It will be like the baby boom all over again
Sean Coughlan at the BBC explains now what:
The next part of the A-level U-turn jigsaw is that the government is allowing universities in England to add more places – to meet the extra demand from young people who have had their results upgraded.
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To increase capacity, the government in England will lift the “student number controls” which would have capped places.
Which means universities can add more students but
But that still depends on it being possible – they will still need to have enough spare space, teaching staff and accommodation, along with the pressures of Covid-19 social distancing measures.
Which doesn’t just magically pop into being because it’s needed.
A later update (the BBC doesn’t provide links to each segment of live reporting, unlike the Guardian):
Queen Mary University of London said in a tweet it was “deeply sympathetic” to affected students, and that it would guarantee a place to any students who had originally missed but now met the terms of their offer.
An hour down the page there is a student who was sad about her lost place at Queen Mary:
“I’m relieved but quite frustrated at the same time. It’s too late,” says Zainab Ali, 18, from London.
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She’s come to terms with the fact that she’s going to her second choice, the University of Westminster, instead – but still feels frustrated because she had “always wanted” to go to Queen Mary’s since being a child.
So it looks as if she’ll get to go after all (perhaps with overcrowding).
If they do it anything like my school, they’ll just shove the additional students into existing classes and let the instructors figure out how to teach so many. We had huge surges in our enrollment during the 2008 recession, and that followed other increases in enrollment over the preceding several years, but we added no instructors. They just put our classes in larger rooms.
They did hire a boatload of new administrators, though. They are now reducing the faculty through attrition, but the administration continues to grow. We probably have more than 10X the administrators we had when I started 14 years ago, and every time an administrator leaves or retires, they split the job into two jobs, deciding there is “too much work” for one person. Even though most of our administrators delegate the bulk of their duties to their assistants. (I found out this is because each administrator is compensated more the more people they supervise, so there is an enormous incentive to multiply their deputies, vices, and assistants.)