A million UCAS higher education applicants in 2030 is a big deal – projections, however, are notoriously fickle beings.
In making this forecast (and UCAS is even honest enough to note that the central projection tops out at just over 900,000) there’s a whole bunch of trends to assume, hypotheticals to account for, and assumptions to cross-check.
The figure includes, for example, international students, so we assume geopolitical stasis in an increasingly unpredictable world.
It posits that demand will broadly continue to rise (there’s an interesting 2023 anomaly we’ll get to in a moment), and there will be no constraints on capacity – despite there being a pending response to a student number controls consultation in England, and outriders across the political spectrum already making the case for and end to the painful conjunction of fee freezes and growth that has characterised recent years.
