They're clever enough to go to university but not clever enough to pick up £12m of free cash on offer - that's one conclusion from today's report on the take-up of bursaries last year.
About 12,000 of them fell foul of the paperwork put out by the Student Loans Company. Faced with ticking a box to share information with the university of their choice, these students (or their parents) declined. Even before the government started losing our details on mislaid discs, it's natural to say 'no' to more data sharing - but in this case it meant losing potential bursaries. The forms need to be improved.
Today's report from the Office for Fair Admissions (Offa) suggests, though it does not say so out loud, that some institutions have not been chasing students that hard to give away their bursaries. "Bursary take-up/consent to share does not appear to have been actively managed or identified as an issue," says Offa, which suggests universities should pay the money retrospectively to those who missed out.
But Offa also found that at universities that provided bursaries to all students without a means test some students still failed to collect their entitlement. What part of "free money" did they not understand?
Or is the new bursaries system just too confusing, as the University and College Union and the National Union of Students have complained?
Either way it may strengthen the idea floated last May by Sir Martin Harris, the head of Offa, and backed by the higher education minister Bill Rammell, that the money earmarked for bursaries might do more to widen access if it was spent on summer schools for teenagers and other forms of targeting young people at an earlier stage. Do bursaries really make a difference between going to university or not, or choosing where to study?
