Student selection and social engineering

A big row has broken out in Britain over the UK government’s policy on student admissions to the country’s universities. The Business Secretary, Peter Mandelson, reportedly called on higher education institutions to ‘look beyond raw exam results when selecting applicants’. This is part of a broader UK government policy encouraging universities to use ‘contextual data’ in the admissions process. That of course is the cue for the Daily Mail newspaper to come forward with its view, and let me tell you that it doesn’t like what the government is looking for, not one little bit. And why? Because Lord Mandelson is clearly being horrid to the unfortunate middle classes; or as their headline writer puts it: ‘Middle-class students face university place struggle as Mandelson backs giving poorer students two-grade ‘head start”. And also, they take the view that any framework that recognises background and context will be at the expense of real excellence, and therefore will amount to dumbing down.

As for me, I find nothing particularly remarkable about what Peter Mandelson is reported to have said. Access programmes in Irish universities have long allowed access students – i.e. students from disadvantaged backgrounds -to  enter colleges with lower points than would be required for others, provided they meet minimum entry requirements. This has not produced any ‘dumbing down’ in that access students have on the whole out-performed their non-access fellow students, probably in part because they become highly motivated.

Nevertheless, if contextual data are to be used more widely for student admissions they will create operational problems, as making use of such information can be very time-consuming. A good illustration of that can be seen in this article which outlines the selection methods used by Oxford University. The large number of interviews conducted, for example, would be unmanageable for institutions that don’t have the special funding and resources enjoyed by Oxford and Cambridge.

All of this can however serve to remind us that a purely examination results-driven admissions system has one sure aspect: the best predictor of success in seeking entry to the university programme of your choice is not your documented school performance but rather your address. If you come from a strongly middle class area (like, say, much of Dublin 4) then you will get to do what you want at university, because the public and private resources available to you as you go through school will be so much greater than those available to people from poorer districts.

I have previously argued that the CAO points system is increasingly counter-productive. We need to put together a whole new way of  selecting students for higher education, that matches social needs and national policy ambitions.

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Tags: access, Peter Mandelson, university admissions

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