My quoted text was from a British government publication, acknowledging that their policies had failed to close the gap. It was a rare example of a government admitting failure, and they had no motive to massage the figures to be worse than they actually are.

The ‘increase in gap’ means that the expansion of higher education participation has been largely an expansion in participation by people from middle class backgrounds. Thus at one time the gap was 27 percentage points and it is now 30.

You seem to hint at the idea that the ethos or atmosphere in universities is off-putting to w-c students. That may be so. Does that count as discrimination? I don’t know.

Even the data you quote does not support your position. From 1990-2000 the percentage of young people from working class backgrounds grew 80 percent. Among those from professional backgrounds the percentage grew 29 percent. This isn’t even close. Another way to say it- assuming the ratio of kids from working class backgrounds to professional backgrounds remains constant at 1:1, from 1990 to 2000 the number of working class kids enrolled in HE as a percentage of working + professional kids so enrolled, increased from 21% to 27%. How is this an increase in the gap? Just b/c the absolute difference in numbers is greater?

Not if different classes segregate by institution – which is what they in fact do. So at the top end you get the best of the working class and the best and quite a lot of the rest of the middle and upper classes, at the bottom end you get the majority of the working class participation.

“I had a friend who was a Ugandan Asian (so-called, the equivalent of an asylum seeker nowadays I suppose) who was rejected by every University he applied to apart from Aberdeen which required maximum A level grades.”

I believe it is Asians from a Bangladeshi background that suffer that fate now.

I hope you don’t mind me contiuing to address your points. I think two things to consider are that working class HE participation rates in the US are no better than in the UK, therefore it is likely (to me, speaking as an outsider) that similar institutional barriers are in place, and secondly that in both countries the gap between affluent and non-affluent enrolment has worsened since the eighties, when I graduated, so I don’t think the situation has improved in either country.

I think there is a danger that a particular social class evaluates its own relationship with the less privileged, and gives itself top marks for inclusion – without giving a voice to those who are excluded.

UK gov’t report from 2003 on the drive for widening partipiation in HE:

http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Education/documents/2003/04/08/Widening.pdf

“Around half of the population describe themselves as (working class). In 2000, 18 per cent of young people from these backgrounds were benefiting from higher education. While this was an increase of 8 percentage points on the position in 1990, the increase in participation by people from families with professional and non-manual occupations was 11 percentage points (from
37 per cent to 48 per cent). In other words, the gap in participation between those in higher and
lower social classes has grown. Indeed, if one turned the clock back to 1960 … the gap between the two groups was actually less than it is now.”

Sebastian, I think my use of the terms respects their normal menaing better than the eccrentric re-interpretations. I agreed with you that doing improvements would require a fair degree of monitoring and testing. You’d be surprised how much support there is for this in the teachers unions; AFT for example was a force behind NCLB. The central problem is that unions believe (rightly, in my view) that schools and districts are very poorly managed, and therefore are very reluctant to cede power over these issues to what they see as incompetent and ill-willed managers.
If you know of some literature about how we can improve the achievment of large swathes of poor children I’d be thrilled to see it!

That certainly wasn’t what I was told when I applied to college. There weren’t SATs in those days, we just had our A levels, but one would be given a nod and wink regarding Universities which were prepared to consider the application of youngster’s from a non-affluent background. I went to Warwick University, which had such an enlightened policy. I can tell you the ones which had a policy of non-acceptance if you like – I suspect all academic working class children know which they are.

One would also notice that, following admission interviews, white middle class youngsters would be set lower admission targets than we would.
I had a friend who was a Ugandan Asian (so-called, the equivalent of an asylum seeker nowadays I suppose) who was rejected by every University he applied to apart from Aberdeen which required maximum A level grades. Luckily he got that. Meanwhile my other friend, son of a doctor, was accepted into medical school with 3 grade Cs.

It isn’t just the overt discrimination which damages your chances, it’s the feeling of monolithic rejection. The awareness that one is at best tolerated.

I always think that for a working class scholar there is a tightrope. If you are not rebellious enough you will do what all the institutions are telling you to do – go and get a job in a shop, forget about your silly ambitions – while if you are too rebellious you will throw your books in the river and say sod the lot of them.

Umm, ok. If you posit that education deficits which are currently associated with poverty can only be dealt with by eradicating poverty and if you change “closing the gap” to making eradicating the possibility of variation, I suppose you are correct that the solution must be revolutionary. But that is only because you have been a little funny with the terms.

If you believe that not having gobs of money does not automatically mean you are incapable of receiving a good education if it is available and if you set the bar at significantly reducing the gap (say eliminating 75% of it) you could certainly take a stab at it by improving the awful inner-city school systems. But to do that you would need to be allowed to identify how children are doing year to year to sift the good schools from the bad and the good techniques from the bad. And that isn’t going to be allowed so long as the current teachers’ unions have the deciding say in the matter.

So, the problem is less to do with college admissions practices as it is that the students are prepared for HE. Now you’re talking effectiveness of secondary, or even elementary education.

Harry, you’ve approached the problem from an institutional perspective. I wonder about the view from the other end of the telescope: the influence of culture/subculture and the family. While economics does plays a significant role, public access to education through grade 12, and hence, preparation for HE, is almost universal. Indeed, it’s complulsory.

So what’s the difference? I would look in the home, as primary, and secondly, in the cultural environment. Where HE is not valued in the home or culture,I would expect low rates of HE enrollment. Whereas, where education is highly valued, there is great incentive to overcome even great obstacles to accomplish the educational goal.

To illustrate, the relatively recent homeschooling movement has been studied to evaluate the effectiveness of that means of education. In Home Educated and Now Adults (http://www.nheri.org/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=27), Ray reports on the success of the students, irrespective of income and social setting. The difference here being the highly motivated family. Indeed, all faced the added financial burden of schooling at home, and many conducted their schooling in the face of discriminatory and legal challenges to do so.

While one might expect for these home schooled students to be denied objective consideration for admission at colleges and universities, such is generally not the case. Again, perhaps it’s because these schools recognize and value the preparedness and highly motivated nature of these students.

whether it is a radical goal depends partly on how you interpret it. If it is literally closing the achievement gap, so that there is no correlation between achievement and socio-economic class of origin (except whatever can be explained by some putative IQ gap that correlates with socioeconomic class of origin) then, yes, it certainly would require a fair amount of monitoring (and hence testing) but it is an extraordinarily radical goal. AT least given the available technologies; we simply don’t know how to get high or even modest levels of academic acheivement from swathes of children raised in relative poverty, for example; so we’d have to reduce the proportion of kids raised in poverty from 17-20% (as now) to 0% (or thereabouts). Resistance to testing is as nothing compared to resistance to eradicating child poverty.

There are other ways of interpreting it: ‘closing’ is often interpeted as ‘changing slightly’ and ‘achievement gap’ is very often interpreted in terms of everyone reaching some (low-ish) threshold of performance.

Laura—yes, I agree it would take a lot more. Is it clear, in fact, that the Hope scholarship program is well understood by all relevant parents.

alison: I guess there might be discriminatory attitudes. What counts as a discriminatory attitude though? Suppose you had a college which deliberately promoted a pro-intellectual ethos. Would that constitute a discriminatory attitude? Not by my standards.

What is sure is that if a kid from a working class or poor background with any level of SAT/ACT, GPA (corrected for quality of school) and AP scores applies to a college they will have at least as much chance of admission as a kid from a wealthy background. (Not as much chance of accepting, or of completing, but that’s a different matter). College administrators spend a lot money trying to find well-prepared low income kids. Maybe if there were suddenly large numbers of such kids available we’d find middle-class parents pressuring to restructure admissions to discriminate against them: in fact, I bet we would. Then we’d find out.

I think that would help somewhat, but it would have to part of a much bigger project. The HOPE scholarship program in GA, which offers a free ride at a state college for anyone who earns a B or better at high school, has not been successful in increasing the percentage of low income students in college.

This is frequently asserted, but is it actually true? I think working class youngsters experience overt discrimination, but their experiences are never canvassed. In many cases they never even get so far as to apply to the institution, so how confident can we be that they aren’t put off by discriminatory attitudes?

It isn’t that radical of goal, but the problem is that at lower levels of education there is great resistance to actually testing the children to see what they are learning if using those tests has even a hint of trying to measure teacher performance. And if you are not permitted to measure teacher performance by linking it to actual learning, you can’t find out if your reforms (whatever they may be) are working. So long as teacher’s unions successfully avoid the ability to test teacher performance, you can’t reform the system.