Applicant numbers and demographics: undergraduate and postgraduate admissions statistics
Many factors have an impact on an applicant receiving an offer of a place at the University. We recommend that you do not use the admission statistics as a guide to whether you might receive an offer. You can find more about how we make offers by:
On this page
Admissions statistics
Our undergraduate and postgruaduate admission statistics dataset contains admissions information from the 2017 to 2022 admissions cycles.
Read contextual information and background to help you understand our admission statistics.
You can also read the technical notes to correctly interpret the dataset.
Overview admissions statistics
Age on entry admissions statistics
Disability admissions statistics
Ethnicity admissions statistics
Gender admissions statistics
POLAR3 admissions statistics
School type admissions statistics
Technical notes
Counts are reported by admissions cycle. Whilst there is some variation according to study level and application scheme, the admissions cycle generally runs from September to September. The admissions cycle name refers to the calendar year in which the cycle ended: for example 2021 refers to the September 2020 to September 2021 cycle.
Not all applications within an admissions cycle will be for entry in the immediate entry year as applicants can apply for deferred entry. This should be understood when interpreting counts of 'registered' for the latest cycle, as applicants for deferred entry will not have yet registered.
Undergraduate data is accurate as of 1 December 2022, whilst data for all other study levels is accurate as of 20 January 2023.
Rounding
We have a responsibility to make sure that we do not risk identifying individual applicants by publishing this data. As such, in line with the HESA rounding and suppression policy, all figures are rounded to the nearest 5. This means that, for example, where 0 is reported this may be rounded from 1 or 2.
Providing the statistics as a single table splitting counts by all University areas and applicant characteristics would require a significant degree of rounding that would sum to misleading totals. Instead, the whole dataset is provided as a series of tables with different aggregations.
University area groupings
Faculty name
The University faculty responsible for the course the application was associated with. An application’s faculty may change depending on the count. For example, an application that initially applied to a course in the Faculty of Health Sciences but that went on to receive an offer to a course in the Faculty of Life Sciences will belong to the Faculty of Health Sciences in the ‘Application’ count but the Faculty of Life Sciences in the ‘Offer’ count. More information about counts.
Our faculty structure changed during the cycles covered by these statistics. View our current faculty structure.
School name
The University school responsible for the course the application was associated with. An application’s school may change depending on the count. For example, an application that initially applied to a course in the Bristol Medical School but then went on to receive an offer to a course in the School of Biological Sciences will belong to the Bristol Medical School in the ‘Application’ count but the School of Biological Sciences in the ‘Offer’ count. More information about counts.
Our school structure has changed during the cycles covered by these statistics. View our current school structure.
Some courses do not belong to any school and applications associated with these courses are therefore reported with the name of their faculty in the school field.
Study Level
The study level of the course the application was associated with:
- undergraduate: undergraduate courses including integrated master's courses. There are many different ways to apply for undergraduate courses; the statistics only include applicants who have applied via UCAS or who have progressed from International Foundation Programmes.
- PGCE: Postgraduate Certificate of Education
- PGT: postgraduate taught courses
- PGR: postgraduate research courses
Applicant characteristic groupings
Applicant category
- Groups applicants as either Home or Overseas according to their domicile and visa status.
- Applicant categories are closely related to fee statuses. There are however multiple fee statuses belonging to each applicant category.
- An applicant's applicant category and fee status may change throughout the admissions cycle.
- A small number of applications have an ‘Unknown’ applicant category.
Age on entry
- Groups applicants by whether they will be aged either ‘21 and under’ or ‘over 21’ at the time of entry to the University.
- Students aged over 21 when commencing study on an undergraduate course are typically considered to be mature students.
- ‘Age on entry’ is reported for undergraduate applicants only.
Disability
- Groups applicants by whether or not they have declared they have a disability.
- ‘Unknown’ includes both applicants where this data has not been captured alongside applicants that have chosen not to disclose their status.
Ethnicity
- Groups applicants by their self-declared ethnicity.
- We use the the same ethnicity categories as the Office for Students use for reporting to support Access and Participation Plans.
- These categories are aggregations of lower level ethnicity options presented to applicants and students.
- ‘Unknown’ includes both applicants where this data has not been captured alongside applicants that have chosen not to disclose their ethnicity.
Gender
- Groups applicants by their self-declared gender.
- ‘Other or unknown’ includes applicants where they have declared a gender that is neither male or female, applicants where this data has not been captured and applicants that have chosen to not disclose their gender.
- Different options will have been presented to applicants depending on the application route.
POLAR quintile
- The POLAR (participation of local areas) classification is maintained by the Office for Students. It is now in its third iteration, POALR3, and this is what ‘POLAR quintile’ refers to.
- This measure indicates the proportion of 18-year-olds that have historically entered higher education in local areas and is reported here in quintiles, with quintile 1 indicating the lowest levels of participation and quintile 5 indicating the highest levels of participation.
- POLAR quintile is reported for Undergraduate only.
School type
- Groups applicants by the type of the school from which the applicant has applied, either ‘State school’, ‘Independent school’ or ‘unknown’.
- ‘Uunknown’ includes applicants from other types of schools, applicants from schools outside the UK and applicants where this data was not collected.
- ‘School type’ is reported for undergraduate only.
Counts
Application
- Refers to the number of applications.
- An applicant can submit multiple applications within the same admissions cycle.
- For undergraduate, we report the faculty and school for the course the application was associated with when it was first received. For all other study levels, we report faculty and school for the course the application was associated with at the end of the cycle.
Offer
- Refers to the total number of offers issued, which includes conditional and unconditional offers.
- An applicant can receive multiple offers within the same admissions cycle.
- For undergraduate, we report faculty and school according to the course the application was associated with when it first received an offer. For all other study levels, we report faculty and school according to the course the application was associated with at the end of the cycle.
Contextual offer
- We operate a contextual offer scheme.
- The ‘contextual offer’ count refers to the number of contextual offers issued.
- An applicant can receive multiple contextual offers within the same admissions cycle.
- For undergraduate, we report faculty and school according to the course the application was associated with when it first received an offer.
U offer
- Refers to the number of offers issued that were unconditional from the outset.
- We issues unconditional offers to applicants where they have already met their course’s entry requirements. We do not issue unconditional offers to applicants who have yet to meet these requirements.
- An applicant can receive multiple unconditional offers within the same admissions cycle.
- Applicants who are issued and accept conditional offers will have these offers revised to unconditional upon meeting the conditions of their offer.
- For undergraduate, we report faculty and school according to the course the application was associated with when it first received an offer. For all other study levels, we report faculty and school according to the course the application was associated with at the end of the cycle.
Accepted
- Refers to the number of applicants that have accepted their unconditional offer, and so are accepted for entry to study with us.
- An applicant can only be accepted for one application per admissions cycle.
- For undergraduate, we report faculty and school according to the course the application was associated with when the applicant was first accepted. For all other study levels, we report faculty and school according to the course the application was associated with at the end of the cycle.
Registered
- Refers to the number of applicants who went on to register with us as a student.
- We report faculty and school according to the course the application was associated with at the end of the cycle.
- These counts of registrations may differ significantly from counts in other sources of information for a number of reasons, as this dataset is concerned specifically with reporting on groups of applicants that registered. For definitive reporting on the University student body read our student numbers and demographics statistics.
