This paper has shown the difficulties an analyst faces even when making an
apparently simple comparison between the characteristics of individuals in HE and
characteristics of individuals in the population. So the analyst is faced with a
judgement about whether there is indeed under-representation of specific social
groups, of whether the proportionate participation of these groups is far enough below
one (1) to trigger a search for the cause. The traditional panoply of statistical analyses,
such as significance tests, confidence intervals or standard errors, cannot help here
because these address only the sampling variation due to chance. None of the many
analytical decisions and compromises summarised in this paper concerns such
sampling variation (Gorard 2006). They are much more to do with clarity and good
judgement. There is no simple consistent answer to the analytical decisions described
in this paper, including decisions about the meaning of HE, the nature of domicile, the
classifications used, and the age range and geographical span of the relevant
population. Yet every analysis covering patterns of participation must make, even by
default, a bewildering number of these decisions, and every analyst might quite
reasonably make a different set of decisions. Unless these analytical compromises are
clearly reported, there is a danger that debates about what is happening in widening
participation will be misinterpreted by commentators as being about issues of
substance, whereas they are, in reality, merely about differences in these analytical
decisions.
The difficulties rehearsed in this paper often lead analysts to focus mainly on young
full-time participants taking their first degree, for whom the data is most complete.
The relative quality of data for young full-time participants, in turn, leads some
commentators to take these elements for granted in an uncritical way in their own
smaller scale work. All of this may bias public perception of HE issues, by apparently
marginalising part-time and older students. Yet these are two groups that the available
evidence shows are the most likely to help create the widening participation that
policy, apparently, requires. The paper has illustrated how difficult it is to decide
which social groups are under-represented in HE in the UK, if any, and by how much.
In fact, the two groups most obviously under-represented in HE at present - males
and whites - have been largely ignored in concerns about WP.
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