Category: Participation

  • Promoting access to higher education worldwide

    Promoting access to higher education worldwide

    by Graeme Atherton

    The shift to the political right in many countries in the world, including it appears the UK now, presents a new set of challenges for equitable access and success to higher education. Not that it needed any new ones. Inequalities in participation in higher education are pervasive, entrenched and low on the list of priorities of most governments. Since the early 2010s we have been working with other organisations across the world including the World Bank and UNESCO to understand the extent and nature of these inequalities but more importantly to initiate activities to address them. In 2016 working with colleagues including the late, great Geoff Whitty I undertook a project to bring together as much secondary data we could on who participates in higher education by social background across the world.

    The Drawing the Global Access Map report found that in all the countries where we could find data (over 90%) higher education participation was unequal. The extent of this inequality differs but it binds together countries and higher education systems of all varieties. Following convening 2 global conferences on higher education access around the time of this report in an attempt to galvanise the global higher education community, we then launched World Access to Higher Education Day (WAHED) in 2018. The aim of WAHED was to create a vehicle that would enable universities to launch activities to address inequalities in access and success on the day in their own place. As the pandemic hit we also started a global online conference and up to 2022 over 1000 organisations from over 100 countries engaged in WAHED. We also produced research to mark the day including the All Around the World – Equity Policies Across the Globe report in 2018 which looked at policies on higher education equity in over 70 countries. The report found that only 32% of the countries surveyed have defined specific participation targets for any equity group and only 11% have formulated a comprehensive equity strategy.

    WAHED played an important role as a catalyst for activism, especially in contexts where individuals or departments felt that they were acting in isolation. However, progress will be limited if efforts are restricted just to an International Day of Action. Hence, in December 2024, working again with the World Bank, UNESCO as well as Equity Practitioners in Higher Education in Australasia (EPHEA), and a number of educational foundations, we launched the World Access to Higher Education Network (WAHEN). The aim of WAHEN is to construct an alliance for global, collective action on higher education equity and more information can be found here. It will focus on:

    •              Capacity Building via the sharing, professionalisation and enhancement of practice in learning, teaching and pre-HE outreach

    •              Collaboration – enabling organisations to formulate and deliver shared goals through a set of global communities of practice.

    •              Convening – bringing together those from across countries and sectors to affect change in higher education through World Access to Higher Education Day.

    •              Campaigning – advocating and working with policymakers and governments around the world producing research and evidence.

    •              Critical thinking – creating an online space where the knowledge based on ‘what works’ in equitable access and success can be developed & shared.

    It was because there was a national organisation that works to tackle inequalities in higher education in the UK, the National Education Opportunities Network (NEON), that I founded and led for 13 years, that WAHED and WAHEN happened. NEON led these efforts to build a global network. There remains a large way to go for WAHEN to be sustainable and impactful. We are working intently on how to position WAHEN and how it should focus its efforts. Inequalities in access and success are locally defined. They can’t be defined from a Euro-centric perspective, and they can also only be tackled through primarily work that is regional or national. The added value of international collaboration in this area needs to be articulated, it can’t be assumed. But at the same time, nor should the default assumption be that such a network or collaboration is less required where equitable access and success is concerned than in other parts of higher education. This assumption encapsulates the very problem at hand, ie the lack of willingness to recognise the extent of these inequalities and make the changes necessary to start to address them.

    The present challenges to higher education presented by the global shift to the right brings into sharp focus the consequences of a failure to deal with these inequalities. Universities and left leaning governments are unable to frame higher education as open and available to all with the potential to enter. The accusations of elitism and the threats to academic freedom etc then become an easier sell to electorates for whom higher education has never mattered, or those in their family/community. It is more important than ever then that something like WAHEN exists. It is essential that we develop the tools that give higher education systems across the world to become more equitable and to resist populist narratives, and that we do this now.

    Professor Graeme Atherton is Director of the World Access to Higher Education Network (WAHEN) and Vice Principal, Ruskin College, Oxford.

    A hybrid conference Access and Geopolitics: Next Steps in Tackling the Equity Crisis in Global Higher Education, was held on 3 June 2025 at the Department of Education in Oxford, jointly organised by WAHEN, The Centre for Skills, Knowledge and Organisational Performance (SKOPE) and the Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE). There were almost 40 presentations on: the politics – and geopolitics – of widening participation; the challenge of financing access; private provision and higher education as a public good; populism and the equity ‘backlash’; and, the challenge of generating meaningful participation data. Speakers included: John Blake, Director for Fair Access and Participation at the Office for Students, England;  Dr Jamil Salmi, global tertiary education expert; Professor Shamit Saggar, Executive Director of Australian Centre for Student Equity and Success; Professor Rachel Brooks, Professor of Higher Education, Oxford and President of the British Sociological Association; Professor Johanna Waters, Professor of Human Geography, UCL; Dr James Robson, Director of SKOPE and Associate Professor of Tertiary Education Systems, Oxford; Graeme Atherton, Director of the World Access to Higher Education Network (WAHEN) and Vice Principal, Ruskin College, Oxford; and Danielle Watkis, DPhil student, Department of Education, Oxford. A full record of the event will soon be available on the CGHE website.

    Author: SRHE News Blog

    An international learned society, concerned with supporting research and researchers into Higher Education

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  • Fun with Participation Rate Data

    Fun with Participation Rate Data

    Just a quick one today, mostly charts.

    Back in the fall, StatsCan released a mess of data from the Labour Force Survey looking at education participation rates—that is, the percentage of any given age cohort that is attending education—over the past 25 years. So, let’s go see what it says.

    Figure 1 shows total education participation rates, across all levels of education, from age 15 to 29, for selected years over the past quarter century. At the two ends of the graph, the numbers look pretty similar. At age 15, we’ve always had 95%+ of our population enrolled in school (almost exclusively secondary education, and from age 26 and above, we’ve always been in the low-tweens or high single digits. The falling-off in participation is fairly steady: for every age-year above 17, about 10% of the population exits education up until the age of 26. The big increase in education enrolments that we’ve seen over the past couple of decades has really occurred in the 18-24 range, where participation rates (almost exclusively in universities, as we shall see) have increased enormously.

    Figure 1: Participation rates in Education (all institutions) by Age, Canada, select years 1999-00 to 2023-24

    Figure 2 shows current participation rates by age and type of postsecondary institution. People sometimes have the impression that colleges cater to an “older” clientele, but in fact, at any given age under 30, Canadians are much more likely to be enrolled in universities than in colleges. Colleges have a very high base in the teens because of the way the CEGEP system works in Quebec (I’ll come back to regional diversity in a minute), and it is certainly true that there is a very wide gap in favour of universities among Canadians in their mid-20s. But while the part rate gap narrows substantially at about age 25, it is never the case that the college participation rate surpasses the university one.

    Figure 2: Participation Rates by Age and Institution Type, Canada, 2023-24

    Figure 3 shows college participation rates by age over time. What you should take from this is that there has been a slight decline in college participation rates over time in the 19-23 age range, but beyond that not much has changed.

    Figure 3: College Participation Rates by Age, Selected Years, 1999-2000 to 2023-24

    Figure 4 uses the same lens as figure 3 only for universities. And it’s about as different as it can be. In 1999, fewer than one in ten Canadians aged 18 was in university: now it is three in ten. In 1999, only one in four 21 year-olds was in university, now it is four-in-ten. These aren’t purely the effects of increased demand; the elimination of grade 13 in Ontario had a lot to do with the changes for 18-year-olds; Alberta and British Columbia converting a number of their institutions from colleges to universities in the late 00s probably juices these numbers a bit, too. But on the whole, what we’ve seen is a significant increase in the rate at which young people are choosing to attend universities between the ages of 18 and 24. However, beyond those ages the growth is less pronounced. There was certainly growth in older student participation rates between 1999-00 and 20011-12, but since then none at all.

    Figure 4: University Participation Rates by Age, Selected Years, 1999-2000 to 2023-24

    So much for the national numbers: what’s going on at the provincial level? Well, because this is the Labour Force Survey, which unlike administrative data has sample size issues, we can’t quite get the same level of granularity of information. We can’t look at individual ages, but we can see age-ranges, in this case ages 20-24. In figures 5 and 6 (I broke them up so they are a bit easier to read), I show how each province’s university and college participation rates in 2000 vs. 2023.

    Figure 5: University Participation Rates for 20-24 Year-olds, Four Largest Provinces, 2000-01 vs. 2023-24

    Figure 6: University Participation Rates for 20-24 Year-olds, Six Remaining Provinces, 2000-01 vs. 2023-24

    Some key facts emerge from these two graphs:

    • The highest participation rates in the country are in Ontario, Quebec, and British Columbia.
    • In all provinces, the participation rate in universities is higher than it is for colleges, ranging from 2.5x in Quebec for over 4x in Saskatchewan.
    • Over the past quarter century, overall postsecondary participation rates and university participation rates have gone up in all provinces; Alberta and British Columbia alone have seen a decline in college participation rates, due to the aforementioned decision to convert certain colleges to university status in the 00s.
    • Growth in participation rates since 2000 has been universal but has been more significant in the country’s four largest provinces, where the average gain has been nine percentage points, and the country’s six smaller provinces, where the gain has been just under five percent.
    • Over twenty-five years, British Columbia has gone from ninth to second in the country in terms of university participation rates, while Nova Scotia has gone second to ninth.
    • New Brunswick has consistently been in last place for overall participation rates for the entire century.

    Just think: three minutes ago, you probably knew very little about participation rates in Canada by age and geography, now you know almost everything there is to know about participation rates in Canada by age and geography. Is this a great way to start your day or what?

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