University offers

sir – I was delighted to read the news from Ucas that unconditional offers with strings attached will be reduced by up to 75 per cent within a year (report, January 30).

As Camilla Turner reports, a record one in four school-leavers were given a “conditional unconditional” offer last year, in which students are guaranteed a place if they make an institution their first choice.

The perils of this trend have been well advertised: students select the wrong course or even the wrong university for their skill set, A-levels lose their rigour (and their raison d’être) and students rest on their laurels in the run-up to exams. As the educationalist Laura Mcinerney once put it: “Even a fairly studious 18-yearold will put partying before Proust.”

Students unmotivated to perform could have a detrimental effect on schools judged to a large extent by league tables. Parents understandably still value league tables when deciding about their children’s education.

When he was education secretary, Damian Hinds told the BBC that “the systematic use of unconditional offers is not in the interest of students and they should not be used just to get people through the door”. And yet the practice has continued.

Students, once enthusiastic about bolstering their personal statements with a range of extracurricular activities, are also becoming apathetic. This bodes ill for the country, which benefits from the energy of offering help and volunteering that many learn in their final teenage years. Alice Elliott

Head of Key Stage 5, Sexey’s School Bruton, Somerset

sir – Harry Hodges (Comment, January 30) congratulates Oxbridge on not “opening the doors to all comers”.

For some decades, I was responsible for a part-time evening LLB course at the sort of place Mr Hodges probably had in mind when sneering at “dumbed-down institutions offering Mickey Mouse degrees”.

I gave up judging applicants on their existing qualifications because they were unreliable indicators of future performance. That’s how a coal miner became a head of barristers’ chambers.

Snobs who dismiss unseen all our 130 universities or so except two

(or perhaps the other 22 members of the self-selected Russell Group) should give a thought to the justified resentment of those graduates whose achievements they routinely dismiss. Professor Chris Barton

Stoke-on-trent, Staffordshire