At least since the post-war period, the idea that universities should be melting pots, where different kinds of people mix and learn from each other, has held sway. This, alongside national economic interests, is why higher education has expanded almost continuously since then.
Higher education is seen as both a private and social good. On average graduates live longer, earn more, spend more, pay more tax, receive fewer benefits, and can afford to volunteer more and be politically critical and active (which is why university should be cheap/free to students). This is partly due to what they learn and how they learn it, but also to meeting—in the classroom or elsewhere in their time as students—people from different walks of life.
The rise in student numbers over the past few decades is in many ways a success story—at least if we ignore ongoing debt and financing issues—in that people who previously did not have the opportunity to study and enter the graduate labour market now can. The problem is that while the system as a whole is socially diverse, students are corralled into homogeneous groups within it.
Universities are actively complicit in this. It happens through the way selection systems operate and how universities themselves work. If we really want to make universities more inclusive, we need to address both.
The sorting hat
Education systems are supposed to operate as a kind of ‘sorting hat’, somehow ‘feeling’ in which ways people are intellectually or vocationally inclined and then allocating them to the right courses and subsequent careers. This only works, though, if everyone has a good chance of finding things they like to do, and then doing as well as they can at them. It has been recognised for more than 50 years that, due to systematic discrimination, those who are economically disadvantaged and/or less physically or geographically mobile, from an ethnic minority, disabled or LGBTQI+, often do not have the best chance of shining. The corollary of this for universities is that secondary school grades—the principal means of judging suitability for study—are not an accurate reflection of potential.
The most accessible ways of addressing this are by adjusting entry criteria through contextual admissions or positive action and ensuring that admitted students are supported. Universities invest a great deal of time in outreach and widening participation under pressure from governments, but individual university populations still don’t reflect national populations. Part of the problem is that some universities make the right noises but cannot, or will not, do more because their organisational identity (and USP) is bound up in exclusivity.
Most university systems are characterised by hierarchies, reinforced by the absurdity of rankings. Some rankings even reward high admission requirements—a proxy for social exclusivity—essentially discouraging universities from lowering them. Research shows that top universities like to recruit high-performing students because they require less support, thus freeing up resources for research, which promotes their global and national visibility. Without this, they would not be able to attract international students or postgraduates who they can charge through the nose.
Overall, this means that high status universities—and thus academic careers—are dominated by middle-class students, while others have largely domestic working-class and/or ethnic minority student bodies. The paradox here is that there is no systematic difference in teaching quality between university types, and those students at ‘top’ institutions would be just as well (if not better) served elsewhere. A further injustice is that the false kudos associated with high-ranking universities carries currency on the labour market, and this feeds back into ‘graduate prospects’ figures on rankings and national data.
Diversity on campus
Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that rankings are abolished and admissions revamped, and all universities contain a representative and international mix, also somehow mediating the gendered patterns around subject choices. Even then, having a rich diversity on campus (assuming there is a campus) does not ensure meaningful interaction. Research continues to show that students in marginalised groups can be excluded on racist, linguistic, homophobic or other grounds, even if they are present in significant numbers. This impacts their experience, engagement and, ultimately, their academic performance.
In terms of academic factors, teaching would need to be reorganised and supported accordingly, underpinned by cultural competency rather than simply diversity and inclusion training. Large-scale lectures inhibit interaction between students and between students and staff, so small group, collaborative sessions would also be needed, ideally across disciplines. Then suitable topics and activities—carefully facilitated—would have to be chosen, where problems and potential solutions could be jointly discussed. This is where approaches such as critical pedagogy and decolonising come into their own—not simply in terms of broadening and recentring the curriculum, but also in how material is taught and how staff and students relate to one another.
Attention would need to be paid to how students’ lives are physically and temporally organised, too. My own work shows how students’ campus footprints—essentially where they do and don’t go—are partitioned into particular areas or faculty buildings, while timetabling brings them onto campus at different times. It is not possible to have everyone ‘in’ simultaneously, but practical issues such as this need to be considered, as do accommodation and campus activities such as sports and student societies, bearing in mind that not all students are residential, and many have caring and/or working responsibilities. Not everyone has to meet everyone else, and some separations—particularly safe spaces for minority groups and single-sex accommodation—should be retained, but meaningful and diverse interaction has to be actively enabled.
Cultural change
In short, change would need to be wide-ranging and cultural, crossing academic and physical (and virtual) boundaries, and staff and students would need to learn how to negotiate all of this. This kind of approach might be called out as ‘social engineering’ and trying to undo the natural order. But asserting that the current unequal social order is natural assumes that talent is overwhelmingly concentrated within certain (white, middle-class, male) groups.Accusing students from marginalised groups of being the ‘minority pick’ is the wrong way around. We should really be saying to privately educated Russell Group students: “You’re largely here because you’re posh.”
Such an extensive overhaul may seem like overkill, but the progress we have made thus far has been far too slow. If we are serious about universities being inclusive, a great deal (i.e. virtually everything) needs to change.
The original version of this piece originally appeared in Research Professional – you can access it here (paywall).
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