‍Last year, I started shaving my head. ‍

I’m beautiful bald, I know. Thanks for telling me, I love to hear it.

What I’m going to talk about here though, isn’t fishing for compliments. It isn’t about the outcome, it’s about the journey getting there.

I didn’t just wake up one day and decided my indie boy days were finally over. The decision took years. Years of a developing ‘solar panel’ on the crown that caused me a ridiculous amount of anxiety and shame. I thought about it every day for a decade with dread and despair, because that male pattern baldness forced me to change my identity and who I was.

It was a slow painful process of letting go to who I was in my 20s, and working out what my new identity would be. Change is incredibly difficult on this level. At least it was for me.

The decision to shave my hair off took 10 years. The actual shave took like, 5 minutes.

Some people of course, just buzz their head on a whim. No existential crisis, no decade-long anxiety riddle battle with themselves. They just do it. And good for them.

But if you were to put me and them side-by-side, you might have two exceptionally attractive baldies, who are massively different on a fundamental level.

Two types of Clearing Student

Now, I understand this is about to be a slightly left field comparison. But bear with me.

A-level results day was last week. Right now, hundreds of thousands of students are going through UCAS Clearing. And like those head-shavers of the world, they are not all the same.

A good chunk of them are using Clearing strategically. They have either changed their mind or wish to ‘trade up’, or use this as an opportunity, and are deciding to go a different uni. UCAS data from 2024 suggest this is about a third of Clearing students.

Good for them. The proverbial ‘on a whim head shavers’.

There is however a large chunk of students who have gone through Clearing because they either missed their grades, or increasingly, because they made a last-minute decision to go to uni, even though they didn’t originally apply. For many of them, they have made a life-changing decision almost in the heat of the moment.

This decision isn’t like what to have for your lunchtime meal-deal. This will impact identity, your future career, your whole life. It’s about who you are.

So, when I thought about big life decisions that I’ve made recently, I thought of two things. The first was having a child. The other was shaving my head. I may have gone with the more ‘trivial’ option here, but I really do believe that there is a comparison.

I had 10 years to get comfortable with changing my identity, accepting that my original idea of who I was is gone, and embrace my new life as a beautiful bald guy.

Yes, yes, yes, I know it’s a different beast. But, thousands of people across the country have only had days to get used to the idea that who they are and where their life will go, who they are, what their identity is, and now this will be fundamentally different to what they had planned.

Missing data

The important thing in all this for me, is that universities don’t really know the extent of this problem. They don’t know this distinction.

A 2026 HEPI report, which looked at an OfS funded Pre-Arrival questionnaire, did a bit of digging on this. Working with the University of East London, they found that over 20% of their Clearing students never initially applied to university, and that this group was the most at risk of withdrawing or worse, not even making it to enrolment before disappearing.

Universities don’t know whether students traded up, missed grades, changed their minds, are stressed, anxious, excited, empowered, powerless, or in any way ready for what’s coming next.

If you don’t know who the at risk students are coming into uni, then how do you support them?

The link to Evaluation

Clearing is almost entirely evaluated on placement numbers. How many students found a place, how many courses had vacancies, did the Clearing system run smoothly… This is all operational. It’s KPIs, and delivery metrics. It’s not measuring impact.

All of this is measuring whether the head got shaved. It doesn’t tell you whether the person was ready, and it doesn’t tell you whether they are ready for what’s next.

If the route into HE, the mindset and the journey getting there, is a predictor of risk of withdrawal, then this has to be captured on a Clearing Theory of Change. It also means that ‘Clearing’ shouldn’t just finished in the next few days. It needs to continue through to the student enrolling, and even into the start of the course.

And most importantly, we need to start measuring this stuff. We need a baseline of ‘readiness’ for all the students. Not just academic readiness, but emotional readiness.

This is what I didn’t realise until I buzzed my head. Decisions in life that are emotional, are hard. When you think about someone else’s big life change, you can see the exciting possibilities. The wonderful bald life ahead where you fully live your Captain Picard dreams. I think we take that approach when we talk to students about students. “Come to uni here instead, it’s an adventure!”

But when it happens to you, it’s all really scary. ‍ ‍

The Ego Boost

When people tell me how I ‘pull off the bald look’, I’m of course, delighted.

But really, it doesn’t matter too much. When my partner’s 8 year old tells me I “look like an egg”, I don’t feel sad about it anymore. Losing my hair no longer causes me sleepless nights, I’ve been through that emotional journey, reached acceptance, and actually, I really enjoy the benefits.

For someone who had to make a decision, and without being ready, those external factors will have more of an impact. Every sign that it was the wrong choice, every difficult moment, is going to hit harder.

This is reflected in the research on belonging. For example, Phillips-Berenstein et al. (2024) describe how university drop out is linked to insufficient psychosocial readiness, and that assessing students readiness is crucial to identifying those at risk.

These Clearing students who arrived last minute and uncertain about whether this particular university is for them, will be more sensitive to those small moments when they find uni a little tricky. When they feel a bit out of their depth in a lecture, or a pang of homesickness, or struggling with money… those moments hit you more deeply when you haven’t done the emotional journey.

It won’t cause you a breakdown, but it can sting if an 8 year old calls you an egg and you’re not yet ready to be your true bald self.

So what do we do?

I think we need 3 things.

Firstly, data. The UCAS application holds some information about route of entry for students, but universities need to retain this, and clock it in their learning analytics platform.

Secondly, evaluation. If you’re evaluating Clearing outcomes, it’s not just about getting students in, it’s about monitoring retention, progression, and success. And you need to understand the student mentality as part of that, so pre-arrival questionnaires around readiness or something like this, is key.

Thirdly, targeted transition support. Not a separate programme necessarily… Unis have been getting better at understanding the importance of belonging and emotional readiness, not just academic readiness. But there needs to be something for those late-decision makers, acknowledging the speed of their decision, reassuring them that the decision was a good one, and helping them to get to acceptance and embedding where they are in their identity.

I had to spend years getting ready to embrace bald-life. When it came to the razor, I was ready.

Not everyone gets that time. It’s our responsibility to help them get there, and evaluate whether we’re doing a good job at it.