On Thursday 14 July, a seminar is to be held by the Society for Research in Higher Education, posing the question: is widening participation wrong and unethical?
Until now widening participation was always considered a good thing, an aim even. Suddenly that is being retracted. Suddenly not all students should go on to higher education, regardless of their financial background?
Any student who has undergone A-Levels in the past few years will know the drill that schools force upon us: finish your AS Levels. Then write your personal statement. In schools up until now it was just assumed that if you wanted a career, you were going to apply to university. Anyone who wasn’t drafting their personal statements in Years 12 and 13 and looking at prospectuses was considered an anomaly, and forgotten in the rush to get us to decide what to do with the rest of our lives at 17 and apply for a relevant course to pursue that. Now the threat of £9,000 tuition fees hangs over anyone applying to university post-2012/13. Schools are realising that pushing every student possible into a degree is no longer an option, and alternative career routes, like apprenticeships, are now being more widely considered. Good. So they should be. It’s about time that routes other than degrees were more widely recognized. However, this should not be an assessment of whether students from lower-earning backgrounds should be encouraged to go to university, but a re-assessment of the encouragement that students are given.
Students have the right to go on to higher education, and should be made aware of this, and encouraged in their choice if they decide it is the path for them. Pushing students who lack the desire for further education into university, however, can only result destructively. But is it a greater evil to discourage students from applying to university because of their financial situation? An article in the Guardian described research from the University of Glasgow that claimed that students from lower socio-economic groups are more likely that their more advantaged peers to drop out because of debt…well, yes, of course they are. But does this mean that as a group they should not be as encouraged as other students from going on to further education?
This is a situation that could possibly lead to further widening between classes. A society where university is for only those who can afford it is not one we want to see. Universities bridge these gaps, generally providing a platform of opportunity for students regardless of background. Widening participation and encouraging those students that want to attend university and want to pursue careers that require a degree is not something that should be questioned. Education should be a right, not a privilege.
Hopefully this seminar will come to the conclusion that no, widening participation is not wrong or unethical. Pushing students into university with the belief that a degree is the only route to a career? Discouraging students from even applying to university because of their economic background? Now that is wrong and unethical.
Firstly the UK needs to learn the lessons from countries such as Germany which have far better vocational courses and career paths that don’t follow the standard university route. Secondly, and I say this as a true believer in the value of university and the right to free education, the elephant in the room is that we have too many universities these days. Given the competitive nature of the UK job market and the positive saturation of arts degree’s coupled with the fact that China for example is producing more graduates each year than the population of England is it right to encourage students to go to a University that is low in the league tables when that could actually be detrimental to their career prospects when compared with three years spent gaining experience on the job.