Who is missing from higher education?



a long-term decline from 1986 to 1999 in the odds ratios for managerial/professional
class compared to working class students, in terms of attainment levels at age 16,
staying on in formal education at age 16, attainment at 18, and subsequent
participation in HE. For these two groups in England, the odds ratios of taking a
degree fell from 7.9 in 1990, to 5.7 in 1996, and 4.4 in 1999. The near consensus
among these analysts confirms that the DfES (2003), who claim that the situation is
actually getting worse in terms of social class participation, are simply wrong. In fact,
HE participation has been slowly widening for decades.

The fastest growth in widening participation between the two collapsed social class
groups in Table 8 occurred in a short period of the early 1990s, reflecting perhaps
little more than a rapid increase in the number of places available at HE institutions.
However, there has also been a more general increase since 1940 as part of a
relatively long-term historical and social trend. This trend is largely undisturbed by
specific policies to widen participation. This suggests that the quickest and easiest,
and once everything is taken into account perhaps even the cheapest, way to widen
participation is simply to increase the number of funded places at HEIs. The HEIs will
generally find the students if there are places to be filled, and the historical evidence is
that these new students will be disproportionately from the less represented social
groups. Interestingly, the more recent initiatives intended to widen participation are
associated with the only period in this historical record during which participation has
not widened.

Out of interest, Table 9 shows a rather unusual way of comparing the socio-economic
composition of HE students and the population census, by including the not known
responses as a category rather than eliminating them from the analysis as is normal.
The figures represent Welsh-domiciled students participating in HE in 2002/03. The
socio-economic classifications derived from UCAS admission data ignore the 38% of
all Welsh-domiciled students who did not enter HE through UCAS, and a further 28%
of UCAS-entered students were not classifiable or did not respond to the occupational
question. This means that socio-economic classifications are only available for 34%
of students, and even these will contain errors and areas of subjective judgement (see
above). Similarly, the population census only has responses for 71% of complete
cases. Presenting the table in this way, making the missing cases visible in both

18



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