Access to Britain’s top universities is far from fair

Research suggests that access to the United Kingdom's top universities is far from fair for students from state schools and ethnic minorities, even when the figures are screened for subjects studied at A-level

Hard Evidence: why aren’t there more black British students at elite universities?

Young people from black British backgrounds are more likely to go to university than their white British peers, but they are much less likely to attend the UK’s most selective universities. As the Independent Commission on Social Mobility pointed out: “There are more young men from black backgrounds in prison in the UK than there are UK-domiciled undergraduate black male students attending Russell Group institutions.

Performance-based university funding and the drive towards ‘institutional meritocracy’ in Italy

Many countries, including Italy, are increasingly managing their public higher education systems in accordance with the New Public Management principle that private-sector management practices improve efficiency and quality. A key mechanism has been the introduction of performance-based funding systems designed to reward ‘high-performing’ institutions and incentivise ‘lesser-performing’ institutions to improve. Instead of improving efficiency and quality across the board, however, we argue that performance-based funding systems naturalise longstanding structurally determined inequalities between institutions by recasting national higher education systems as competitive institutional meritocracies in which institutional inequalities are redefined as objective indicators of intrinsic ‘merit’ or worth. We illustrate how performance-based university funding systems naturalise pre-existing inequalities between universities drawing on the case of Italy, a country characterised by longstanding inequalities between its northern and southern regions which demonstrably impact on the apparent ‘performance’ of universities. The concept of institutional meritocracy captures the illusory nature of this performance game

Does grammar school attendance increase the likelihood of attending a prestigious UK university?

In 2018 the UK government launched a £50 million scheme to fund the expansion of existing grammar schools provided that they increase efforts to attract more pupils from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds. This initiative assumed that grammar school attendance boosts the educational attainment and the higher education progression rates of pupils judged to be of high ability. It is already well established that grammar school pupils' higher average levels of educational attainment are due largely to their academic and social selectivity. The evidence in relation to higher education enrolment conditional on educational attainment, however, is more mixed. This paper sets out to update and improve on previous studies of the impact of grammar school attendance on higher education enrolment. Our analysis of data from the Next Steps longitudinal survey linked to National Pupil Database records finds that propensities to enrol in higher education generally, and at prestigious Russell Group universities specifically, are no better for grammar school pupils than for non-selective state school pupils with the same level of attainment at GCSE and A-level. This nil effect of grammar school attendance on progression to higher education net of the effects of educational attainment holds regardless of pupils' socioeconomic background, suggesting that grammar schools are no better than non-selective state schools as facilitators of upward social mobility

Organisational Identity as a Barrier to Widening Access in Scottish Universities

Widening access policy has historically focused on tackling the socioeconomic barriers to university access faced by prospective students from under-represented groups, but increasingly policy makers are seeking to also address the barriers to wider access posed by undergraduate admissions policies. In this vein, the Scottish Government has recently called upon universities to set separate academic entry requirements for socioeconomically disadvantaged applicants which recognise that “the school attainment of disadvantaged learners often does not reflect their full potential” and which better reflect the minimum needed to succeed in higher education. In this paper, we draw on in-depth interviews with admissions personnel at eighteen Scottish universities to explore the scope for more progressive admissions policies of this kind in light of universities’ identities as organisations and in light of corresponding organisational strategies for position-taking in global and national higher education fields. We present a theoretical model and an empirical illustration of three hierarchically-ordered ideal types of organisational identity—globally competitive, nationally selective, and locally transformative—and show that the more dominant of these tend to constrain the development of more progressive admissions policies. This is because globally competitive and, to a lesser extent, nationally selective organisational identities are understood to require admission of the ‘brightest and best’, conceptualised as those with the highest levels of prior academic attainment who can be expected to succeed at university and beyond as a matter of course. We conclude that universities must recognise and redress the implicitly exclusionary nature of their organisational identities if genuine progress on widening access is to be made

The use of access thresholds to widen participation at Scottish universities

The Scottish Government has set ambitious targets for widening access to full-time undergraduate degree programmes. Meeting these targets will be a real challenge, not least because young people from socioeconomically disadvantaged contexts continue to lag substantially behind their more advantaged peers when it comes to achievement at Higher level. Following the recommendations of the Commission on Widening Access, the Scottish Government has mandated Scottish universities to set separate entry requirements for contextually disadvantaged applicants, known as ‘access thresholds’. In this article, we draw on the findings of a research project commissioned by the Scottish Funding Council to develop an empirical evidence base for the use of access thresholds to widen participation in higher education. We show that access thresholds are mathematically necessary if wider access is to be achieved, and we present evidence demonstrating that applicants admitted with Higher grades lower than the market rate have a high probability of success at degree level. We welcome the widespread use of access thresholds but highlight the scope to be much bolder than is currently the case. We also show that the use of the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD) to identify contextually disadvantaged learners runs a high risk of failure to reach the intended beneficiaries. We argue strongly in favour of the use of administratively verified individual level measures of contextual disadvantage instead, specifically receipt of free school meals and low household income

Drugs, money, and the new Vietnam

This study examines the current public policy on illicit drug laws. The research briefly reviews the history of drug laws, illicit drug toxicology and current drug policy strategies. The study concludes that the current policy has failed. The study reviews the financial aspects of the illicit drug trade- money-laundering and its corrosive effects upon public and private components of society. The study notes the discussion of the implications of drug trade revenues and profits have been nearly nonexistent. The research concludes that the corrosive effects of illegal profits are more lethal to world governments than most other issues. In conclusion, the study briefly notes Western European approaches to drug policy. A four-step process is recommended to reexamine and reevaluate public policy in a globalizing world