Allan Massie: The case for single-class universities

Published on Monday 23 August 2010 12:31

UNIVERSITIES need more poor students. That headline may dismay some university lecturers and professors who think they already have too many students who are not up to demands. There have always been some, of course.

I can recall from my own time at Cambridge long ago a couple of rowing Blues whose interest in the subject they were supposedly studying was the far side of non-existent. Now, when so many more people attend university than was the case then, the number of poor students has inevitably risen. Drop-out rates demonstrate this.

The word "poor", however, has more than one meaning, and when the higher education minister David Willetts called for more poor students to be admitted to universities, he meant students from poor backgrounds rather than students who are intellectually inadequate.

Universities, he suggested, should be discriminating. Rather than relying wholly on A-level grades, they should seek out students whose potential has not been fully realised at school - perhaps because the school itself was not very good, even poor, in the other sense of the word. Of course, he was speaking about England, but the same question is frequently raised in Scotland: how do we enable more young people from backgrounds described as "disadvantaged" to get to university?

When Scottish education minister Mike Russell once again aired the possibility of introducing a graduate tax as the means of financing university education, the likelihood that this would enable young people from such backgrounds to go to university was doubtless one of the ideas behind it.

Introduce a graduate tax, and students don't leave university with a load of debt. Their education can be financed; they can even once again receive generous grants; and they pay back, from this tax, once they are earning a certain sum. So those from poor backgrounds, whose parents are unable to make any financial contribution to their education, might be less likely to be deterred from applying to a university.

There is much to be said for such a tax, even if such a rejigging of student financing is scarcely possible at a time of financial stringency. This is not a time for the state to incur new costs now in return for repayment a good many years later. So whatever the attractions of a graduate tax, it looks like a non-starter at present.

Willetts was really talking about the need for a ladder which will enable bright young people to climb from a disadvantaged background to the sunny uplands of a university education and middle-class prosperity. There used to be such a ladder of course.It was called the "11-plus", which separated children at that age into two groups: academic sheep and non-academic goats, the former going on to a grammar school, the latter to a secondary modern or technical school.

Things were certainly a bit different in small-town Scotland, where there was only one secondary school; that too, however, tended to develop an elite, as the non-academic pupils left at the earliest opportunity, aged 14 until the leaving age was raised. Those who remained after that age received what in England would have been described as a grammar-school education.

This early division did achieve the goal of making social mobility easier. It offered a pathway for bright children. Just before he died a few weeks ago, the historian Tony Judt wrote an article in which he recalled with gratitude how many of his friends at King's College, Cambridge in the 1960s were, like himself, beneficiaries of the 1944 Butler Education Act - that provided for the 11-plus - which gave them an entry to a highly academic grammar school. But, of course, this was tough on many who, like John Prescott, failed that exam and were left behind, often resentful. So comprehensive education was introduced, the idea being equality for all.

This was to some extent successful, but there was an unlooked-for development. Good comprehensives led to rising house prices in their catchment area and so we got middle-class comprehensives on the one hand, and what were unkindly called "sink comprehensives" on the other.

Consequently, in the past 20 years the social mobility which characterised post-war Britain has slowed, the gap between rich and poor has widened, and the proportion of university students from poor backgrounds has fallen, even while the total number of young people going to university is very much greater than it was in, say, 1980. So Britain is a less equal country than it used to be.

In one respect, the figures relating to the class background of students are misleading. In the past half century the middle-class expanded hugely, while the working-class has shrunk. Indeed, the old working-class has not only shrunk, but also divided, between that part which works and that part which lives on benefits, this latter group victims of what is called "social exclusion". But one consequence is that the middle-class pool of aspiring students is bigger and deeper, the working-class one smaller and shallower, than in the 1950s and 60s when social mobility flourished.

None of this alters the fact that the dice are loaded against prospective students from poor backgrounds. They go to schools where most pupils do not aspire to a university education and where academic standards are inevitably lower. Many lack the stimulus of an able and ambitious peer group. There can be no surprise if the grades they achieve in Highers or A-levels don't do justice to their ability or potential.It is reasonable that, without taking on themselves the responsibility of effecting "social engineering", universities should practise some discrimination in favour of students who fall into this category. Exam results are a guide, but should not be the only one. The difficulty is one of numbers and pressure of time, the need to make decisions quickly. Ideally, every candidate for university should be interviewed, and soundings taken from teachers. This used to be possible when less than 10 per cent of young people went on to university. Now that almost half aim to do so, it is impossible.

Judgments have to be made on less evidence than those responsible for admissions might wish to have, far less than used to be available. Full fairness is never likely to be achieved. There will always be candidates who feel hard done by, but some discrimination in favour of poor students is surely justified.