Measuring university contribution to social mobility
David Kernohan is Deputy Editor of Wonkhe
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The nice thing about the Office for Students’ interest in publishing sector-level dashboards is that a great deal of data is available to analyse – and with the requisite amount of torture all kinds of league tables and rankings can be produced.
Today is the turn of HEPI and the London South Bank university to use the Access and Participation data set to plot social mobility. To be honest, “social mobility” is stretching things – knowing that you entered university, finished your course, and experienced one of the OfS’ “good” outcomes 15 months later is not an indicator that you have transcended IMD quintile one and two to enter the world of the graduate elite. I prefer to see it as a top level look at how good a university is at helping people “get in and get on”. Here’s a plot:
The former Colleges of Advanced Technology (CATs) top up the ranking – along with a scattering of post-92s, though we also find Imperial and the LSE in the top 10. Interestingly, a couple of entrants have large student populations studying via subcontractual arrangements – the University of Greater Manchester, for instance, includes a large number of students studying at Regents’ College.
As longer term social mobility or even social status is so difficult to measure (or even define, as Public First found on behalf of the Telegraph) I am a lot more comfortable seeing this as a league table of how good you are at providing higher education to non-traditional students. But to truly nail that lens I’d want to add some information about how the students themselves feel about the whole thing. And as luck would have it, I’ve already built something to do that.
Yes– it’s alterni-TEF again (do see the original article for the full methodology), so I’m plotting the combined flag score (basically how well or badly a provider performs against benchmarks, over three outcomes measures and seven banks of National Student Survey questions), looking only at students in IMD quintile 1 or 2. I exclude any provider that doesn’t have a complete bank of publishable indicators for this group.
In this alternate look, two large post-92 providers in or near London (Hertfordshire and Middlesex) top the table, with the University of Sheffield making a strong showing on behalf of the Russell Group. To even be listed on this table you need a large group of non-traditional students – and if you want to be near the top they need to be at least moderately happy.
What would genuinely measure social mobility? For me, I’d want to see something that looked at longer term outcomes in a way that goes beyond simply having a good salary or a “graduate job” – something like answers to the quality of life questions in graduate outcomes but 15 years further into the future. At a point when society more widely is in a state of flux, individualised measures of self-worth feel much more important to track.