How the ‘Undergraduate Entry Requirements – Perceptions of Prospect Students’ report will help you:
- Secure robust evidence to support your university’s brand and reputation management strategies and approach
- Gain practical insights to inform your entry requirements communications
- Identify cross-institution opportunities to provide clear information and guidance on entry requirements, using UCAS data to your advantage
- Understand differences in entry requirement perceptions through demographic lenses including widening access groups and subject areas
More about the ‘UG Entry Requirements – Perceptions of Prospect Students ‘ project
This research project brought together Alterline and 27 Universities from around the UK to gather evidence exploring how entry requirements influence prospect UG’s decision-making, confidence, and perceptions of institutional brand, reputation and teaching quality, with added demographic lenses including widening access groups and subject-level variations.
The full visual research report includes an executive summary. practical recommendations and a segmentation of prospect students based on their behaviours and perceptions of entry requirements. A data dashboard is also provided as an output to enable exploration of the data based on individual university needs and priorities.
Report contents include:
- How young people take entry requirements into account during decision making and when
- How young people view entry requirements in relation to university reputation and who/what is informing those views
- What information young people need regarding entry requirements
- How young people perceive differences between advertised grades and the actual grades that successful applicants receive
- How this affects their perception of the university’s brand, status and selectivity
- Differences based on a range of demographics including qualification type being studied, FSM eligibility and course areas
Action and recommendation workshops February 2026:
We will be running a series of online workshops to share the outputs from this interesting project throughout February 2026. Any universities who join the project in late January/early February will be invited to attend those events which will also be recorded to share with any universities who purchase the research at a later date.
Project partners
This project was developed in partnership with a number of universities who helped to shape the research design through our collaborative University Futures model. With 27 universities participating as at the end of January 2026 it has been our most popular collaborative research project ever and the level of support enabled us to conduct additional analysis and add extra outputs to enhance the value for money of the research. We would like to express our thanks to all the universities who have supported the project.