Entry rates might not be the easiest way to understand it
There’s a suggestion doing the rounds that it is easier for non-white young people to get into university than their white peers.
The idea goes something like this: 30 per cent of all white 18 year olds got into university in the 2025 cycle, compared to 51 per cent of Asian students, 48 per cent of black students (and 61 per cent of Chinese students). Therefore loads of deserving white 18 year olds are being turned away by awful, woke, universities… or something.
To start off with, universities can only admit people who apply to them.
Just under 40 per cent of white 18 year olds from England apply to university, and just over 87 per cent of the ones that do get a place. In comparison, while just over 68 per cent of black English 18 year olds apply to university, the same proportion that do (87 per cent) get a place.
What we are seeing, in other words, isn’t universities choosing to recruit black students – it is black students being more interested in applying to university than white students.
Even so, it remains the case that the overwhelming majority of English domiciled 18 year old students are white – even if that majority isn’t as massive as raw demographics may suggest. White English 18 year olds represent 60 per cent of applicants, 61 per cent of accepted applicants – but 73 per cent of the wider population.
In each case, the size of the dot represents the number of applicants in question.
In other words, there is a small and underrecruited cohort of very well qualified applicants who are not placed at university. And it is these students that high tariff providers are putting in place measures to improve recruitment among. Which honestly is probably driven by market logic (why would you not want to recruit more applicants with good A levels?), with the pleasing side effect that it also drives diversity and inclusion.
The other big takeaway here is the low application rate among white 18 year olds – something that applies similarly to 18 year olds from disadvantaged backgrounds of all ethnicities (people from nearly all minoritised ethnic groups are proportionally more likely to live in disadvantaged areas than White British people). As Anne-Marie Canning noted recently, the issue may well be one of trust, and one prominent underlying factor is debt aversion.
These are difficult questions, backed by a huge and ongoing body of research. There may be more (numerically) white British 18 year olds in disadvantaged areas, but it is hard not to conclude it is the disadvantage that causes the problems.