New rules will push universities to cut entry requirements for poor pupils

APPLICATIONS FOR most universities are due by January 15th, so sixth formers have a month to pick a course and come up with anecdotes for their personal statement. It is a tricky process, but especially so for those not at a school which packs pupils off to university by the busload. Despite this, much progress has been made in the past decade or so. Largely thanks to the expansion of higher education, 18-year-olds from the poorest parts of the country are now almost twice as likely to go to university as they were a dozen years ago.

But most of the incomers end up in less prestigious universities. So the focus is now on widening access to elite ones. On December 13th the Office for Students (OFS), a new regulator, published its plans. School leavers in parts of the country where university attendance is most common are five times more likely to attend a top university than pupils in parts where it is most unusual to go. The regulator wants to cut this to 2.8 times by 2024-25, as well as to improve these students’ eventual results. It can fine institutions that fail to make sufficient headway.

The slow progress so far is not because the fanciest universities treat poor applicants less favourably than their richer peers. Mark Corver of dataHE, a consultancy, says the admissions system is “astonishingly fair” when judged on whether people go where they would be expected to given their grades. Some 69.2% of teenagers who apply to elite institutions from areas where university attendance is uncommon receive offers, compared with the 69.4% who might be expected to based on their grades and chosen courses. Thus offer-making accounts for little of the big gap in university participation.

So how will universities meet the target? They could improve efforts to get more poor schoolchildren to apply, and to be more ambitious in their choice of institutions. Until recently, such schemes have been characterised by munificence—last year universities spent £750m ($950m) to widen access and support disadvantaged students—if not success. Many relied on poorly targeted outreach programmes. Others too often used (and still use) bursaries as a way to snatch the best applicants from rivals, rather than to help those most in need of financial support.

Belatedly, more universities are thinking seriously not only about how to raise awareness of university in general, but also about how to improve attainment so that children are in a position to apply. This tends to involve building deeper relationships with fewer schools, and sometimes funding charities like IntoUniversity. It runs 30 learning centres, which aim to replicate the supportive homes of better-off peers, in parts of the country with low university participation. Children come after school to do their homework and other activities. At a branch in Weston-super-Mare, primary-school tiddlers solemnly explain what they want to study at university. One mother, whose daughter is an aspiring fashion student, says the centre “gives her hope for the next generation.”

The OFS will spend money to figure out how to do such work effectively. But these efforts will take time to produce results. So to meet the new targets, universities will also have to make more use of “contextual admissions”, which adjust expectations for an applicant’s circumstances. Someone who would be, say, the first in their family to go to university might be given a closer look by admissions officers, or even allowed in with ABB grades at A-level rather than AAA. The thinking is that lower results achieved in trying circumstances indicate a similar level of ability to better ones achieved by public schoolboys. Indeed, research suggests that students from worse schools are more likely to get a first or upper-second-class degree than those with the same grades from better schools (with the exception of those at Oxbridge).

Anna Vignoles, an education expert at Cambridge University, estimates that half of universities already use contextual admissions in some form, though the rigour of the criteria used and the extent to which they publicise it varies. The OFS knows it is fighting against incentives imposed by university league tables, since students’ A-level results are one of the factors used to rank institutions (so those admitting pupils with worse results may drop down the rankings). And one crucial test remains. If middle-class voters’ children are kept out of the best universities by peers with lower grades, politicians may well become less enthusiastic about widening access.