This blog was kindly authored by Dr Emily Magrath, Director of Programme Development and Impact at IntoUniversity.
After fielding a flurry of questions from the classroom of 7 and 8 year olds – ‘what is my favourite colour?’, ‘Is this a university?’, ‘Do staff sleep in the building at night?’ – we settle together to explore the question: ‘what is a career?’ Today, this looks like high-vis jackets and hard hats for civil engineers to plan the needed infrastructure for a town; paleontologists codifying discovered fossils; and foley artists creating a soundscape for a forest epic. The students identify the skills they have used and tell me their many ambitions – the room includes possible footballers, doctors, engineers, nurses, lawyers, fashion designers, a taxi driver (like his dad) and a mathematician. This is a starting point, one which gives them years to think about their future possibilities and, more importantly, to build the knowledge and skills to make them future realities.
The potential for talent is everywhere
Geography has become a primary driver of inequality in the UK. Despite initiatives to widen access to university and despite increases in higher education progression rates, areas remain where progression rates and education outcomes remain persistently and stubbornly low. As recently articulated by Alan Francis OBE, Chair of the Social Mobility Commission, this continues to ‘waste talent and limit potential’ across the UK.
Mounting evidence is stark in emphasising the particular challenges of these areas, so-called cold spots, which are, in reality, places systematically starved of opportunity with intersecting barriers: geographical isolation; lack of or expensive transport options; lack of teacher quality; and a lack of graduate jobs. Young people from disadvantaged backgrounds who want to pursue higher education in these locations face hard choices, often commuting to university, struggling to pursue their chosen career in their local area or having to leave it behind. It is not a surprise then to see the UPP Foundation’s inquiry on Higher Education attitudes in Doncaster this year determining that for many young people university is seen as a “bad bet.”
In the face of these challenging intersections, starting widening participation work at 16 or 17, (or even 14 or 15) is too late. Interventions beginning at these points ultimately have failed many students in these regions – approaches must be anchored from primary age.
Why start at primary age?
It is clear that students from disadvantaged backgrounds face additional educational barriers. Their starting point often shows significant gaps to more advantaged peers, and without intervention, these can become entrenched well before secondary school. In 2023, the Education Policy Institute estimated the disadvantage learning gap at age 5 to be 4.6 months. This was wider than it had been prior to the pandemic. Furthermore, in some areas of deprivation, 50% of young people begin school with delayed language development.
There are no easy solutions, but earlier intervention is essential for building learning progress, fostering positive educational experiences and supporting students to acquire necessary qualifications for progression to higher education.
I would like to study accounting. I want to be rich and I love maths. I would like to study at Oxford university because it’s one of the best universities
Year 6 student, IntoUniversity
Alongside academic development, the implicit and explicit messaging young people hear is key. Young people are full of aspirations, but they need to hear not only how to connect these to actual pathways, but also that they can achieve them. Otherwise, their beliefs can become fixed – often in early teenage years – that university is not for ‘people like them’.
An antidote to this is to start conversations early and normalise university spaces. I have seen powerful examples of how sustained work can make a difference: a widening participation officer telling 10 and 11 year olds that the local university was “their university,’ they were welcome to ask questions and find out what happened there; seeing toddlers at ease climbing over benches in a lecture theatre at a family learning day; and the 18 year old who told me they just assumed they would go to the city’s university because ‘you took me there every year since I was little’.
Building place based ecosystems
Just after the pandemic, I met a father photographing his son in a graduation gown and mortar board at one of our primary graduation trips to a university – the culmination of a programme where students have imagined a university future for themselves. He proudly showed me photos of his older children in previous years (fortuitously aged so that none had missed out during the pandemic). This engagement with the university was a touchstone for each child and for the family.
The children go through the programme in Year 4, 5 and 6, and so they know it’s coming, and their siblings know it’s coming. They have an aspiration, and they know about what’s next. It’s a clear message for our school. Education is a journey, it continues in Secondary school and beyond and opens up opportunities. Because it is built into our curriculum, university feels like an entitlement for them. It is available for them.
Primary School Headteacher about IntoUniversity primary school programme
The recent Ruskin Institute for Social Equality’s report on coastal cold spots this year similarly emphasised geography’s critical role in higher education access. It showed that, accounting for similar backgrounds, young people can experience as much as a fivefold difference in their likelihood of progressing to HE based on where they live. The report argued that a move away from ‘collaborative, place-based, cross-sector approach’ to one emphasising individual universities’ targets has not served these areas well.
Consistent, long-term, sustained work from an early age is the only path forward when countering the entrenched challenges of cold spot areas. These are not challenges that can be solved by one intervention, one school, one charity or one university. Young people in these places need ecosystems of sustained support and opportunities available from an early age. That is how we can shift the dial on persistently low progression rates and ensure equitable access to higher education for all young people, regardless of where they live.
An initial response to yesterday’s Curriculum and Assessment Review from HEPI Director, Nick Hillman, is available on the HEPI website here.
Today’s blog was kindly authored by Martin Webster, Director of the National Education Opportunities Network (NEON). It is the fifth blog in HEPI’s series responding to the Post-16 Education and Skills white paper. You can find the other blogs here, here, here, and here.
Since the Labour Party formed the Government in 2024, things have undoubtedly changed for higher education and specifically widening access. At the Labour Party Conference in 2024, there was a feeling of optimism with the Minister for Skills, the Rt Hon Baroness Smith, describing widening access as the Government’s number one priority for higher education. We now have a Government that not only believes in the importance of higher education but is putting a new emphasis on both expanding access and improving the outcomes of disadvantaged students.
This ambition for widening access has now been crystallised in the recently published Post 16 Education and Skills white paper, which lays out the key steps that will be taken, the main ones being:
increasing the maintenance loan in line with forecast inflation each academic year.
introducing the Lifelong Learning Entitlement to include modular funding, for both full and part-time study.
reintroducing targeted, means-tested maintenance grants by the end of this Parliament.
reforming the regulation of access and participation plans to allow an approach where the Office for Students (OfS) can be more risk-based with an expectation that providers will continue to strengthen evaluation.
bringing together a Task and Finish group of sector experts, charities, OfS, and UCAS to consider how the system can best widen access.
demonstrating a commitment to widening access to postgraduate level studies.
All of the above demonstrate the importance that the current Government are placing upon widening access and lays out their expectations for change, a change to a more equitable higher education system. Whilst there may be some who critique some of the steps outlined, and may feel they do not go far enough, if the higher education sector can make these changes, we will end up producing better outcomes for disadvantaged learners.
But…
Westminster, we have a problem
It is no secret that the higher education sector is under pressure with providers trying their hardest to ensure they can maximise efficiency from limited resources. Nowhere has this been felt more keenly than within widening access. Over the past couple of years, the National Education Opportunities Network (NEON) started to hear anecdotes from our members about ‘efficiency measures’ that were being taken. These ranged from recruitment freezes on their teams and reductions in dedicated budgets to staffing reorganisations where certain roles, and in some cases whole widening access teams, were being put at risk of redundancy. In the spring of 2025, we therefore surveyed NEON members in order to try to ascertain a more accurate picture of the extent of the problem.
Thirty six of our members responded, and whilst the results may not be statistically significant, they indicate a concerning trend. For the 2025/26 financial year 58% reported a reduced level of financial resources for widening access, and 58% reported a reduced level of staffing resources.
Even within NEON we have seen some of our members unable to renew their membership with us, not because they do not feel their membership is not giving them and their colleagues benefits, but because they have so little available budget that they cannot afford, or are not allowed to invest in, the relatively modest subscription amount.
These findings should concern both the Government and policymakers. Despite being the number one priority for higher education, widening access budgets are being diverted within institutions, sometimes due not to a lack of commitment, but due to necessity. Staffing is being cut and, in one case that we know of, this has included the removal of dedicated evaluation colleagues, an area that the Government are placing even greater emphasis upon. Higher education providers have made a range of commitments in their Access and Participation Plans, and those commitments are at serious risk of not being met.
As one anonymous NEON lead member stated in their response to our survey:
It is increasingly difficult to prioritise widening access activity over such things as recruitment activity when the University’s most pressing need is to balance the books. The resource for widening access will be reduced and we will simply be unable to maintain the level of current activity. This will of course have a disproportionately negative impact on under-represented and hard to reach groups.
Another NEON lead member commented:
The reduction in [institutional] funding means we’re only able to reach a fraction of the disadvantaged learners who would benefit from our outreach offer – we’re currently working with approximately 40% of the schools in our region due to capacity. Of the remaining 60%, over 50% of those have average or higher than average numbers of PP learners.
The Task and Finish group will undoubtedly come up with an excellent set of recommendations, but the reality is that, on the ground, there are even fewer colleagues to deliver the important work that is taking place across England to ensure it is effectively evaluated. Steps need to be taken now to ensure widening access is protected and that providers can support the Government’s ambitions.
So what should the Task and Finish group consider?
ensuring that funding for widening access is ring-fenced and subject to further accountability measures;
establishing an expectation that all providers work with learners across all age groups, from primary school level up to and including mature learners;
considering how the evaluation of access and success initiatives can be strengthened for all providers, including small specialist providers, through a regional approach delivered by collaborative partnerships;
considering how widening access can be established as a strategic driver within schools and colleges; and
developing greater, direct communication between the Department for Education and higher education providers to ensure the Government’s strategic priorities are being met and greater understanding can be developed.
Widening access is at a crossroads. We can stand by and watch progress continue to wane away, or we can put measures in place to continue to build upon the hard of work of colleagues across the higher education sector and improve equitable access and success.
This blog was kindly authored by Professor Abigail Marks, Associate Dean of Research, Newcastle University Business School, and member of the Chartered Association of Business Schools Policy Committee.
From January 2026, public funding for the vast majority of Level 7 apprenticeships in England will be withdrawn for learners aged 22 and over. Funding will remain for those aged 16 to 21, alongside narrow exceptions for care leavers and learners with Education, Health and Care Plans. Current apprentices will continue to be supported. Ministers present the change as a rebalancing of spending toward younger learners and lower levels, where they argue returns are higher and budgets are more constrained.
At first sight, this decision looks like a simple trade-off: concentrating scarce resources on school-leavers and early career entrants, while expecting employers to bear the costs of advanced, Master’s-level training. For business schools, however, particularly those that have invested in Level 7 pathways, such as the Senior Leader Apprenticeship, the implications for widening participation are likely to be profound. The Senior Leader Apprenticeship is often integrated with an MBA or Executive MBA. Alongside this, many institutions align Level 7 apprenticeships with specialist MSc degrees, often with embedded professional accreditation. In essence, Level 7 apprenticeships in business schools provide structured, work-based routes into advanced leadership and management education, usually culminating in an MBA or MSc.
Why Level 7 apprenticeships matter for widening participation
Since the apprenticeship levy was introduced in 2017, Level 7 programmes have provided business schools with a powerful route to widen participation, particularly among groups that have been historically excluded from postgraduate education. According to the Department for Education’s 2023 Apprenticeship Evaluation, almost half (48 per cent) of Level 7 apprentices are first-generation students, with neither parent having attended university, and around one in five live in the most deprived areas of the country. Analysis by the Chartered Association of Business Schools shows that in 2022/23, a quarter of business and management Level 7 apprentices held no prior degree qualification before starting, with a small minority having no formal qualifications at all. The age profile further underscores the differences between these learners and conventional Master’s students, with 88 per cent of business and management Level 7 apprentices aged over 31, indicating that these programmes primarily serve mature learners and career changers rather than recent graduates.
This picture contrasts sharply with the traditional MBA market, both in the UK and internationally. Research on MBA demographics from the Association of MBAs in 2023 highlights that students are typically in their late twenties to early thirties, often already possessing a strong undergraduate degree and professional background, and participation is skewed toward those with access to significant financial resources. An Office for Students analysis of Higher Education Statistics Agency data shows that conventional graduate business and management entrants are disproportionately from higher socio-economic backgrounds, with lower representation from disadvantaged areas compared to undergraduate cohorts. In practice, this means that the subsidised Level 7 apprenticeship route has been one of the few mechanisms allowing those without financial capital, prior academic credentials, or family background in higher education to gain access to advanced management education in business schools.
The economic and societal cost of defunding Level 7
Employer behaviour is likely to shift in predictable ways once the subsidy is removed. Some large levy-paying firms may continue to sponsor a limited number of Level 7 places, but many smaller employers, as well as organisations in the public and third sectors, will struggle to justify the full cost. Data from the Chartered Management Institute suggests that 60 per cent of Level 7 management apprentices are in public services such as the NHS, social care, and local government. Less than 10 per cent are in FTSE 350 companies. Consequently, there is a risk of further narrowing provision to those already in advantaged positions.
The progression ladder is also threatened. Level 7 apprenticeships have been a natural progression for people who began at Levels 3 to 5, building their qualifications as they moved into supervisory roles. Closing the door at this point reinforces the glass ceiling for those seeking to rise from technical or frontline work into leadership. With data from the Department for Education reported in FE Week reporting that 89 per cent of Level 7 apprentices are currently aged over 22, the vast majority of those who have benefited from these opportunities will be excluded from January 2026.
The consequences extend beyond widening participation metrics. Leadership and management skills are consistently linked to firm-level productivity and the diffusion of innovation. Studies such as the World Management Survey have shown that effective management correlates strongly with higher productivity and competitiveness. Restricting adult access to advanced apprenticeships risks slowing the spread of these practices across the economy. For business schools, it reduces their ability to act as engines of regional development and knowledge transfer. At a national level, the UK’s prospects for growth depend not only on new entrants but also on upskilling the existing workforce. Apprenticeships have been one of the few proven ways of achieving this. If opportunities narrow, it is possible that firms may struggle to adopt new technologies, deliver green transitions, or address regional productivity gaps. The effects may also be felt in export performance, scale-up survival, and international competitiveness.
The removal of public funding for adults over 21 threatens to dismantle a pathway that has enabled business schools to transform the profile of their postgraduate cohorts. Where once mature students, first-generation graduates, and learners from deprived regions could progress into Master’s-level management education, the policy shift risks returning provision in England to a preserve of the already advantaged. In contrast, our European counterparts, where degree and higher-level apprenticeships retain open access for adults, will continue to allow business schools to deliver on widening participation commitments across the life course.
Lessons from Europe
Germany’s dual study system has expanded, with degree-apprenticeship style programmes now making up almost five per cent of higher education enrolments. Data from the OECD shows that the proportion of young adults aged 25–34 with a tertiary degree in Germany has risen to around 40 per cent, driven partly by these integrated vocational–academic routes. Switzerland shows even more dramatic results: between 2000 and 2021, the share of 25–34-year-olds with a tertiary qualification rose from 26 to 52 per cent. Crucially, Switzerland also leads Europe in lifelong learning, with around 67.5 per cent of adults aged 25–65 participating in continuing education and training. For Swiss business schools, this creates a mature, diverse learner base and allows firms to continually upgrade leadership and management capacity. Both countries demonstrate how keeping lifelong pathways open is central to sustaining firm-level productivity, innovation, and international competitiveness.
Conclusion
The decision to defund most adult participation at Level 7 thus represents more than a budgetary tweak. It narrows opportunities in advanced management education and risks reversing progress in widening participation. Unless English business schools, employers, and policymakers act swiftly to design new pathways, the effect will be a return to elite provision. More worryingly, England risks falling behind international counterparts in building the leadership capacity that underpins innovation, productivity, and growth.
One of the great promises of higher education is that it acts as a social ladder—one that allows students from low-income backgrounds to climb up and reach a higher social and economic status. No one, I think, ever believed it was a guaranteed social leveler, or that children from wealthier families didn’t have an easier time succeeding after college because of their own, and their family’s, social and cultural capital. But most people, in America at least, believed that on the whole it played a positive role in increasing social mobility.
Over the past couple of decades, though, particularly as student debt has increased, people have begun to wonder if this story about social mobility through college is actually true. That’s a hard question to answer definitively. Data sets that track both student origins and outcomes are few and far between, and it’s also difficult to work out what social mobility used to look like in a quantifiable sense.
However, this summer economist Sarah Quincy of Vanderbilt University and Zach Bleemer of Princeton University released a paper called Changes in the College Mobility Pipeline Since 1900. This paper overcame some of those data limitations and took a long, more than century-long, look at the relationship between social mobility and college attendance.
What they found was sobering. Not only is higher education no longer helping poor students catch up with wealthier ones, but in fact the sector’s role as a social elevator actually stopped working almost 80 years ago. This seemed like a perfect story for the podcast, and so we invited Zach Bleemer—who you may remember from an episode on race-conscious admissions about two years ago—to join us to discuss it.
This discussion ranges from the methodological to the expositional. Where does the data come from? What does the data really mean? And are there alternative explanations for the paper’s surprising findings? But enough from me—let’s hear from Zach.
The World of Higher Education Podcast Episode 4.4 | The Widening Gap: Income, College, and Opportunity with Zachary Bleemer
Transcript
Alex Usher (AU): Zach, you wrote, with Sarah Quincy, a paper called Changes in the College Mobility Pipeline Since 1900, which looks a long way back. And you argue that the relative premium received by lower-income Americans from higher education has fallen by half since 1960. Take us through what you found—give us the 90-second elevator pitch.
Zachary Bleemer (ZB): Consider kids who were born in 1900 and were choosing whether or not to go to college in the late 1910s and early 1920s. What we were interested in was that choice, and in particular, following people for the next 20 years after they made it. Some people graduated high school but didn’t go to college, while others graduated high school and chose to go.
We wanted to compare the differences in early 1930s wages between those two groups—both for kids from lower-income backgrounds and kids from upper-income backgrounds. Now, you might be surprised to learn that there were lower-income kids going to college in the U.S. in the early 1920s, but there were. About 5 to 10% of people from the bottom parental income tercile even then were attending college.
What we found, when we linked together historical U.S. census records and followed kids forward, is that whether you were low-income or high-income, if you went to college your wages went up a lot. And the degree to which your wages went up was independent of whether you were low-income or high-income—everyone benefited similarly from going to college.
If you compare that to kids born in the 1980s, who were choosing to go to college in the late 1990s and early 2000s, you see a very different story. Everyone still gains from going to college, but kids from rich backgrounds gain a lot more—more than twice as much as kids from poor backgrounds. And that’s despite the fact they’re making the same choice. They’re going to different universities and studying different things, but when it comes down to the 18-year-old making a decision, those from poor families are just getting less from American higher education now than they did in the past—or compared to kids from rich backgrounds.
AU: I want to make sure I understand this, because it’s a crucial part of your argument. When you talk about relative premiums—premium compared to what, and relative compared to what?
ZB: What we always have in mind is the value of college for rich kids, and then asking: how much of that value do poor kids get too? In the early 20th century, and as late as the 1960s, those values were very similar. Lower-income kids were getting somewhere between 80 and 100% of the value of going to college as higher-income kids.
AU: And by “value,” you mean…
ZB: That just means how much your wages go up. So, the wage bump for lower-income kids was very similar to that of higher-income kids. Today, though, it’s more like half—or even a little less than half—of the economic value of college-going that lower-income kids receive compared to higher-income kids.
AU: So in effect, higher education is acting as an engine of greater inequality. That’s what you’re saying?
ZB: I guess it’s worth saying that lower-income kids who go to college are still getting ahead. But it’s not as much of a pipeline as it used to be. Higher education used to accelerate lower-income kids—not to the same level of income as their higher-income peers; they were never going to catch up—but at least they got the same bump, just from a lower starting point.
AU: So the gap widens now. But how do you make a claim like that over 120 years? I mean, I sometimes have a hard time getting data for just one year. How do you track college premiums across a period of 120 years? How sound is the empirical basis for this? You mentioned something about linking data to census records, which obviously go back quite a way. So tell us how you constructed the data for this.
ZB: The first-order answer is that I called up and worked with an economic historian who had much more experience with historical data than I did. Like you said, it’s hard in any period to get high-quality data that links students in high school—especially with information on their parental income—to wage outcomes 10 or 15 years later.
What we did was scan around for any academic or government group over the last 120 years that had conducted a retrospective or longitudinal survey—where you either follow kids for a while, or you find a bunch of 30-year-olds and ask them questions about their childhood. We combined all of these surveys into a comprehensive database.
In the early 20th century, that meant linking kids in the 1920 census, when they were still living with their parents, to the same kids in the 1940 census, when they were in their early thirties and working in the labor market. That link has been well established by economic historians and used in a large series of papers.
By the middle of the 20th century, sociologists were conducting very large-scale longitudinal surveys. The biggest of these was called Project Talent, put together by the American Institutes for Research in 1961. They randomly sampled over 400,000 American high school students, collected a ton of information, and then re-surveyed them between 1971 and 1974 to ask what had happened in their lives.
In more recent years, there’s been a large set of governmental surveys, primarily conducted by the Departments of Labor and Education. Some of these will be familiar to education researchers—like the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). Others are less well known, but there are lots of them. All we did was combine them all together.
AU: I noticed in one of the appendices you’ve got about nine or ten big surveys from across this period. I guess one methodological limitation is that they don’t all follow respondents for the same amount of time, and you’d also be limited to questions where the surveys provided relatively similar answers. You never get your dream data, but those would be the big limitations—you’ve got to look for the similarities, and that restricts you.
ZB: I’d add another restriction. You’re right that, as we filtered down which datasets we could use, the key variables we needed were: parental income when the student was in high school, level of education by age 30, and how much money they made at some point between ages 30 and 35. All of our surveys had those variables.
We also looked for information about what college they attended and what their college major was. Ideally, the surveys also included some kind of high school test—like the SAT or an IQ test—so we could see what kinds of students from what academic backgrounds were going to college.
But there was another key limitation. In most of the data before 1950, it was really difficult to get a direct measure of parental income. Instead, we usually had proxies like parental occupation, industry, or level of education—variables that are highly predictive of income, but not income itself.
So, a lot of the work of the paper was lining up these measures of varying quality from different surveys to make sure the results we report aren’t just noise from mismeasurement, but instead reflect real changes on the ground in American higher education.
AU: So you ran the data and noticed there was a sharp inflection point—or maybe not sharp, but certainly things started to get worse after 1960. When you first saw that, what were your hypotheses? At that point, you’ve got to start looking at whatever variables you can to explain it. What did you think the answer was, and what did you think the confounding variables might be?
ZB: My expectation was that two things would primarily explain the change. My background is in studying undergraduate admissions, so I thought the first explanation would be rising meritocracy in admissions. That might have made it harder for lower-income and lower-testing kids to get access to high-quality education. I also thought changes in affirmative action and in access to selective schools for kids from different backgrounds, along with rising tuition that made it harder for lower-income kids to afford those schools, could have played a big role. That was one possible story.
The second possible story is that it had nothing to do with the causal effect of college at all. Instead, maybe the poor kids who go to college today aren’t as academically strong as they were in the past. Perhaps in the past only the brilliant poor kids went to college, while all the rich kids went regardless of ability. So it could have looked like poor kids were getting a big benefit from college, when in fact those few who made it would have done well anyway.
It turns out neither of these explanations is the primary driver of rising regressivity. On the test score story, it’s always been the case that rich kids who go to college have relatively higher test scores than rich kids who just graduate high school—and that poor kids who go to college have relatively lower scores compared to their peers. That hasn’t changed since 1960.
And on the access story, it’s always been the case that rich kids dominate the schools we now think of as “good”—the fancy private universities and the flagship public universities. But over the last 50 years, poor kids have actually slightly increased their representation at those schools, not the other way around. Rising meritocracy hasn’t pushed poor kids out. If anything, the variety of admissions programs universities have implemented to boost enrollment among racial minority and lower-income students has relatively increased their numbers compared to 1950 or 1960.
AU: You were just making the case that this isn’t about compositional change in where poor students went. I heard you say there are more lower-income students at Harvard, Yale, and MIT than there were 50 or 60 years ago—and I have no doubt that’s true. But as a percentage of all poor students, surely that’s not true. The vast wave of lower-income students, often from minority backgrounds, are ending up in community colleges or non-flagship publics. Surely that has to be part of the story.
ZB: Yes. It turns out there are three primary trends that explain this rising collegiate regressivity, and you just hit on two of them.
The first is exactly your point: lower-income students primarily go to satellite public universities, basically all the non–R1 publics. Higher-income students, if they attend a public university, tend to go to the flagship, research-oriented universities.
I’ll skip talking about Harvard, Yale, and Princeton—almost no one goes to those schools, and they’re irrelevant to the overall landscape.
AU: Because they’re such a small piece of the pie, right?
ZB: Exactly. Fewer than 1% of students attend an Ivy Plus school. They don’t matter when we’re talking about American higher education as a whole. The flagships, though, matter a lot. About a third of all four-year college students go to a research-oriented flagship public university.
What’s happened since 1960 isn’t that poor kids lost access to those schools—it’s that they never really had access in the first place. Meanwhile, those schools have gotten much better over time. If you look at simple measures of university quality—student-to-faculty ratios, instructional expenditures per student, graduation rates—or even our own wage “value-added” measures (the degree to which each university boosts students’ wages), the gap between flagship and non-flagship publics has widened dramatically since the 1960s.
The flagships have pulled away. They’ve gotten more money—both from higher tuition and from huge federal subsidies, in part for research—and they’ve used that money to provide much more value to the students who attend. And those students tend to be higher income.
The second trend is what you mentioned: increasing diversion to community colleges. Interestingly, before 1980, community colleges were already well established in the U.S. and enrolled only slightly more lower-income than higher-income students. They actually enrolled a lot of high-income students, and the gap was small. Since the 1980s, though, that gap has grown substantially. There’s been a huge diversion of lower-income students toward community colleges—and those schools just provide lower-value education to the students who enroll.
AU: At some level this is a sorting story, right? You see that in discussions about American economic geography—that people sort themselves into certain areas. Is that what you’re saying is happening here too?
ZB: It’s not about sorting inside the four-year sector. It’s about sorting between the two- and four-year sectors. And on top of that, we think there’s fundamentally a story about American state governments choosing to invest much more heavily in their flagship publics—turning them into gem schools, amazing schools—while leaving the other universities in their states behind. Those flagships enroll far more higher-income than lower-income students.
AU: When I was reading this paper, one thing that struck me was how hard it is to read about American higher education without also reading something about race. The last time you were on, we were talking about SCOTUS and the Fair Harvard decision. But as far as I can tell, this paper doesn’t talk about race. I assume that goes back to our earlier discussion about data limitations—that race just wasn’t captured at some point. What’s the story there?
ZB: No—we observe race throughout this entire period. In fact, you could basically rewrite our study and ask: how has the relative value of college for white kids compared to Black kids changed over the last hundred years? I suspect you’d see very similar patterns.
The datasets we’re working with observe both parental income and race, but they aren’t large enough to separately analyze, for example, just white students and then compare lower- and higher-income groups over time. There’s a sense in which you could tell our story in terms of race, or you could tell it in terms of class—and both would be right. At a first-order level, both are happening. And within racial groups, the evidence we’ve been able to collect suggests that class gaps have substantially widened over time.
Similarly, we show some evidence that even within the lower-income group there are substantial gaps between white and Black students. So in part, I saw this as an interesting complement to the work I’d already done on race. It points out that while race is part of the story, you can also reframe the entire conversation in terms of America’s higher education system leaving lower-income students behind—irrespective of race.
AU: Right, because it strikes me that 1960 is only six years after Brown v. Board of Education. By the early to mid-1960s, you’d start to see a bigger push of Black students entering higher education, becoming a larger share of the lower-income sector. And a few years later, the same thing with Latino students.
Suddenly lower-income students are not only starting from further behind, but also increasingly made up of groups who, irrespective of education, face discrimination in the labor market. Wouldn’t that pull things down? Wouldn’t that be part of the explanation?
ZB: Keep in mind that when we measure wage premiums, we’re always comparing people who went to college with people who only finished high school. So there are Black students on both sides of that comparison, across both lower- and higher-income groups.
That said, I think your point is well taken. We don’t do any work in the paper specifically looking at changes in the racial composition of students by parental income over this period. One thing we do show is that the test scores of lower-income students who go to college aren’t falling over time. But you’re probably right: while racial discrimination affects both college-goers and non-college-goers, it’s entirely plausible that part of what we’re picking up here is the changing racial dynamics in college-going.
AU: What’s the range of policy solutions we can imagine here, other than, you know, taking money away from rich publics and giving it to community colleges? That’s the obvious one to me, but maybe there are others.
ZB: And not just community colleges—satellite publics as well. I’ve spent the last five years of my life thinking about how to get more disadvantaged students into highly selective universities, and what happens when they get there. The main takeaway from that research is that it’s really hard to get lower-income students into highly selective universities. It’s also expensive, because of the financial aid required.
But once they get into those schools, they tend not only to benefit in terms of long-run wage outcomes, they actually derive disproportionate value. Highly selective schools are more valuable for lower-income kids than for the higher-income kids who typically enroll there.
What I’ve learned from this project, though, is that the closing of higher education’s mobility pipeline isn’t fundamentally about access. It’s about investments—by state governments, by students, by donors, by all the people and organizations that fund higher education. Over time, that funding has become increasingly centralized in schools that enroll a lot of wealthy students.
So, the point you brought up—redirecting funds—is important. In California they call it “rebenching”: siphoning money away from high-funded schools and pushing it toward low-funded schools. There’s very little academic research on what happens when you do that, but our study suggests that this century-long trend of unequal investment has disadvantaged low-income students. Potentially moving in the other direction could make a real difference for them.
AU: Zach, thanks so much for being with us today.
ZB: My pleasure.
AU: It just remains for me to thank our excellent producers, Tiffany MacLennan and Sam Pufek, and you, our listeners and readers, for joining us. If you have any questions or comments about today’s podcast, or suggestions for future editions, don’t hesitate to get in touch at [email protected].
Join us next week when our guest will be Dmitry Dubrovsky, a research scholar and lecturer at Charles University in Prague. He’ll be talking to us about the slow-motion collapse of Russian higher education under Vladimir Putin. Bye for now.
*This podcast transcript was generated using an AI transcription service with limited editing. Please forgive any errors made through this service.Please note, the views and opinions expressed in each episode are those of the individual contributors, and do not necessarily reflect those of the podcast host and team, or our sponsors.
The promise of higher education as a pathway to opportunity has never been more important, or more precarious.
While overall university participation has reached record levels, this headline figure masks a troubling reality: where you’re born in England increasingly determines whether you’ll ever set foot on a university campus. And even once students do get their foot in the door, they might not have the support system in place – financially as well as academically – to succeed and thrive.
It is in this context that the UPP Foundation has today published the concluding paper in its widening participation inquiry. Mission Critical: six recommendations for the widening participation agenda is our attempt to fill in the gaps that the government left in its opportunity mission around widening participation, and to provide targets and mechanisms by which it can achieve success in this area.
Doing “getting in” right
For years, the biggest single aim of widening participation work has been “getting in” – ensuring that young people from disadvantaged backgrounds are supported to attend university, most often by undertaking a bachelor’s degree as a residential student. The aim of growing participation has come under political scrutiny in recent years and is no longer an accepted mission across the political spectrum.
But as our inquiry’s earlier papers highlight, there remains significant gaps in participation. Although more young people are going to university than ever before, there are stark disparities in the rates at which young people from different parts of the country attend university. If we believe, as I do, that talent is not simply concentrated in London and the South East, then by implication if opportunity is spread out more evenly, participation in higher education needs to grow.
That’s why our first recommendation is a “triple lock” widening participation target. This includes a gap of no more than ten percentage points between the highest and lowest regional HE participation rates; plus a 50 per cent floor for progression to HE at 18-19 across all regions; and a target for 70 per cent of the whole English population to have studied at level 4 or above by the age of 25, as advocated by Universities UK. Meeting these targets will ensure that “getting in” really is for everyone.
Onwards and upwards
But this is not enough in isolation. The people we spoke to in Doncaster and Nottingham made it clear that “getting on” and “getting out” are equally important parts of the widening participation struggle – with the cost of learning a major barrier to full participation in university life.
With that in mind, we’re calling for the restoration of maintenance loans to 2021 real-terms levels by the end of the decade, as well as additional maintenance grants for those eligible for free school meals in the last six years.
We also want universities that are currently spending millions of pounds on bursaries and hardship funds to put that money towards outreach in the most challenging cold spots, as well as ensuring that the wider student experiences that undergrads cherish are available to all. That’s why it makes sense for a proportion of the proceeds from the proposed international student fee levy, if introduced, to be ring fenced to support an expanded access and participation plan regime, prioritising disadvantaged students from cold spot backgrounds.
Revitalisation
Finally, widening participation needs to address the short-term mindset that grips young people both before and during their time at university.
Young people are more mindful of their finances than ever before, with many opting out of university in favour of a job in places where graduate careers are scarce and those who do choose to attend keeping one eye on their present and future earnings even before they’ve graduated.
If we are to revitalise the widening participation agenda, we have to bring employability to the fore, both by reconfiguring the Office for Students’ B3 metric on positive student outcomes and by bringing employers into the design and outputs of university study. There are already fantastic examples of this working in practice across the sector, such as at London South Bank’s energy advice centre and Bristol University’s career- and community-oriented dental school. It’s time for the sector to pick up these ideas and run with them.
The young person in Doncaster with the same grades and aspirations as their counterpart in Surrey faces not just different odds of getting to university, but different expectations about what’s possible. When we fail to address these disparities, we’re not just perpetuating inequality, we’re actively weakening the economic foundations that the whole country depends on.
What our new report offers is a chance to refocus the widening participation agenda around a series of ambitious but achievable targets. Getting in, getting on and getting out are all crucial parts of the higher education cycle, especially for those who otherwise wouldn’t attend. If the government want to take their widening participation priorities seriously, all three aspects need to take their place in the sun.
Secondary schools, particularly those in regions with a high density of higher education providers, are inundated with offers of university outreach initiatives.
Meanwhile university widening participation and schools liaison teams, acting (in England) on the principles of their respective access and participation plans (APPs), channel their efforts towards regions, schools, and demographics currently underrepresented in their institution.
The result is a substantial duplication of effort and resources from institutions competing within the HE marketplace.
Variety pack
The typical set of university partnerships for many schools appears to be a local Russell Group university, a local post-92 university, and the designated Oxford and/or Cambridge link college for their region.
Encounters with local universities may be facilitated by a Uni Connect partnership, although a recent evaluation revealed inconsistencies in the extent to which partnerships offered a ‘joined up’ approach to locally targeted outreach. Local universities are undoubtedly convenient. Campus visits require minimal travel time and costs, and widening participation teams may have a strong knowledge of local issues and individual schools.
However, relying on the convenience of local institutions both reinforces the tendencies amongst applicants in many regions to stay close to home for university without considering other options, and risks perpetuating undermatch amongst when local universities do not provide a suitable academic match. For example, the Uni Connect East Anglia partnership, neaco, includes the University of Cambridge, Anglia Ruskin University, the University of East Anglia, and several others.
There exists a large gap between the ABB entry requirements for Engineering at UEA compared to the A*A*A asked for at Cambridge. Students with predicted grades within this gap have a substantial risk of undermatching if they narrow their options in line with the Uni Connect parameters.
Three at the point of use
The three-tiered university outreach provision, sometimes partially supported by Uni Connect, goes some way towards achieving Gatsby Benchmark 7:
encounters with further and higher education appropriate to the needs of each pupil
Yet it seems unlikely that three universities could represent the diverse spectrum of HE offerings across the country, nor truly provide a good match for every pupil.
There are two issues to address here: firstly, that locally-targeted outreach should not be solely conducted by local universities; and secondly, that universities must balance their widening participation and recruitment priorities to avoid duplication of resources and overwhelming target schools.
A university, admittedly with the resources to do so, can offer informed and meaningful regionally-targeted outreach despite not being located in the immediate vicinity of target schools. I am a long-standing proponent of the Oxbridge Link Area scheme, which provides schools with a point of contact at each university, and encourages WP practitioners to develop knowledge about and relationships with stakeholders in specific UK regions.
Most recently, I teamed up with the charity Aspire Liverpool for the latest iteration of the Magdalene College Liverpool Event – a day of super-curricular exploration for 700 Year 10 pupils led by academics and Student Ambassadors, held in Liverpool’s St George’s Hall.
From Cambridge to Merseyside
One of the comments I receive most from pupils when I visit schools in Merseyside and North Wales is that they are surprised, but pleased, that a representative from Cambridge showed up for them. In the case of the Liverpool event, my team arrived determined to show the pupils that a coachload of busy academics took the time to travel to Liverpool, because we think these pupils are worth investing time and resources in, and have the potential to apply to competitive universities should they choose to. With a recruitment hat on, I’m keen to continue to develop the institutional memory amongst our target schools of being the college and university who can be relied upon to deliver high-quality locally-targeted outreach provision.
Working with Aspire Liverpool helps us to target those schools which haven’t historically engaged with our outreach programmes, and helps to address the second issue I put forward, regarding the risk of duplication of outreach offerings from multiple universities. Attempting to collaborate with universities targeting similar groups of students can result in competition for recruitment. Whilst I have rarely delivered activities in partnership with, for example, the University of Liverpool or the University of Oxford, I liaise with their respective WP teams to develop an understanding of what activities students may be receiving from other providers, and to avoid clashes between the dates of our flagship events.
Universities are often more comfortable collaborating with third-sector organisations such as The Brilliant Club, if they can demonstrate quality and value, as promised by successful applicants to the recent Equality in Higher Education Fund. Such organisations can help to scale up activities which are challenging for a single university WP team to provide, such as the attainment-raising initiatives promised in many Access and Participation Plans.
So, where do we go from here?
How can students be presented with a sufficiently wide range of HE options to increase their likelihood of finding a suitable academic match, whilst avoiding the duplication of effort and resources by each individual HE provider? The UCAS Outreach Connection Service, launched to UCAS advisers in 2024, may go some way towards highlighting the range of opportunities available, and allowing teachers to point students in the right direction towards potentially suitable universities and courses.
And potential reforms to Uni Connect may establish a more defined strategic purpose for the partnerships, and perhaps space in the calendar to deliver campus visits or residentials for other partnerships’ target schools. Without overwhelming students by the sheer number of HE options available, it is doing them a disservice by not making them aware of the range of choices both in their home region and beyond.
It remains crucial to understand the local contexts in which students are making their university choices, and is the responsibility of WP teams to set aside their recruitment angle to some extent, to provide opportunities for students to engage with multiple universities in their search for the perfect match.
This week on the podcast we examine the government’s brutal funding cuts to universities.
What does the £108m reduction in the Strategic Priorities Grant mean for higher education, and why are media studies and journalism courses losing their high-cost subject funding?
Plus we discuss the independent review of student suicides, and explore new research on widening participation and regional disparities.
With Shân Wareing, Vice Chancellor at Middlesex University, Richard Brabner, Executive Chair at the UPP Foundation, Debbie McVitty, Editor at Wonkhe and presented by Jim Dickinson, Associate Editor at Wonkhe.
Widening access to higher education has experienced a precipitous fall from grace in the eyes of politicians over the last ten years – a fall that may have slowed slightly but as yet to stop under this government.
This fall may have coincided with the shift away from place-based to institutional-focused approaches to the problem. The access and participation plan regime may have stopped widening participation slipping out of sight completely but as our latest report shows, they have done little to increase higher education participation for those from the poorest backgrounds, particularly in rural and coastal areas.
Split geographies
The report – Coast and country: access to higher education cold spots in England – looks at the data published annually by the Department of Education on participation in higher education by free school meal (FSM) backgrounds. There are things we know about what this data shows as outlined in previous reports I have written and more recent work such as that from the Sutton Trust – in particular that London does far better than everywhere else.
In this report, though, we show exactly how much. The national higher education participation rate in 2022–23 for those from FSM backgrounds was 29 per cent. If you take out London, which has only 16 per cent of the population of England, it falls to 23 per cent. London is covering up a much more challenging situation in the rest of the country than we are prepared to admit.
These challenges increase as areas get smaller. The report looks at the relationship between the size of an area and the FSM higher education participation rate. It drops steadily as population decreases from 43 per cent in big cities to 18 per cent in rural villages. Nor is the situation improving. The gap between London and the other 84 per cent of the population has increased 3 per cent from 2012–23 to 2022–23 and just under 3 per cent between predominantly urban areas and predominantly rural areas over the same period.
Many coastal areas in England – especially seaside resorts – have well documented problems with poverty, unemployment and health inequalities and higher education participation can be added to that list. The higher education participation rate for those from FSM backgrounds coastal communities was 11 per cent lower than in inland areas in 2022–23 with in many areas less than one in five such young people going onto higher education. There is an overlap here between rural and coastal areas here with the South West especially including areas of lower higher education participation.
It is often said that the differences in higher education participation described above are associated with attainment in schools. Increasing attainment was the priority where widening access work was concerned for the Office for Students for a number of years. In the report, we map GSCE attainment at the area level against FSM higher education participation – and the correlation is indeed strong.
It is far weaker, though, in villages and coastal areas than the rest of the country. This suggest that in the places where the problems are the greatest, better GCSE results alone won’t be enough. In 2022–23, six of the ten areas with the lowest levels of higher education participation did not have a university campus within them. What provision exists also matters.
We need new (old) stories
If any progress in closing the gaps between regions described above is to be made then place must again become the central focus for widening access to higher education work – as it was when the last Labour government championed the issue so vigorously in the 2000s.
The pendulum has swung too far since then toward what institutions themselves do. Consequently, that political link between widening access, opportunity and growth has been broken. It is possible that the government itself will swing the pendulum back to place, and some of the signs coming from the Office for Students in recent months have been promising.
However, higher education providers themselves can take the initiative themselves here and look for new ways to form stronger partnerships – ones that take whatever replaces Uni Connect as the start, not the endpoint, of what regional collaboration means.
While the sector’s financial challenges make competition for students more intensive than it has ever been – and thus collaboration in this area more difficult – the value of higher education itself is being questioned by young people more than it ever has been since participation increased rapidly in the 1990s. Fighting between each other for young people’s and their schools’ attention won’t convince those, especially from the poorest backgrounds, that higher education is worth it. But collaboration will.
Collaboration won’t produce additional provision in rural and coastal areas, or the money to fund it. But unless we shift the story and the practice of widening access back to place, this additional provision will never come.
Twenty-five years on from Blair’s target for 50 per cent of young people to go to higher education, the Labour Party set out a new ambition to “break down barriers to opportunity.”
The opportunity mission articulates a multi-generational challenge: to make sure that children and young people can get on, no matter what their background; to change Britain so that a child’s future earnings are no longer limited by those of their parents; and to make Britain one of the fairest countries in the OECD. It is a fundamentally important challenge, and one that will be years in the undertaking.
Widening participation in higher education plays a huge part in this mission, and it is for that reason that the UPP Foundation has announced a major new inquiry into the future of widening participation and student success. We have launched this inquiry by publishing a short “state of the nation” summary of the key issues in 2025. Because while success in the opportunity mission would transform the shape of British society, Labour is all too aware of the differences between the optimism of Blair’s famous 50 per cent pledge and the markedly different political and economic circumstances Keir Starmer’s government finds itself in now.
A changed landscape
Universities and schools face significant headwinds when it comes to dismantling the gaps students face when looking to get in and get on. The HE sector is facing well-publicised and unprecedented financial challenges, with the recent rise in fees doing nothing to alleviate pressure amid rising costs. With institutions contemplating restructuring moves and the government no closer to outlining a solution for widespread mounting deficits amid heavy fiscal weather, it is hard to see universities or the government finding much bandwidth for widening participation in the near future.
There is also no equivalent target or metric that captures the challenge in quite the same way as Blair’s. This is understandable. Part of the reason no similar metric presents itself is because widening participation is now seen as multidimensional: not just focused on access to university, but also continuation rates, graduate outcomes, and less easily quantifiable measures of success, such as student belonging and participation in the immersive elements of the student experience.
With the number of commuter students rising to reflect different learning patterns and pathways in a diverse student population, student living arrangements are also a major part of this puzzle. As the Secretary of State alluded to prior to the general election in an address to Universities UK, modern widening participation must reach out to more of those coming from nontraditional backgrounds, and those pursuing non-linear pathways through higher education.
A wider view of widening participation means we need a more nuanced understanding of how access to university varies along socioeconomic, geographical and other demographic lines. As today’s report outlines, the difference in progression rates to higher education between students eligible for free school meals and their peers has widened to 20.8 per cent – the highest on record. Young people in London are significantly more likely to progress to higher education than their counterparts in the North East. The continuation gap between students from the most and least advantaged backgrounds now sits at 9.4 percentage points, having increased from 7.5 in 2016–17. As one of many charities operating in this space, we come face-to-face with the scale and scope of this disadvantage gap time and again. Equality of opportunity is still some way off.
As well as this, some are schools struggling to do as much as others to support access to HE. Polling in our new report finds that 75 per cent of teachers in London expect at least half of their class to progress to higher education, compared to just 45 per cent in the North West and Yorkshire and the North East. Similarly, 75 per cent of teachers in Ofsted Outstanding schools thought that more than half their class would progress to HE, compared to just 35 per cent in schools rated as Requires Improvement or Inadequate.
Although the Secretary of State said in a letter to heads of institution in November 2024 that expanding access and improving outcomes for disadvantaged students was her top reform priority in HE, the long list of challenges facing this government poses the risk that widening participation becomes a footnote to the geopolitical crisis.
What we’re doing
Despite the difficult environment facing both universities and the government, we think this agenda is too important to be put on the back burner. We hope our inquiry will help to establish new collective goals for widening participation and student success for the years ahead.
The current moment provides a significant opportunity to interrogate the ways in which access and participation, student finance, student experience on campus, careers guidance, and student belonging intersect. It is in the context of this opportunity that the UPP Foundation, supported by Public First, is launching this inquiry, which aims to establish a new mission for widening participation.
Following the introductory paper, we will publish two investigations, the first focusing on the persistent widening participation problems latent in “cold spot” areas of England, and the second exploring how the university experience differs based on students’ living arrangements and economic backgrounds, with poorer students often receiving a secondary experience that contributes to lower continuation and completion rates. Cumulatively, they will shed light on what meaningful widening participation really looks like to those who need it most, and what levers can be pulled to realise this vision.
This inquiry comes at a crucial moment. We want to help the sector, the Office for Students and the government by setting out a series of evidence-based goals, recommendations and policies which could help make the broader vision a reality, while recognising “the art of the possible” in an era of fiscal restraint. Through these recommendations we hope to see the rhetoric of the opportunity mission and the Secretary of State start to become reality.
Medicine is an elite profession, traditionally dominated by white, male, middle- or upper-class people, frequently from medical families.
In 2014, the Medical Schools Council (MSC) created a Selection Alliance (SA), and published Selecting for Excellence (SfE), to address inequities in access to medical degrees in the UK for those from “widening participation” backgrounds.
Fostering Potential: 10 years on from Selecting for Excellence , published in December of 2024, reports on progress made, with welcome achievements that are testament to the commitment of the community. The report rightly notes that focus on widening access has meant support for diverse students once they commence studies has been neglected.
Recently, medical student activism – #LiveableNHSBursary , and #FixOurFunding – have highlighted the peculiar funding situation medical students find themselves in , and the financial pressures they experience during their studies.
Fostering Potential asserts that WP needs to be reconceptualised away from a deficit framing of individuals as lacking ambition or aptitude to excel, to understanding lack of participation as the product of systemic and institutional failures around inclusion. For me, one of the main barriers to success for students from a disadvantaged socio-economic background studying medicine is the degree was designed and developed for a financially comfortable student. Its current structure excludes students from diverse backgrounds, and part of this is financial.
The earnings gap
One might argue that the financial hardship experienced by student medics is the temporary cost of what will become a lucrative career. However, once qualified, doctors from a lower socio-economic background will experience an average class pay gap of £3,640. This means their degree is both harder won and less remunerative.
Current research and initiatives on financial barriers to success mostly treat money as a discernible object that can be quantified. It is a thing we either have enough of, or not; something we earn for ourselves as individuals. Hence proposed solutions tend to focus on maximising individual students’ abilities to earn alongside studies, while recognising that lack of time due to part-time work or caring responsibilities means some students cannot take advantage of extracurricular career development opportunities.
I find this contradictory and suggest it misses a key point – money is also a relationship; it shapes our experiences of the world far beyond how much we have. It is a condition of success, not a result of it. Developing support for a student from a financially disadvantaged background should be informed by research that explicates how poverty impacts students’ opportunities to learn and exploit the advantages higher education allegedly offers.
A student’s-eye-view
I lead a project at Lancaster Medical School called Medicine Success, providing funds to mitigate the hidden costs of a medical degree for students from diverse backgrounds – purchasing a stethoscope, professional attire and funding the compulsory elective.
Five years of project evaluation data reveal much about the role money plays in students’ sense of belonging and success. A student’s-eye-view of the degree reveals how unexpected its hidden costs are, how difficult it is to cover the cost of living and studying without financial support, and how choices about career development are constrained by cost. Further, the data shows students with scarce resources are keenly aware of how wealth is a vector of exclusion and inequity shaping their experience of the degree differently to their wealthier peers:
Receiving these funds made a massive difference as it took me by surprise how much of a financial burden studying at university was. It seems that every aspect of it requires you to spend money that you don’t have and I feel at times it’s not all inclusive (2nd year, 2024)
Their evaluations of the funding show that money transforms our lived experience of the world, and in turn, shapes our thoughts and feelings. They explain how scarcity can impact mental health and mental bandwidth, and the funding alleviates financial anxiety and paid-work commitments so they may focus on their studies.
But it means more than just being able to afford essentials, it means being able to participate equally and with pride in their degree in comparison to their wealthier peers. This directly impacts self-esteem and addresses feelings of unworthiness or lack of belonging.
A good example of this is the professional attire fund:
I know professional attire might not seem serious but not having the right attire when it’s necessary leads me to overthink about how I’m dressed and feeling insecure during sessions. It’s often to the point where instead of focusing on learning I can’t help but to think about my appearance. (1st year, 2020)
It is well-established that class can be read through a multitude of symbols. Respondents describe how their “lower” social status feels revealed through clothing, making them feel insecure in the learning environment. Students relate having their cheap and tired-looking clothes pointed out to them by peers, others worried about wearing the same outfit every day and what that said about their finances, while some feel that their patients have less respect for their opinion when they don’t present well-dressed. Meanwhile, ill-fitting clothing and shoes also interfere with the ability to focus on studies, causing pain and making long shifts additionally exhausting.
Widening participation initiatives that focus on belonging from a social, cultural or academic skills perspective miss this crucial element – money. One student articulates a point made repeatedly by many of their peers:
Funds like these make students like myself feel more heard and seen and gives us the opportunity to come from a lower socio-economic background and not feel as if we don’t belong here simply due to lack of finance. It gives us the confidence and the ability to work hard for what we want as we know there is always support available for students like us. (1st year, 2022)
Recipients of Medicine Success funding attest that financial support levels the playing field with their more privileged peers in numerous, significant, and yet, subtle ways. Providing financial support is essential to make the learning environment, social activities, and career development accessible to students from all backgrounds. Belonging is in part financial; you can’t participate fully without money.
Wider Context
Recent reports show that the government is making a loss on student loans due to higher interest rates . This means private lending institutions are making a profit from the scheme funded by tax-payers and graduate repayments. In Why We Can’t Afford the Rich, Andrew Sayer explains that our current political system “supports rentier interests, particularly by making the 99 per cent indebted to the 1 per cent” , in which wealthy people are less likely to earn money through paid work, but accrue wealth through financial activities. The student loans scheme is one example.
Higher education is presented as a means of social mobility, while extracting wealth into a financial sector that shores up its and its investors power. It does so by making already poor people pay to access education but without the conditions to participate fully. The promise of breaking the cycle of poverty with a university degree is so powerful that it deflects attention from what is really happening, despite extensive evidence that education has yet to prove itself as a solution to class inequalities. For these reasons, even with WP policies, HE has financial injustice embedded within it, resulting in deleterious effects on students’ mental health, degree experiences and outcomes.
I see this as an example of “financial trauma,” defined by Chloe McKenzie as “the cumulative effect of being required to experience economic violence, financial abuse, financial shaming, and/or (chronic) financial stress to attain or sustain material safety”.
Social mobility is a problematic term; it requires individual people to increase their position in an established hierarchy that is itself integral to maintaining socioeconomic inequality. This is why I welcome the MSC’s push to reconceptualise improving participation as a systemic issue, not one focussed on changing individuals to fit into the status quo. At the same time, we must apply this thinking to financial barriers to success, by recognising that money is far from a private issue but a matter of justice.
