Key audiences to fill your courses through Clearing 2021

You have places available for Clearing applications, but how can you attract the best students? To stand out from the noise of all the other summer Clearing campaigns you need to know who to target, what to say and when to communicate your message.

That’s where we come in. As the UK’s largest online student platform, The Student Room has direct access to millions of students. We’re experts in what makes them tick and we’ve identified high engagement Clearing groups who are already thinking about using Clearing as their path to apply for further education.

Fill in a form or call us for more information: 0800 999 3222

We’re applying this cycle 

Applying for higher education in 2021 

1.6m users on The Student Room are interested in applying to university or HE college this cycle. This is the must-have audience for your Clearing campaign.

Our analytics show that 23% of our whole audience are in Year 13. Students who voluntarily opt into our Clearing database provide explicit, first-hand data  about their subject choices. On average, our students supply two subject choices when they register.

We can also target by study level, location and college or university preferences.

We can target Year 13s who are thinking about university or college and are ideally aligned with your institution.

We’re focused and goal-orientated 

Mature students

Over 49,000 users on The Student Room who are interested in Clearing are over 25 years old. The often-forgotten mature student audience is rich with diverse, highly skilled and goal-orientated candidates.

In today’s fast-moving labour market workers need to retrain and upskill to remain competitive. Mature students are highly motivated to plug their skill gaps by achieving top qualifications and pursuing further education opportunities.

Mature students also make brilliant ambassadors. When surveyed about their decision to go to university, 92% responded positively and a quarter described it as ‘life-changing’.*

We understand the skills that this segment is looking for and can help you target them with the right courses.

*Source:  MillionPlus mature student survey 2018

We’re open to new options 

UCAS Extra 

98,600 users on The Student Room are signalling that they’ll use UCAS Extra to apply for courses in 2020. As they are already exploring alternative options, they are easy to influence.

UCAS Extra applicants may have missed their entry criteria or been unable to secure offers from the universities they really want to go to. However, this is not an audience of under-performers. On Results Day, some students will discover they performed much better than expected and reject their existing offers to look for more competitive places through Clearing. Others may have narrowly missed top university or college places but still have grades that are well above average. Some may simply have changed their minds about their chosen course or university.

We’ll use our in-depth knowledge of student motivations to position you as their new first choice. 

We can afford to pick and choose

High Achievers

We have 276,000 users in our High Achievers segment. 52% of High Achievers demonstrate they are interested in applying to university, compared with 16.1% of all Year 12/13s. They are also significantly more likely to be considering postgraduate study.*

High Achievers may be good at multiple subjects or have various high-profile career paths in mind. Clearing and self-release allow them to change their minds and pursue more competitive or prestigious places. Find out more about this audience.

High Achievers tend to be curious about the world, which means we can target them in key onsite locations, like ..

*Based on overlap segments: we capture this by measuring online behaviour, such as which forums users visit.