UK -- Don't blame the universities for the lack of state-school students

Vince Cable's efforts to force universities to admit more working-class students are ridiculous, given what the Government has done to slow social mobility, says Archie Cornish. 


Vince Cable’s calls for elite universities to admit a greater proportion of working-class students or face financial penalties are a little empty. As of September, proposals state, "elite" universities will face penalties of up to £500,000 if they do not admit an externally set quota of state school students.

Cable is casting the Russell Group universities in the role many feel the banks occupy: rogue, self-interested institutions which burn and pillage society and must be slapped on the wrist, or better handcuffed. It is a piece of political evasiveness as cheap as David Cameron’s cack-handed (and inaccurate) observation last year that Oxford had only admitted one black student. The government’s ministers have always struggled to distance themselves from the institutions which propelled them into power, but are usually met with little more than impatience: Oxford and Imperial College London have reacted to the Business Secretary’s remarks by telling him to mind his own Business.

This government has severely damaged access for Britain’s universities. It introduced the infamous £9,000 maximum fees, which most of the big names are set to charge, and which were met with sometimes obnoxious (that flag-swinging) but undoubtedly serious protests. The government has always argued that it had to hike the fees given the economic climate, and while this may be true, there can be no excusing its atrocious presentation of the policy: the £9k bombshell was interpreted as a standard (rather than maximum) fee, and the its architects failed to emphasise the waivers and delays available for poorer students. When this year’s applications to UCAS were predicted to fall by 10 per cent in January, the sound of two and two being put together could .

Given how much the Coalition government has done to compromise poorer students' access to top universities, it is ridiculous for Cable to portray them as obstacles in the path of reforms.

That's not to say that reforms aren't needed. Oxford, Cambridge and the other Russell Group universities have an unhealthy stranglehold on power and influence in Britain. More needs to be done to ensure that applicants from a wider range of schools get into top universities, so that the future elite is drawn from more than private schools and some exceptionally good state schools.

Oxford itself has decided to target prospective applicants not by school but by income, seeking out those whose families earn less than £16,000 a year, and who traditionally will not go to university. This makes greater social sense - but, unfortunately, poorer headlines. Michael Moritz’s donation of £75m, on the other hand, made a big splash. The welcome reception of the millionaire’s gift, which by next year will already assist 100 students, suggests that in the face of unrelenting funding cuts, universities must ramp up their strategies for targeting alumni for support.

True change in education needs more than money, though, just as real social mobility relies on more than quotas and figure-fixing. The director of the Sutton Trust, which last year rated Cambridge’s Oxbridge-feeder Hill’s Road Sixth Form College as an "elite institution", explained the school’s success in terms of the high percentage of children whose parents are Cambridge dons. If this shows anything, it is that there is more to school success than the private-state dichotomy Cable relies on.

In contrast, Cable’s remarks are just not subtle enough. The top universities really are not evil opponents of change, and the government’s attempts to fashion themselves as crusaders for social mobility are transparent and hypocritical. Like so many proposed actions on universities, it is a surface solution to a deep, complex problem.

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