Universities can’t just take everyone, because lots of them massively over-offer, & the government has put a cap on admissions this year (plus staff-student ratio & grade entry tariff are an important part of how league tables assess universities). Universities can’t solve this.

I am not defending universities — who are often less compassionate than staff would like to be — and I’m not defending the system. But this is a result of universities being sort of semi-independent in what they can do, plus a frankly ridiculous admissions process.

There needs to be (so much) reform! But universities don’t have as much freedom as they could have, and blaming them takes criticism from the government, who are the ones who screwed up.

I should have said *some universities in the first tweet — not all universities over-offer, and I’ve worked in plenty of universities who had lots of spaces on clearing day too. But the point is that this is a systemic failure, as well as something that hurts individual students.

(This is why I kept predicting that universities with the highest entrance grades would be screwed — I assumed everyone would get their predicted grades & somewhere like UCL would suddenly have a million extra students. I didn’t foresee the downgrading of all working class kids.)

(And I’m still super wary of any solutions that include mass deferrals to next year, both because of how hard that will be for kids from poor backgrounds/difficult home situations, but also because next year’s cohort is probably going to be bigger and still messed up by COVID.)

(not speaking for my university, not speaking for my department, really just thinking out loud)