NEON Blog: University access – the role of background and Covid-19 throughout the application process
Dr Angus Holford,
Research Fellow at Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of Essex
https://www.iser.essex.ac.uk/people/ajholf
There’s several stages to the UCAS application process. Students, schools, and universities all have control over some decisions but not over others: Teachers predict grades; students decide where to apply; universities make offers; students make a firm and insurance choice from among those offers; they then get accepted (or not) on A-Level/Highers/BTecs results day; then those who don’t get an offer can go through Clearing to find a place.
Every one of these stages can contribute to ethnic and socioeconomic inequalities in access to Higher Education, to high-tariff universities, or to competitive courses. Seemingly positive decisions or outcomes at one stage can also have negative effects later on. For example, the more aspirational or ‘ambitious’ a given application relative to the student’s own predicted grades the less likely it is to attract an offer, because admissions tutors may rightly expect that the student is unlikely to achieve the required grades. Similarly, the more ambitious is the (conditional) offer that the student has chosen as their firm choice, the less likely they will be to be accepted on results day. In this case, it would be important to choose a more conservative insurance choice.
With my colleagues at the University of Essex, we wanted to unpick this complexity to understand which stages contribute most to the final gap in access, and think about how we could intervene to reduce it.
We analysed data on the population of UCAS applicants from 2017-2020, which documents the decisions and outcomes of each stage of the process, along with demographic characteristics, and achieved and predicted educational qualifications.
Analysis of some stages confirmed what is broadly known already: Low SES and Black applicants are less likely to be taking A-Levels/Highers, and receive lower predicted grades than High SES or White students with the same GCSE results, for example.
At other stages, we learned about a more nuanced picture: Low SES students make less ambitious applications, measured by both whether it is to a high tariff university and the entry tariff of the course itself, than High SES students with the same predicted grades. By 2020, Black students were more ambitious on both counts than White students. South Asian students were less likely to apply to high tariff institutions, but their preference for medicine and dentistry courses means the average entry tariff of the individual courses they apply for is around half an A-Level grade in one subject more ambitious than White students.
We also discovered that COVID-19-induced policy changes had surprisingly little impact on allocation to firm choices on results day: Acceptance rates went up similarly for all groups. The main differential impact was to improve the proportion of White students who found a place through Clearing, denting the relative advantage that ethnic minority students had enjoyed by this measure in earlier years.
Two stages stood out as contributing to inequalities in access. First, Low SES, Black and South Asian students are all less likely to receive an offer for a given course than High SES, or White students on the same educational track and same predicted tariff score. There’s several possible responses to this, all of which would need more data and research to up. One thing schools could consider is whether there’s differences in the quality of references or personal statements across these groups – something we as researchers didn’t have access to. Another possibility is that ethnic minority students are less likely to be doing the right pre-requisite subjects or qualifications. Better information, advice and guidance both when making post-16 choices (to help students keep doors open) and when applying to university (to avoid wasting applications) would be needed in that case. Universities and UCAS could also reconsider masking of applicant names – an approach piloted and rejected a few years ago – or consider disregarding, removing or restructuring the personal statement from the process.
Second, the stage that contributes most to ethnic gaps in access to university comes on results day. Black and South Asian students are between 7 and 9 percentage points less likely to be accepted on to their firm choice, compared with people with the same predicted grades, with a firm choice on the same course at the same university in the same year. The same pattern is true of insurance choices. This is mostly because Black and South Asian students are more likely to underperform relative to their predicted grades. This requires improved support in the FE / sixth form sector, to convert predicted into realized grades. Until this gap in performance is addressed, any shift to post-qualification applications or offers will not help close the gap in access to high-tariff universities or competitive courses.
Our full Working Paper showing the complete methodology for these analyses is here https://www.iser.essex.ac.uk/research/publications/working-papers/iser/2022-07 and a four-page Explainer here https://www.iser.essex.ac.uk/files/misoc/reports/explainers/university_access_background_covid19.pdf (DOI: 10.5526/misoc-2021-008). We will continue to investigate what could help explain the gaps we see at some of these stages, including controlling for the impacts of individual schools and colleges, and the exact set of qualifications, subjects and predicted grades that students are applying with. We hope to report back to NEON members soon!