Ucas first figures show UK university applications are down 12% on last year

Today The Guardian reported the latest figures for course applications from the Universities and Colleges Administration Service (Ucas). Ucas explains that students have been able to submit applications since early September, but most of the applications so far have been for medicine, dentistry and veterinary courses at Oxford and Cambridge, as their deadline for 'equal consideration' is the 15th of October. Many other applicants are expected to apply between October and the January 15th deadline for the majority of courses. So, although this data doesn't show the complete picture of applications, it does allow us to compare with 2011 applications at the same time last year. The headline figure of a 12% drop on last year in UK based students comes from this data: You can see from this graph that although UK and other EU applications are reduced, the non EU applications have increased. The Ucas data shows applications by UK region. From this we see that all areas in the UK have seen a decrease in applications on last year, the worst affected region is the East Midlands with a 20% decrease: Given the deadline for reading medicine at Oxford and Cambridge is passed it is interesting to note the 21% decrease in applications for professions allied to medicine on last year. Does this indicate students are choosing to study elsewhere or is there a trend to opt out of these professions? We will have to wait for the later Ucas data to get answers to these questions. Here's the data from Ucas in a more accessible Google spreadsheet format. What trends do you see? What would you like us to follow up? Data summary Download the data • DATA: download the full spreadsheet More data Data journalism and data visualisations from the Guardian World government data • Search the world's government data with our gateway Development and aid data • Search the world's global development data with our gateway Can you do something with this data? • Flickr Please post your visualisations and mash-ups on our Flickr group • Contact us at [email protected] • Get the A-Z of data • More at the Datastore directory • Follow us on Twitter • Like us on Facebook