The annual UCAS release last week prompted headlines celebrating a surge in 18-year-olds applying for UK engineering degrees. Indeed, the core numbers for the 2025 January Equal Consideration application deadline show an 14.5% increase in applications to Engineering and technology courses compared to the same point last year. Could this herald an end to the flatline in Engineering admissions? Will this surge in applications equate to more bums on seats? Sadly, probably not.
Despite growing demand, the Engineering acceptance rate has remained steady in recent years; a rising number of applicants per admission, on average, signals a lack of capacity in the sector. Engineering degrees are among the costliest degree programmes to run, involving long contact hours of teaching and expensive facilities. In our recent submission to the Comprehensive Spending Review, we estimated that the average cost is almost twice the funding available. Given the financial challenges across the higher education sector, many universities simply cannot afford to admit more domestic engineering students. Each additional student would make their losses worse.
No wonder, then, the continued overreliance on overseas students. The only way to expand capacity is to increase the international student intake and use their higher fees to subsidise more places for UK students. So, good news that, at 26.6% of all applications to Engineering and technology, the proportion of international applications from outside the EU is unprecedented this year (applications are up 20.4% year-on-year). At least for some, perhaps, as increasing international recruitment may be an option for only part of the sector, where we now see admissions increasingly concentrated at a smaller number of higher tariff providers.
Meanwhile, the proportion of Engineering and technology applications from the EU by the deadline, has declined again, now making up only 3.7% of the total. Amidst an overall increase in the number of UK-18-year-olds applying by the deadline, while numbers accumulate, the international phenomenon sees the proportion of applications to Engineering and technology from English and Scottish 18-year-olds declining. None-the-less, both Northern Ireland and Wales see material and proportional increases (applications up 24.9% 16.4%, respectively). This will please the Universities Wales director who spoke recently on the “alarming” drop in higher education participation in Wales compared to other UK nations.
The increase in applications is even sharper among women (+20.0%) with the latest data release telling of an unprecedented proportion of women among those making applications to Engineering and technology. Continuation of the annual increase in applications from women (of 1.1 percentage points per year as at Jan 30th for the two consecutive years), could see us reach the fifty percent mark in applications by 2050! Notwithstanding that the volume of growth in applications from men in the last year is more than one-third of the total number of applications from women in 2025.
But with observed changes to applicant behaviour, and students – particularly women – considering Engineering being increasingly enticed by and deferring to other fields (such as computing, architecture and design) beware that an Engineering choice is decreasingly a commitment to Engineering.
The insights in this blog come from a recent EPC study into Engineering admissions for the Royal Academy of Engineering. The latest admissions figures come from the UCAS Equal Consideration Deadline, which took place on 29 January; this normally accounts for approximately 80% of applicants in any given cycle. We will need to wait to the end of the cycle to see Engineering data decoupled from that for Technology but recognise that increases in Engineering applications in the main scheme outstripped those to Technology in only 3 of the last 5 years.
