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Widening participation: A delicate balance
Universities and governments around the world are faced with a perennial dilemma over the issue of widening participation in higher education. These concerns are founded on the same principles as workplace diversity and social inclusion – issues that have been in the public consciousness for decades – but just like these other matters they require careful, diplomatic and most importantly, genuine analysis and strategic attention.
As observed in The Times on 16th March 2007, The Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) – the world’s largest single pipeline of applications to university is planning, with UK government support, to implement sweeping reforms to its application processes in order to collect data that may be utilised to further the agenda of widening participation.
The data in question includes the ethnicity of the applicants’ parents and whether or not they have attended university themselves. In addition, it will examine whether the applicant has ever been in local authority care.
The concern reflected in The Times is that this can only lead to this data being considered for application purposes and thus will result in a “positive discrimination” paradigm that will reflect that seen in a quota-based approach to increasing diversity in corporate recruitment.
History suggests that it is very difficult to be the first generation in your family to attend university and that going to university, due to culture, parental guidance and ambition, and recently escalating costs, is an almost exclusively middle class privilege.
Naturally, governments around the world are keen to ensure that people from a broad range of backgrounds get access to the best available education; they are also keen to make sure they don’t ignore what could be a great pool of untapped potential in their society.
This problem is not limited to the UK - it is a truly global phenomena. In presenting the methodology behind the THES – QS World University Rankings in 11 countries in Asia in early 2007, it became evident that this was a key concern across the region from South Korea to New Zealand. A number of institutions were so concerned with the matter that they were keen for some measure of success, or perhaps effort, in this respect to be included as a contributing factor to the rankings.
In India, where the caste system plays a role, institutions are encouraged by the government to allocate a certain, not inconsiderable, proportion of their places to “lower caste” applicants on the basis of widening participation. St Joseph’s College have a policy of taking 10% of admissions from the lowest of the castes – regardless of how competitive they may be with the rest of their application pool. It might be interesting to know more about how this fact influences their experience when they get there with a secondary education, almost invariably inferior to that of their peers.
Countries with greater problems with unemployment and poverty are likely to have a greater problem in this regard… not only due to reduced parental encouragement and personal ambition toward university amongst their under-privileged, but also due to directly opposing parental influences to earn money to support the family.
It seems inevitable that if widening participation is the motivation for adding questions to the application forms used by universities, that if considered as part of the consideration process, it can only result in, at the very least, the perception of positive discrimination. And thus, cause consternation and malcontent amongst applicants and their families – particularly, perhaps, amongst parents who worked very hard themselves to be the first in their generation to attend university.
There seem to be a couple of natural steps here. Firstly, data collected at the application stage could be of use if gathered only for retrospective analysis, but dangerous if used for an aid to decision making. Secondly, if universities accept the mandate handed to them by government, then they need to take responsibility for the entire life-cycle of their eventual output and put their formidable financial, personnel and political resources behind primary and secondary educators, who may provide a steadily increasingly channel of applicants from atypical backgrounds.
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