Farewell to the Ucas personal statement – you will not be missed

Changes to the university application process might help end our celebration of self-importance, says Will Gore

The less we’re encouraged to bang on about our own apparent brilliance, the better (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

Are there any two words more likely to strike fear into the hearts of 18-year-olds and their parents than “Ucas form”?

For teenagers planning to go to university, the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service is an organisation that you never hear about before your GCSEs. Then, as soon as you set foot in the sixth form, you never stop hearing about it, as it becomes an acronym to dominate your dreams and nightmares.

The Ucas form, as the gateway to higher education, takes on a kind of magical status, with any wrong move likely to impede your chances of happiness. The notorious personal statement seems to take on particular importance, as you aim to squeeze every extracurricular show of brilliance into the kind of charming prose that would convince an uncertain admissions tutor that you are worth a punt.

However, in a long-debated change, Ucas announced this week that the personal statement is no more. Instead of 4,000 characters’ worth of word-perfect, free-form boasting, applicants will instead be asked to answer three structured questions about why they want to study their chosen course, and how their academic and non-academic experiences have prepared them for it.

The overhaul is aimed at encouraging more young people from disadvantaged backgrounds to apply for university places, with the HE sector still disproportionately attracting youngsters from the more prosperous socio-economic groups. With the Ucas personal statement often polished by pushy parents, or by teachers at smart schools with an eye on their number of uni entrants, it can feel like an overwhelming exercise for those who have less support (and that’s before anyone even mentions the cost of doing a degree).

A more structured application form, which asks specific questions, should level the playing field, at least to some extent. And while it ought to be obvious that going to university is not the be-all and end-all, it is entirely right that potential students shouldn’t be put off by an application process that seems to place greater store on style than substance.

There are hopefully other benefits too. For one thing, there will be less angst for parents, who convince themselves that a less-than-elegant phrase might nix their child’s longed-for place to read English literature at a top-rated institution. Maybe too it will persuade ambitious mums and dads that it isn’t really necessary to shell out for those extra trips to European capitals, just to give the personal statement a certain je ne sais quoi which can only be demonstrated by exposure to continental culture.

Most importantly, however, the demise of the personal statement might help to end an era in which shameless self-promotion has become not only tolerated, but encouraged. Transparency about actual achievements is hard to feel too shady about, but all too often accomplishments are hammed up and exaggerated as people compete for eyeballs.

Social media certainly must take a share of the blame for all this. LinkedIn, for example, is full to bursting with pomposity and hyperbole. And Instagram was essentially designed for photo-based bragging. But Ucas personal statements got the ball rolling with all of this yonks ago, as teenagers battled to come across as sophisticated, cultivated and as knowledgeable as possible.

I know this from the bitter experience of my own personal statement, written in deadly earnest in 1996, full of flourishes and going big on my many (if very minor) triumphs – from work experience as a park ranger, to captaining my local cricket club.

Four years later my self-importance came back to bite me when, at a gathering of departing history undergraduates, our tutors arrived with a sheaf of tatty papers and proceeded to read back to us our ghastly teenage missives. Some were worse than others; none was without its cringeworthy boasts or bombast.

Perhaps it was a valuable lesson. But how much better had we not been given the space to show off in the first place.

We live in an age of personality – politics and culture alike are seemingly dominated by showboating individuals. So bravo to Ucas for ditching the personal statement. The less we’re encouraged to bang on about our own apparent brilliance, the better.