Who is missing from higher education?

qualifications in this way may be unfair. We should not, therefore, consider widening
HE participation without a more detailed consideration of who the additional
participants are intended to be. Put another way, who is missing from higher
education?

We cannot assess the claims of under-representation in HE using figures from HE
alone. We need also to track changes in the social class of the population from which
HE entrants come, and changes in the distribution of entry qualifications by social
class in that population. These figures then have to be combined in appropriate
proportions. And even this takes no account of the ‘inflation’ taking place in class
categories, due partly to the feminisation of the workforce. Non-manual occupations
have grown in past decades, while both skilled and non-skilled manual occupations
have declined, changing the meaning and relative privilege of non-manual
occupations. So, for example, an observation that the proportion of students from non-
manual backgrounds has remained the same over a number of years could actually be
construed as evidence of wider participation in HE.

In order to establish that access to higher education is unfair, we would need to
demonstrate that particular social groups are seriously under-represented in
universities, and that this under-representation has no reasonable or merited
explanation. In a sense, this sounds easy to demonstrate, but it is actually dependent
on a sequence of less than perfect analytical steps (Gorard and Smith 2006). These
steps include having:

• a suitable definition of, and method of measuring, membership of the social
groups involved;

• a suitable definition and characterisation of the relevant population;

• an accurate measure of the prevalence of the social groups in the relevant
population;

• an agreed definition of what we mean by participation in HE;

• and an accurate measure of the prevalence of those with higher education
experience in the social groups involved.

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