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President's weekly update

19 August 2021

This year’s admissions cycle

While I hope that most of you are enjoying a break over the summer, our admissions teams have been working hard. This has focused on undergraduate recruitment following UCAS confirmation of A-level results which this year were based on teacher assessed grades (TAGs), and on postgraduate taught (PGT) students. Postgraduate researchers (PGR) tend to be confirmed later.

It is really encouraging that we are ever more popular for undergraduate study and as you will have seen in the media, many students attained grades much higher than we would normally expect. Anticipating that this would be an atypical year, with the shift to TAGs after most of our offers were made, we sought to manage the admissions cycle as best we could while being fair to applicants.

This has resulted in quite a number of our undergraduate degree programmes being over target across all Faculties. We have accepted all students who met offers as we are required to do. For programmes that have a cap due to the need for clinical training (notably medicine, dentistry and optometry), we have been working with the government’s brokerage scheme to secure places at other universities, though some students may need to be deferred. The situation in medicine was compounded by the fact that changes in grades very late last year meant more students met grades than we could accept so some deferred to this year’s entry. Wherever possible we have prioritised students who have already overcome disadvantage.

None of these disruptions is in any way the fault of our new students who have had an incredibly difficult year. We are very much looking forward to welcoming them – and indeed all our students - on campus next month.

We are planning and executing significant investment in staff and facilities in some areas. While we are delighted to be so popular with students from across the UK wanting to pursue their educational aspirations at Manchester, in financial terms, like most Russell Group universities, we actually make a slight loss on those home undergraduate courses. As you’ll know fees have remained pretty much static for nearly a decade while costs have inevitably risen; if they had risen annually with inflation the undergraduate home fee would now be about £11,500 rather than the current £9,250.

Overall, international undergraduate numbers are slightly over target. We are aware that some of them are concerned about travelling and there may be limits on flights. This means that there will be uncertainty over the numbers that will actually join us. We have offered to pay the costs of managed quarantine facilities (MQF) for any students arriving from red-listed countries and it is positive to see that now India has moved to the amber category, this will reduce the number of students requiring MQF. We are also working hard with airlines and Manchester airport to facilitate travel.

Work on PGT and PGR admissions will continue over the coming weeks and beyond.  

Once again, I would like to extend a big thank you to all staff who have worked and many who still are working across student admissions.

Global research ranking

It was great to hear that we have risen one place in the Academic Ranking of World Universities to 35th in the world and 5th in the UK. Moreover, our standing improved in 31 of our 47 subjects included in the AWRU.

Research news

In further good news, last year we won more grant income from UKRI than any other UK university, (ranked 3rd by success rate) and the number of fellowships awarded also increased on prior year (ranked 5th), which reflects the hard work of our staff in submitting excellent research proposals in spite of all the COVID challenges.

We have also just been ranked top in the UK for Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTPs) with industry. This long running and successful scheme puts a talented graduate into a company to solve an innovation or management challenge as part of a collaboration with an academic partner.

Return to campus

We are of course all hoping that we will be able to return to more like ‘normal’ conditions in September with a return to campus. Please see today’s announcement on this for more detail. 

While we look forward to the Autumn with optimism and excitement, we recognise the difficulties which our students, staff and alumni with connections to Afghanistan must be experiencing at the moment. We are in dialogue with a variety of agencies about further support the higher education sector may be able to provide. Colleagues in SEED are exploring a joint project with the Asian University of Women to see if we can partner on providing blended learning to Afghan refugees in Bangladesh, led by Alex Gardner-McTaggart.

Regular weekly messages will resume in September and in the meantime, I hope that you all manage to get a good break and have some holiday.

Nancy Rothwell, President and Vice-Chancellor

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