There is no question that competition for university places is fierce and getting fiercer - this year 660,000 students applied for UK university places, up 12% on last year’s record breaking figure. The number of undergraduate places has increased but David Willetts, the Universities Minister has warned that it will still not be enough to stop high-achieving students missing out on places. When a place at university becomes a lottery for top students, parents and students will lose faith in an education system which fails to reward effort and the crisis in university funding will be matched by a crisis in confidence in the education system. How did we get here? ‘And how are the coalition government going to undo the crisis in British universities? And what does this mean for the Oxbridge applicant?
The Labour government set a target that 50% of 18-year-olds should enter university. No-one ever explained why that was deemed a sensible, let alone an achievable, target but as the number has crept upwards (it is currently just above 40%) there has been a related devaluation in the value of a degree and a growth of expectation that anyone should have the option of a university place, almost irrespective of ability. With headlines like "250,000 to miss university places this year" the media can at times seem intent on portraying university as a right of passage, not necessarily earned through ability. Recently the new Universities Minister, David Willetts has launched the idea that people will not necessarily undertake their university education at the age of 18 to 21 but could embark on it at any time up until they are 30. One can see that this might defuse the expectation of an 18 year old and help to re-establish the idea of a university education as being part of the skill-set for a working professional life. However, one wonders whether the idea doesn’t also represent a much-needed (in terms of the government’s coffers) method of restricting university places, cutting funding to the universities (mature students are more likely to enrol on part-time courses) and generally curtailing the currently overstretched market.
Whilst there is a hierarchy of universities with Oxbridge and other high-status universities providing overall higher standards of education and teaching, as evidenced in the league tables and by student surveys, these universities are increasingly finding it hard to select the best students given the qualification framework which has developed. Changes since 1992, including the 1992 creation of an integrated polytechnic-university sector and the use of GCSE, A and AS level examinations to determine student ability, have proved challenging. One might ask how a single exam system can possible be used to accurately determine the ability of the 50% of 18-year-olds whom the previous government determined should have access to university?
Alongside this, the examining bodies have agglomerated and become commercial entities charged with delivering profits to their shareholders - in many cases the universities themselves. In fulfilling this pressure they have inevitably made the examination system more profitable through modular exams, retakes etc – all of which increases their income but makes it harder to judge the quality of the results.
The number of students achieving top grades at A level is close to 5 times the number of places at Oxford and Cambridge universities. Inevitably and understandably top universities have introduced A* requirements and their own tests (BMAT, Law, TSA etc). Whilst such additional criteria may be good differentiators they also make the examining system more complex. And in being more complex they become more inaccessible to those who are from under-privileged backgrounds. Once again we are beginning to move towards an imbalanced socio-economic profile of university applicants.
All universities claim success in providing a needs-blind admissions process. Indeed, large sums of money have been allocated by government, philanthropists and by universities themselves in order to provide bursaries and support to ensure that education is accessible to all. However, in the face of all this support, very little quantitative evidence-based evaluation has been undertaken to establish universities’ claims. Of the many millions spent by both Oxford and Cambridge on “Access initiatives”, it is hard to see just from the small changes in entries and applications from state schools whether this money has been well spent. We still do not know whether state school pupils stand a lesser, equal or even greater chance of getting a place at Oxbridge than their fee-paying peers. And much of the money to widen access has been spent in a pepper-shot, unfocused way too – many Colleges focus on just one geographical area in which to promote applications, but within those geographical areas there are often huge disparities. Few of the universities or colleges use freely available public data to evaluate who they should target to achieve change in their access statistics, let alone how to evaluate the success of initiatives.
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