Understanding the role of personal statements in elite university admissions

The university application process is centralised in the UK. Applicants can choose up to 5 institutions to apply to and apply on the basis of their predicted A level grades and a personal statement. The latter is a controversial element of the admissions process, with research showing that the personal statement gives unfair advantage to more privileged applicants (Jones, 2013). However, very little quantitative research has been carried out on the importance of the personal statement in the admissions process, and the extent to which it contains useful information about applicants likeliness to perform well in the course. In this project we will use data from two London institutions for whom personal statements are an important part of the applications process: i) both are highly competitive, so have many applicants with highly similar predicted grades, meaning the personal statement may be a more important factor in assessing candidates ii) both systematically score their personal statements. We will first examine the extent to which personal statement quality (measured by scores) impact who is accepted among applicants. We will then examine the extent to which personal statements contain information about the candidates by asking whether personal statements can predict university attainment, holding constant entry grades. We will also look at the characteristics of high scorers, investigating whether students with different characteristics produce ‘better’ personal statements. Future work will also examine the impact in changing the format of the personal statement (based on the 2024 reform, in which personal statements will be reformatted into a series of questions).