Tab Guide: The College Allocation System Saga
The Tab Guide to the ongoing College Allocation Saga. Your constant companion through all things confusingly controversial.
The Vice Chancellor and his posse of University bureaucrats have decided to implement a new College admissions system. It’s a complicated issue so I’ll try and summarise it for you briefly – see The Tab’s news report for more details.
Higgins swagging it up with some of the posse
The old system: Applications dealt with by department. Those accepted then sent on to Senior Tutor of the college they applied to, who then either accepts or declines the student for that college. Those who are declined are put into a pool, from which Senior Tutors can choose those applicants ‘best suited’ to their college.
The new system: Applications dealt with by department. Those who are accepted are automatically allocated their college of choice. When a college becomes full, further accepted applicants are randomly allocated a new college. Senior Tutor not involved.
| Pros of the new system/Arguments against the old | Cons of the new system |
| Colleges can express their identity better online to make sure the ‘right’ people apply to their college in the first place. | Senior Tutor can now no longer choose applicants best suited to their college and protect college identity. |
| “The offer factor”. Durham has to make, on average, four offers to every one acceptance. Therefore, there is only a ¼ chance that the trumpet player will choose Durham anyway. | Danger to college institutions- Senior Tutors can no longer, for example, replace an outgoing Big Band Trumpet player with a fresher by choosing a trumpet player from the pool. |
| College spirit shapes the people who go there- therefore it will be retained. | A perceived risk to college spirit |
| This new system complies with a 2010 Discrimination Act. The university is no longer at risk from lawsuits. | Question marks over the illegality of the Senior Tutor system- because applications in the old system first went to the department, the legal requirement may already have been complied with. |
| Student choice prioritised: Senior Tutors cannot reject an individual even when their college is not full as they could in the old system. |
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