Thousands of academic high-fliers face rejection from top universities after A-level entry requirements were raised at the 11th hour to cope with Lord Mandelson’s spending cuts.
Leading universities including Cambridge, Newcastle, Nottingham and York have toughened entry criteria for some courses to avoid incurring fines for recruiting too many students.
Applicants for popular courses at some Cambridge colleges have been told they will need two A* grades at A-level despite being told when they applied A*AA was the standard offer.
Head teachers are concerned that thousands of pupils will be unsuccessful after applying under one set of criteria only to find they are now being judged more harshly.
Schools say it is unfair to change entry requirements advertised last year on websites. They say that in many cases the changes were made after students had submitted their applications.
The moving of the goalposts comes as new figures out on Monday are expected to show a surge in the number of university applicants on last year of nearly 12 per cent.
Universities are believed to be tightening their entry criteria in response to the rise in the number of hopefuls.
Cuts ordered by Business Secretary Lord Mandelson mean that around 6,000 fewer student places will be available this year than last. Universities face fines of £3,700 for every student recruited above their specified quota.
Yet record numbers of students are being predicted three As at A-level, giving universities their toughest ever year of offer-making as they seek to fill their courses while avoiding over-recruitment.
Heads fear that youngsters will be rejected according to criteria that had never been published or was only recently been changed.
Roberta Georghiou, headmistress of Bury Girls’ Grammar, an independent school in Greater Manchester, and a senior figure in the Girls’ Schools Association (GSA), said she was advising her pupils to print out website pages on the day they sent in their applications to ensure they had evidence of the grades demanded at the time.
‘It may be understandable that universities need to raise their boundaries now the government is imposing caps and fines,’ she said.
‘But when the criteria are changed mid-cycle, it does not present an image of honesty and transparency.’
Nigel Taylor, assistant principal of Hills Road state sixth-form college in Cambridge, said he did not have evidence yet that his students had fallen foul of the policy but added: ‘It will not surprise me if I do when we come to analyse offers at the end of this term.
‘When universities reach crunch point and see how many candidates they have, they will vary the offers or reduce the number they make.’
Their concerns follow an investigation by the Sunday Times which found examples of courses where grades had been raised since original listings. These include philosophy, politics and economics (PPE) at York, where AAB grades have been raised to AAA.
Meanwhile, students applying for economics and computer science courses at some Cambridge colleges have been told to get two A* grades at A-level to win a place.
Universities insist that minimum, or standard, offers are for guidance only and they reserve the right to change them.
Further confusion was sown when some universities said tougher entry criteria would apply only to students who had applied after the conditions had changed.
York said its PPE grades had been raised ‘as part of a review’ and ‘no one has been treated inequitably as a result’.
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