63 . Given less than 2 per cent of applicants did not receive an offer in the most recent application cycle , it is possible that there is simply some unobserved factor that is more prevalent amongst POLAR3 quintile 5 learners which is driving the remaining 0.4 percentage point gap in offer rates between these two groups .
64 . The size of this gap is nonetheless useful to compare with the gap in acceptance rates ( presented shortly ) to understand that relatively little of the difference in success after having applied through UCAS is due to receiving an offer , as opposed to the applicant subsequently meeting the terms of their offer and being accepted .
Figure 6 : Gaps in offer rates between POLAR3 quintiles 1 and 5
Acceptance rate
65 . Similarly , the gap in acceptance rates between POLAR3 quintiles 1 and 5 has also narrowed since 2012 .
66 . The acceptance rate is the proportion of applicants that are accepted to start higher education . Table 2 shows that acceptance rates were also relatively high for all applicants , with more than 86 per cent of applicants accepted by the end of the 2016 UCAS application cycle .
67 . In all years since 2012 , there has been a gap in acceptance rates between POLAR3 quintile 1 and quintile 5 areas , as shown in Figure 7 . This gap remained between 3.7 and 3.3 percentage points until 2016 , and then reduced to 1.3 percentage points by 2021 . This gap initially narrowed because the acceptance rate for school leavers from POLAR3 quintile 5 remained
25