The big news is clearly the drop in applications – the same drop we saw in January.

More 18 year olds applied to university via UCAS this year than in 2021 – only in 2022 were there more applications, and if you look at the modal population that is English 18 year olds the gap between 2022 and 2023 is just 19,000.

The 18 year old application rate in England stands at 42.9 per cent, down on 2021 and 2022, but up compared to every other year on record. The June deadline data isn’t the last word on applications – many enter direct to clearing, or apply to a provider rather than via UCAS – but it is a decent indicator of the likely shape of the recruitment round.

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It helps our analysis to consider what was different in 2021 and 2022, rather than what has gone wrong this year.

My working model is that we are seeing a regression to an existing trend of steady growth – amplified by a series of terrible policy decisions – rather than a new trend of shrinkage. But there may be other things going on underneath. One of the most notable subject area trends of the last two years was the rapid growth in healthcare related subject applications – the unwinding of this trend (in one of the most popular subject areas) is a big contributor to the small overall drop in applications.

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The decline in nursing applications makes a huge contribution to this trend. For the second year in a row we see a fall in nursing applications – we’re now 13,000 nursing applications down from the 2021 peak, and nearly 8,000 down on last year. The back end of last month saw promises of increases in the number of nursing places available – today’s figures suggest that the Royal College of Nursing was right to suggest that if the course (and the job, by extension) is becoming less attractive capacity may not be the primary issue.

Clare Marchant and UCAS suggest that this trend away from healthcare subjects should be seen in parallel to a growth in computing subjects – implying that applicants are swayed in their subject area preferences by the growth in popular coverage of trends like large language models. But the growth in computing courses is the continuation of a multi-year trend, indeed this year’s figures suggest that growth has slowed this year.

Furthermore the astonishing DfE commitment to tearing the existing (and struggling) teacher training infrastructure to the ground has left us with a declining number of applications. In that case, it could simply be that people no longer know where to apply.

Add in a handful of other special cases – a decline in mature applications because of the cost of living, a continued decline in EU students because of Brexit, and we can maybe take a guess at why the rest of the higher education press is losing its mind.

Staying with failed government policy for the moment – you may recall that one of the stated aims of the establishment of a market regulator in England was to make it easier for “challenger” institutions to upend the ossified gradients of esteem. In fact, the opposite has happened since 2017 – applications have grown among what are euphemistically known as “high tariff” providers to the detriment of others.

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This puts pressure on providers that recruit locally and teach vocationally – the very ones likely to form the backbone of a short course offer accessible via the lifelong loan entitlement. Although the bit of DfE that thinks about local needs clearly doesn’t speak to the part that thinks competition is the best way to plan a national system, there are questions to be asked as to whether the kinds of places that are currently filling up on home and international undergraduates are also going to be keen to teach 30 credit modules.

Certainly the expansion to the sector has raised all POLAR boats at broadly equal rates, rather than opening the sector to new groups expansion has simply offered more of the same.

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So, well done everyone, I guess.