Widening participation to higher education
Widening participation to higher education
This chapter focuses on widening participation to undergraduate higher education. It considers when in the ‘pipeline’ to higher education these socio-economic patterns first appear, when are they strongest, what causes them, and what can be done about them. The chapter then considers how this stratification can be overcome by using contextualised admissions (CA), as is ongoing policy in the United Kingdom at the time of writing. Contextualised admissions entails the use by universities of contextual data about prospective students' socio-economic and educational circumstances to inform admission decision-making, usually by reducing the grade requirements for entry where it is clear that an applicant comes from a disadvantaged family, neighbourhood, or school environment. CA policies are therefore a kind of positive discrimination within the current set-up.
Keywords: undergraduate higher education, socio-economic patterns, contextualised admissions, CA policies, contextual data, admission decision-making, positive discrimination
Policy Press Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
