If you haven’t looked recently at the stats on the different rates of HE participation by ethnicity, you may find them quite striking.
Today, young people from ethnic minority backgrounds are progressing to university in record numbers.
According to the most recent figures from DfE, the proportion of school pupils in England of white ethnicity who progress to HE by age 19 (41.8 per cent) is comfortably exceeded by the corresponding proportions of school pupils of Asian (68.4 per cent), Black (62.4 per cent) and mixed (51.8 per cent) ethnicity.
White school pupils now also have the lowest progression rate to more selective high tariff universities. Statistics concerning the intersection of ethnicity and socioeconomic background are even more striking – Black school pupils who are also free school meals (FSM) eligible, for example, have a higher HE participation rate (51.3 per cent) than white pupils who are not FSM eligible (45.1 per cent).
Can these gaps be explained?
Whilst as a sector we (quite rightly) focus more on the gap in degree-level attainment by ethnicity (where white students typically outperform those from ethnic minority backgrounds), it is still worth considering why gaps in HE access by ethnicity are so large and what the longer term ramifications of these gaps may be. I recently published a piece of academic research which sought to understand the drivers of HE participation gaps by ethnicity.
This is a much less straightforward task than trying to understand the drivers of disparities in HE participation by socioeconomic background or gender. A number of statistical modelling exercises, using England’s rich administrative datasets, have shown that gaps in HE participation by FSM eligibility and gender tend to almost vanish once average differences in school attainment are controlled for statistically. Of course, this does not excuse such disparities, but it does help us to better understand why they exist.
However, when it comes to the link between ethnicity, school attainment and the likelihood of going to university, the relationship here seems to be far from straightforward. For example, Black school pupils in England get slightly lower grades, on average, in their GCSE exams than their white counterparts. Yet at the same time Black pupils are (quite comfortably) more likely to end up progressing to university. At first glance therefore, these statistics appear somewhat counter-intuitive.
In an analysis of linked National Pupil Database (NPD) and HESA data, I discovered that to better understand overall disparities in HE access by ethnicity, we need to investigate how these disparities vary at different points along the overall school attainment spectrum.
This can be done using a really straightforward method. First, take an entire cohort of all state school pupils in England (I used the one who took their GCSE exams in 2015) and divide them up into five attainment quintiles based on their grades in their best 8 GCSE subjects. Then, within each of these attainment sub-populations, investigate how HE participation varies by ethnicity.
For higher attainers, the results were largely unremarkable. But for those with slightly below average attainment, the results were truly staggering.
The participation gulf for those with lower school attainment
Young people from ethnic minority backgrounds with high attainment are more likely to end up at university than their high-attaining white British counterparts, but only slightly so. For example, 81.2 per cent of those pupils who were both white British and in the highest quintile of attainment ended up at university, compared to 83.3 per cent of high attainers of Black Caribbean ethnicity and 87.7 per cent of high-attainers of Pakistani ethnicity. So far, so “meh”.
But consider what happens at the second lowest quintile of attainers. This time, only 9.7 per cent of all white British students in this attainment bracket end up at university. At this same level of attainment, the HE progression rate for those of Pakistani ethnicity is 38.4 per cent, while the rate for those of Black African ethnicity is 52.1 per cent.
You can take a look at all the percentages here in Table 4 of my paper if you’re really keen, but I can sum it up for you quite simply. While young people from ethnic minority backgrounds with high school attainment are slightly more likely to go to university than high attainers from white British backgrounds, lower attainers from ethnic minority backgrounds are considerably more likely to end up at university than their lower attaining white British counterparts.
And when I say considerably, I mean considerably.
Implications
The upshot of all this is quite simple. Rightly or wrongly, once you get below a certain level of attainment, young people of white British ethnicity just don’t seem interested in going to university anymore. On the other hand, lower attainers from ethnic minority backgrounds are still quite keen to participate in HE, even though their level of attainment might mean that they may face a somewhat constrained choice of different institutions and courses.
This leads us then to another question – why are young people from ethnic minority backgrounds (especially those with lower attainment) – so much keener to go to university? One somewhat unhelpful answer to this question was offered in the controversial Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities report which was commissioned by the previous Conservative government. In the view of the commissioners, many people in ethnic minority communities have “an exaggerated respect for the academic route as the only path to success and economic safety on the part of ethnic minorities”. This perspective of course conveniently ignores another explanation which is well grounded in the sociological literature, which is that within ethnic minority communities, becoming as well-qualified as possible is seen as a necessary strategy to adopt in order to counteract the effects of racial discrimination in the labour market.
Those of white ethnicity, in contrast, may enjoy more latitude to follow alternative pathways with the confidence that they are likely to fall on their feet in the end whatever happens.
Aesop’s fables
One thing we know for sure is that, for those with slightly lower school attainment, white and ethnic minority students seem to be making different choices on average at age 18. How might this all pan out in the longer term? Or, to put it another way, how do graduates with lower school attainment fare in the jobs market, compared to non-graduates with lower school attainment?
When I look at analyses of the LEO earnings data for answers to this question, what I see reminds me of that familiar tale of the race between the tortoise and the hare. School leavers with lower attainment (defined here as not having at least 5 A*-C grades at GCSE) who do not go to university are the hares who dash out of the traps fairly quickly, typically earning wages (albeit fairly low ones) between the ages of 18-21. They have typically enjoyed slightly higher total earnings by age 30 than those lower attainers who went to university, who tend to enjoy only a fairly limited graduate earnings premium at first.
But the graduate tortoises tend to plod their way to greater career earnings in the end, since graduates are much more likely to enjoy wage increases through midlife, whilst the non-graduate hares take an earnings siesta.
Of course, most analysis of LEO so far concerns cohorts of people born in the mid to late 1980s. Without a crystal ball, young people today with lower school attainment can’t really be sure whether going to university (from a career and earnings perspective) will be a smart move or not. Either decision could be justified.
Going to university has always tended to pay off (on average) so far, even as naysayers have continued to argue that the jobs market is becoming too saturated with graduates. On the other hand, continued (and very much welcome) increases in the salaries of less-educated workers (brought about in part by successive real-terms increases to the National Living Wage) may serve to both reduce the size of the graduate earnings premium for lower attainers whilst also increasing the opportunity cost (though foregone earnings) of attending university.
Only the longitudinal studies of the future will confirm whether young people today with lower school attainment will turn out to be better off in the jobs market by going to university or not.
However, if the fortunes of lower attaining graduates turn out to be different on average to the fortunes of lower attaining non-graduates, we can be pretty confident that disparities in fortunes by ethnicity will follow.
