2016 cycle applicant figures – 30 June deadline

These statistical releases describe applicants and applications from the 2016 UCAS cycle at the 30 June deadline.

This deadline is the final chance for applicants to submit a selection of up to five university and college choices through the main scheme. Applications received after this date go into Clearing.

The release is in the same format as the January and March deadlines for the 2016 cycle – ten reports covering different characteristics of applicants (including domicile, age, sex) and provision type (including country of provider and subject).

As in previous cycles, the primary set of statistics covers all applications in the UCAS Undergraduate scheme. These reports are also accompanied by CSV files which contain the data include in each report.

Headline figures:

In total 674,890 people applied to full-time courses in UK higher education by the 30 June deadline this year. This is an increase of 1,850 applicants compared to this point in the last cycle, giving an overall percentage increase of 0%.

Of these, 553,740 people applied from the UK, an increase 150 on this point in 2015, an overall percentage change of 0%.

The number of EU applicants rose by 6% (+2,920) to 51,850. The number of applicants from outside the EU decreased by 2% (-1,230) to 69,300.

The primary set of statistics are in this set of reports 


Coverage of UCAS data

For people living in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, UCAS covers the overwhelming majority of full-time undergraduate provision. Statistics relating to these countries in the data resources can be taken as being close to all recruitment to full-time undergraduate higher education.

In Scotland there is a substantial section of provision that is not included in UCAS' figures. This is mostly full-time higher education provided in further education colleges, which represents around one third of young full-time undergraduate study in Scotland, and this proportion varies by geography and background within Scotland. Accordingly, the statistics on UCAS acceptances in these data resources reflect only that majority of full-time undergraduate study that uses UCAS.

In 2015, around 120 courses at providers in Scotland that were previously part of the UCAS Teacher Training scheme, moved into the UCAS Undergraduate scheme. The numbers for providers in Scotland in 2015 recorded through the UCAS Undergraduate scheme will include those which were previously part of UCAS Teacher Training – estimated to be around 2,000 acceptances, mostly aged 21 or over.