who haven't been at uni recently to understand much about HE finance, and indeed my experience tells me that plenty of recent graduates don't know much about their loans either! i do hope that people can read more about it on here and learn more to help see the full picture.

but it seems that some posters aren't all that interested in hearing other opinions and listening/understanding. clearly this isn't just my opinion (the first line of bewildered's posts says exactly the same thing!). MSE functions by having people who are experts giving up their time to explain things to others who don't know as much about the area. thanks to this i've learnt lots about ebay rights, general consumer rights, beauty tips, LL rights, family law etc etc etc. i don't know about these things so asked or read and heard opinions and took it all on board and updated my understanding. that's what most people do. unfortunately, clearly not everyone is interested in hearing other ideas to their own.

2sides2everystory

melancholly, are you just trying to cover up my assertion that Cashback is skewing proper choice via UCAS with a smokescreen?

bewildered123 has not denied the assertion in my thread title as you have tried to do repeatedly. What bewildered123 posted simply confirms it and then offers refreshingly candid explanation and advice.

Lest there be any doubt, I am of the opinion that an Excellence Scholarship does not reduce the £9,000 pa tuition fee and it does not therefore reduce the size of the SLC loan.

I don't care what you call it or whether you think it is a bursary or a scholarship, it is not a tuition fee discount but a pure marketing gimmick as a promotional tool to sell numbers of a 'close second' rate £9,000 pa tuition package over the main competing ones.

If I and my son have understood it correctly, it is indeed a cashback gimmick and it is conditional upon making the 'close second' university the "firm" choice in UCAS.

If my son chooses Imperial as firm choice and misses out not through grades but by some other bad luck of the draw then arrives at QMC then there he will receive no cashback and be instantly £3,000 poorer than the next guy who set his sights lower.

If he gives up Imperial as firm choice and chooses QMC as firm choice then he's inline for cashback.

If that is not cashback skewing choice via UCAS then what is?

kayr_2

2sides2everystory wrote: »

If my son chooses Imperial as firm choice and misses out not through grades but by some other bad luck of the draw then arrives at QMC then there he will receive no cashback and be instantly £3,000 poorer than the next guy who set his sights lower.

I'm interested to know, if he does get an offer from Imperial and then "firms" it, how he might miss out other than through not getting the grades? I am obviously missing something here! I thought if you got the grades, that was it. What is the bad luck of the draw?

These inducements to make middling universities firm choices aren't new; but the sums involved seem to be higher now. I would agree that the money could skew some students choices. I suppose it's up to us as parents to talk to them and point out the advantages of a top university.

melancholly

i'd suggest that making any firm conclusions about what this means when we're about to hear about how many unis might be changing fees and/or bursaries is premature.

it may make a difference to some decision making, but i think anyone using the money as a major factor would be unwise to do so. most people won't pay back loans with fees at £6K, so it wouldn't be sensible to prioritize these financial incentives over other reasons for picking a uni/course.

since this is pretty much what i said in post 18 - just to be more explicit - i don't think cashback is skewing proper choice (whatever 'proper choice' may be!). these schemes have always been a factor and although the numbers are inevitably bigger for the 2012 entry, this isn't a 'change' in principle from how things have been done for some time. because of that, i think that overegging this isn't sensible or helpful.

there have always been negative consequences to getting into a uni in clearing - many unis don't guarantee accommodation for students who get places in clearing as the most obvious example. if there are a finite number of bursaries linked to each institution, i can't see how this could possibly work if they were reconsidered at the clearing stage. perhaps this might all be possible under a system where students only applied once they had their grades, with fewer choices of unis. but as ever, we work with what we have.

2sides2everystory

kayr wrote:

I'm interested to know, if he does get an offer from Imperial and then "firms" it, how he might miss out other than through not getting the grades? I am obviously missing something here! I thought if you got the grades, that was it. What is the bad luck of the draw?

Maybe there is no danger of that? I just know that it is a terribly inexact science making offers and maximising load factors without overbooking. I understand that some universities may for example vary their offers a bit like Ryanair do i.e. the earlier you apply then maybe you get a cheap seat, but then again they might issue even cheaper seats to fill the plane near the end of the booking period (I don't mean clearing).

I would be interested if anyone can start to bound this conundrum e.g. the earliest you could might get an offer from Imperial is {DATE1} and to do that your UCAS applications would need to be in by {DATE0}, the date the last offers will be issued by Imperial will be {DATE2}. The range in Imperial's offers is likely to be {???} also the ideal time to get an Imperial application in to achieve the most favorable offer is thought to be {DATEX} which may be asap or alap

I would also like to be reminded of the date by which an offer must be chosen as firm {DATEF}.

I know from speaking with some university staff responsible for formulating offers that these things vary tremendously between universities and that the delays by in demand universities like Imperial make it difficult for the 'close second' universities to decide what offers they will make.

bewildered123

^ I work for a popular RG university in a high-demand subject area. I'm afraid that schools are telling their students a lot of rubbish about the need to get their application in early at least as far as we are concerned (our cynical admissions officer is increasingly convinced that it's about certain schools' internal desires to get UCAS out of the way before halfterm than any reality). Basically we, like Imperial, know we will have a lot more applicants than places (because it's all very well for the govt to say take as many aab and above students as you like, but we only have a certain number of halls places, lecture theatres of a certain size etc). We have a formula that dictates how many offers we can make by each month in the cycle (calculated by historic patterns of demand). Applications we are sure about either get an offer or a rejection pretty quickly. Those which are borderline we tend to hang onto until after the January deadline for equal consideration and then make a decision when the admissions tutor knows the full field. If we look to have under-offered slightly we go into UCAS Extra briefly to pick up those strong candidates who have made ludicrously over-ambitious applications and got 5 rejections but in the last couple of years we haven't needed to. We do not vary our offer according to when a student applies, lower offers are given for students who are part of our widening participation scheme (or fit those contextual criteria of performing very well in comparison to the school they attended - we look hard for these because almost invariably they are our best students) or who have other serious mitigating circumstances e.g. serious illness, death of a parent etc. We have signed upto the UCAS conditions to give equal consideration until the January deadline and we stick by that. If a student, who submitted their application by the deadline, has had all their replies in the normal time, they need to respond by 9 May - if a university is keeping them waiting UCAS extends the deadline. Here are the later reply dates: http://www.ucas.ac.uk/students/offers/replyingtoyouroffers
Basically the only no-no is applying after the deadline for equal consideration as popular universities and courses are unlikely to be able to offer places to late applicants.

kayr_2

2sides2everystory wrote: »

I would be interested if anyone can start to bound this conundrum e.g. the earliest you could might get an offer from Imperial is {DATE1} and to do that your UCAS applications would need to be in by {DATE0}, the date the last offers will be issued by Imperial will be {DATE2}. The range in Imperial's offers is likely to be {???} also the ideal time to get an Imperial application in to achieve the most favorable offer is thought to be {DATEX} which may be asap or alap

I would also like to be reminded of the date by which an offer must be chosen as firm {DATEF}.

You could look at the UCAS site http://www.ucas.com/students/importantdates to get some information about dates. In this cycle you have to decide which 2 offers you will accept (firm and insurance) by May 9 2012. Application deadline is Jan 15 but obviously a lot of people apply earlier - I imagine Imperial will have quite a few applications from Oxbridge people already. Offers are supposed to be in by March 31. I don't think your question above is possible to answer. If he has good UMS scores already and does well at interview (I think Imperial interview quite a lot? - but may be wrong) then he will have a good chance. If he doesn't get an offer then there are 4 other choices who may offer "cashback" so he can choose one of them for his firm acceptance if he really wants!

As your son has 5 choices, why not just apply to a range of places (of varying reputation) and see what happens? I know of some people who applied to 5 high ranking places and got the same offers from all - so makes an insurance choice tricky.

I am still intrigued to know what you meant by "bad luck of the draw"!

2sides2everystory

kayr wrote: »

I am still intrigued to know what you meant by "bad luck of the draw"!

I guess I meant the variables he can't control even if he gets top grades as so many do these days.

When I think I was offered BBD for one of about 120 places on my popular pure science course at Imperial, and I got BBCE and just bowled straight in, it just shows how things have changed. Clearly with those grades I could be easily distinguished against someone with AAAA and I know the range of ability was quite staggering - I struggled to keep up.

The same department would want A*AA now which is about what 1 in 8 of all A level students are apparently able to achieve in 2011 (is that right?). So what you are saying is that to make the cut an offer might now not only be A*AA but might stipulate minimum UMS scores??

And then to counter that there is bewildered123's heartening sifting for nuggets (but boy they must be hard to spot unless the school is notoriously bad and the local water is famously full of nutrients!):

... (or fit those contextual criteria of performing very well in comparison to the school they attended - we look hard for these because almost invariably they are our best students)