Gauging the level of competition for places in higher education is not as simple as it might look.

The entry standards quoted in our league tables are a good guide, but they represent the average points achieved by entrants — invariably many more than a candidate will be asked for.

One way of securing a second opinion on the level of competition in different subjects and universities is to look at the number of applications for each place. Both are available on the website of the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (www.ucas.ac.uk/about_us/stat_services/stats_online/data_tables).

The institutional comparisons show substantial differences in the demand for places at apparently similar universities. They also put into context some of the swings in applications figures that are occasionally reported in newspapers.

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Hull University, for example, appeared near the top of some tables recently for boosting its applications by 25 per cent this year, but the base for that increase was the lowest ratio of applications to places at any pre-1992 university. There were fewer than three applications for each place in 2008.

The London School of Economics has had the most candidates to place in each of the past five years. And the level of competition is still growing, even though candidates now have only five choices, rather than six — there were more than 14 applications per place in 2008, compared with 12 in 2003. Bristol is the only mainstream university to get near the LSE on this measure, with 11.4 applicants contesting each place last year. Buckingham, the small, private (but popular) university, was the only other one with more than ten applications per place.

Of course, not every applicant with Bristol — or any other university — on his or her Ucas form has it as their No 1 target. Some will be aiming for Oxbridge, or perhaps for a university closer to home. Many others will be rejected because they are not expected to meet the entry requirements, so the level of competition among serious contenders for places will always be lower than the Ucas figures imply.

The exceptions to that rule are Oxford and Cambridge, which have only about four applicants per place, but virtually all of them serious contenders who are not looking to go anywhere else if they can help it. Although applications to the ancient universities have been increasing, self-selection still keeps the numbers down. At the other end of the scale, the newly-established Glyndwr University, based in Wrexham, had fewer than two applications per place in 2008, when it was still the North-East Wales Institute of Higher Education. Swansea Metropolitan University, another new foundation, had only 2.6 per place.

The figures are equally revealing, if rather more predictable, for individual subjects. Dentistry, medicine and veterinary science are by far the most competitive — especially since candidates have only four choices in these subjects, rather than the normal five. There are almost nine applications for each place in dentistry and nearly as many for medicine, in spite of big increases in the number of places in recent years. Economics and Japanese are next.

Of the subjects with more than 1,000 applications, complementary medicine and agriculture offered the lowest levels of competition in 2008. Metallurgy had the fewest applications per place of any subject — only 1.4 on average — but it is excluded from the table because there were only 38 applications and 27 acceptances.

As with other tables of statistics, it is important not to attach too much significance to a single set of scores, especially since the figures for each university are not broken down by subject. Hull may have had fewer than three applications per place overall, for example, but the university’s highly-regarded politics degree will have had many more.

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