Near offer

The Office for Students analyses links between unconditional offers and dropouts

Remember unconditional offers? There was a time when no speech from an education minister seemed complete without a dig at the increasingly common practice of universities offering students a place before knowing their grades.

Then came the pandemic, during which the whole process of awarding grades was thrown up in the air, and in July 2020 the Office for Students prohibited “the use of ‘conditional unconditional’ offers and other unconditional offers to UK students that could materially affect the stability and integrity of the English higher education sector”. This was an attempt to prevent some higher-tariff institutions from cleaning up in the pandemic fallout, depriving their lower-tariff peers of students.