Who is missing from higher education?

Who is missing from higher education?

Introduction

UK Government policy is to increase rates of participation in, and qualification from,
higher education (HE), focusing particularly on those aged between 18 and 30. The
pressure to increase participation is intended to be directed primarily at those groups
previously under-represented in comparison to their population share, especially
students from low-income families. This is because the current student body in the
UK appears to be stratified in terms of class, ethnicity, and location. At time of
writing the government had spent at least £2 billion on widening participation (WP)
activities since 1997, and despite this there has been a reported fall in the percentage
of young entrants from lower social classes (Sanders 2006). This shows how difficult
the task facing WP is.

The widening participation agenda is predicated on the notion that particular social
groups, defined perhaps by social class or ethnic background, are unfairly under-
represented in higher education. Taking post-compulsory education and training as a
totality, there are, in theory, opportunities of some sort available to the entire adult
population. These include library drop-in centres, free basic-skills provision, job-
seeker training, liberal evening classes, and courses delivered entirely by technologies
such as television or computer. Therefore, the continued under-representation of
certain groups in these objectively open episodes suggests a pervading problem
(Selwyn et al. 2006).

However, unlike the patterns in lifelong learning more generally, it is not clear that
this unfair under-representation in HE has been established, and for a very simple
reason. HE has not previously been intended to be available to all and is, to a large
extent, based on selective entry in a way in which other lifelong educational
opportunities are not. The majority of first places at HE institutions in England are
allocated on the basis of applicants’ prior qualifications. Where these prior
qualification are distributed as unevenly as the opportunities for HE then this both
explains the patterns of participation in HE, and also suggests that using prior

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