Incoming President of Universities UK and Vice-Chancellor of Surrey University, Professor Sir Christopher Snowden, says a number of universities - including some members of the Russell Group - advertised places for students with A and B grades at the beginning of their academic year, but accepted applicants with Cs and Ds to make up the numbers for some courses.
It was a reflection, he says, of problems facing top universities under the present circumstances. Those problems include the tuition fee rise, the change in A-level examinations and the control of student numbers.
Figures recently published show that the 24 Russell Group institutions still had around 11,500 unfilled vacancies last September, while this year some universities are advertising scholarships of up to £10,000 a year to attract the brightest and best students.
Sir Christopher says that any move to fill places by lowering entry requirements would increase the chances of undergraduates attaining poor degrees and damaging student morale in general.
University places, he says, should be awarded on merit, rather than merely making up the numbers with students from deprived backgrounds and schools that perform poorly - just to hit government targets.
He says: “If you take a student into a university you should give them every opportunity to graduate.
“If you put students who are too weak in with a cohort that’s very strong, they are unlikely to prosper. You are not setting them up for success so it is not a reasonable thing to do. ”
Speaking with regard to Surrey University, Sir Christopher says: “Several Russell Group universities significantly dropped their grades last year because, bluntly, they had to.
“You have got to bear in mind, last year, we took the unusual step of making it clear we weren’t going to take any students below BBB at all.
“The reason I say that is, if you go and talk to the Russell Group, you will find quite a lot of them will say, 'we’re AAB’.
“But I can tell you now that I know Manchester took BBC students and some Russell Group universities took ACD students. We didn’t.
“Last year, we had a student who achieved ABC and we did not take that student. The reason is that practice has taught us that students who fall below the threshold often have problems later on in the course and we don’t want them to have problems. We want to help them succeed.”
Manchester University's Student Experience Director, Tim Westlake, says: “We had a similar blanket policy [to Surrey] but I would suggest it was a mistake because we under-recruited.”
Russell Group General Director Wendy Piatt says: “For any course, the offers made, and grades achieved, will be both above and below the typical offer.”
