Why is it time to look beyond UCAS?

UCAS has been a great system for many years helping students to apply to universities in the U.K through a structured and manageable system. The ability to apply to multiple universities (well, actually that is limited to 5 in round 1) through a single account is something that has made the process of application a low-effort and efficient game for everyone.

While there is no denying that UCAS has provided immense value to top-ranked U.K universities over the years, there is also no delusion about the fact that it misses the key ingredient of actually helping mid to low-ranked (or new) universities solve the biases brought on by things such as rankings (amongst other things) that impact application flux each year.

It is no secret that UK Universities employ (probably alongside Australia) the largest collection of education agents in the world to get applications and enrollments - even from some of the larger markets in the domain. Such is the size of this industry that feeds the universities in the UK that there are ancillary organizations and networks which exist to build a narrative around the whole set-up. Universities employ hundreds of such agents through a low entry barrier and then hope that the applications demand for their programs will be solved by virtue of redundancy and duplication of efforts. This leads to prioritising revenue over quality and diversity, and all this happens while UCAS does nothing (or probably is not built) to solve this issue.?

Built around UCAS is also the international admissions consulting or student guidance industry that charges incredible sums from parents and students to "apparently" guide how to fill out the UCAS application properly and also to select programs and help with essays. While UCAS has no direct role in encouraging such an industry and it provides a good amount of helpful content on its website to students who may find such guidance readily available, there is no denying the fact that due to the apparently difficult nature of building applications and school selection, the system creates the demand for such counsellors/companies to thrive.

If a system (that looks like a bottleneck) for applications to (primarily) undergraduate courses in the U.K. is incapable of solving two major issues plaguing the industry, then is it time to look beyond the UCAS and consider an alternate system?

Why should universities that aren't (say) part of the Russell Group or are not top-ranked as per some league tables/ranking tables suffer by getting low application yield through UCAS? Why should new programs or lower-ranked programs even at a top university suffer by receiving a bad response from applicants through UCAS??

If the entire decision-making process is left at the mercy of external factors such as league tables OR counsellors who could induce bias into the whole process, then it reflects on the sorry state of affairs wherein half the international (Non-EU) population that applied through the UCAS each year doesn't get accepted (https://www.ucas.com/data-and-analysis/undergraduate-statistics-and-reports/ucas-undergraduate-sector-level-end-cycle-data-resources-2022) - which is baffling because that just means one of two things: (a) the candidates made wrong applications (so the whole content based guidance system isn't working), or (b) the entire system is biased towards feeding top ranked/rated universities and therefore people who could have applied to the right university chose not to and ended up burning their applications.

This wastage of effort from both sides of the spectrum is frustrating and needs to be solved. We cannot have a system that encourages bias - no matter how it plays out. The idea that there is a system that kills the dreams of half the applicants' population while not contributing to the revenues of a large section of the UK Universities (refer to the HESA data https://www.hesa.ac.uk/news/19-01-2023/sb265-higher-education-student-statistics/location) cannot continue to exist in the current form.?

The Author's views as personal and do not reflect the views of any organization or network or group that the author is associated with. The views are to be understood as an analysis and not as an attack or attempt to disparage any person or organization.