Foreword The shift to higher education very often represents the biggest change young people have faced in their lives up to that point. Moreover, applying to become a full- time undergraduate student is risky. If you manage to secure the place you want, you will then likely leave your family, friends and existing support networks and quite possibly move to a city in a completely different part of the country in order to study a discipline in greater depth than before, while taking on a whole new level of financial independence. There are plenty of opportunities for things to go wrong – perhaps you will struggle to click with your classmates or flatmates, perhaps you will find it challenging to live on the very modest maintenance support available and / or perhaps you will find the shift to a more independent learning style challenging. Each year, as confirmed by the separate HEPI / Advance HE Student Academic Experience Survey , some people discover they have not made as wise a choice as they had hoped. They may not have had good enough information when applying or they may have matured as an individual in the months between applying and enrolling – or something might have changed with the course or institution that originally appealed to them. When such things happen, more resilient students, typically those with more confidence and from better-off backgrounds, are better able to cope. Others, such as those who are estranged from their families, are less likely to have the networks that serve as a safety cushion. The one finding that comes through repeatedly in the pages that follow is how unequal the student experience can be for people from different backgrounds. If equity in education is the goal – and society would clearly benefit from people having more equal chances – then there is great progress still to be made. As the new Government finds its feet and builds its educational policy programme, Ministers should consider what more can be done to deliver an education system that is fairer to those who currently have to fight the hardest to overcome the obstacles in their way. This important report should help in this endeavour by showing the sorts of actions that policymakers, the higher education sector and applicants themselves can take to make the transition to higher education less fraught – and to help guarantee success after enrolment. Finally, one reason why this survey of applicants is so important is that we know less about the applicant experience than we do about people’s experiences while they are school pupils or university students. So I congratulate Unite Students for not only shining a spotlight on the applicant journey but also for doing so consistently year after year, thereby building up a useful longitudinal picture. The annual nature of the survey allows for incremental adjustments as well as changes to those areas covered in more depth. This year, there is a notable focus on international students alongside home students, raising many instructive similarities and differences between these two groups that have not been much discussed in detail before. Nick Hillman Director of the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) Enrolling in higher education is a key life moment for more than half of young people in the UK. Many school leavers will have been studying alongside the same people throughout their secondary education, and many of them might even have transferred from primary school to secondary school en masse. Even those with more recent experience of educational transitions, such as those who moved from a school to a sixth-form college, have generally faced nothing like the scale of transition that enrolling in higher education tends to be. FOREWORD Unite Students | Applicant Index Report 5 INTRODUCTION THEMATIC ANALYSIS METHODOLOGY TOPICAL ISSUES BACK TO CONTENTS