Context dependent

This week saw some quiet good news for the higher education sector. The Supporting Professionalism in Admissions group (SPA) secured long term funding to allow it to continue its useful work.  SPA’s mission is to promote fair admissions and access to higher education by developing good practice in the recruitment and selection of students  – including advising on the thorny issue of contextual admissions.

For its part, the Sutton Trust advocates that there should be a bolder use of background information in deciding who gets coveted university places.  Recommendation 9 of our Mobility Manifesto calls for the increased use of contextual data in university admissions decisions, including by the most selective universities, recognising the different opportunities young people have had.

But aside from simple fairness, what is the justification for this approach?‎ In the UK at least, the case for alternative or lower offers to poorer students has been made in terms of their likelihood of doing at least as well when they are at university. So, a report by the funding council HEFCE in 2014 found that state school students go on to do better in their degree studies than students with the same prior educational attainment from independent schools. This backed up earlier work by Bristol University, which found it was warranted to give students from low performing schools a different A level offer because they went on to do as well when admitted.

But while academics are vitally important – it does no-one any favours to admit a student who can’t cope with the course – ‎ looking just at degree success is a relatively narrow way of seeing the issue. ‎ What about the inherent benefits of building a diverse class, which reflects society and brings with it different viewpoints? What about the role of universities in ‎adding value to an individual, not just in polishing further the already polished? And what about the importance of identifying and nurturing future leaders from a range of backgrounds?‎

No doubt some would say that admissions on this basis smacks of social engineering – but then again so does paying school fees, moving catchment areas or topping up children’s education with expensive tutors. ‎ Top Ivy League US universities have no such qualms.

But context doesn’t stop at the university gates – the advantages or disadvantages of childhood go well beyond. ‎ A relatively un-researched and underdeveloped area is contextual recruitment in the job market. We know that the professions are dominated by the more privileged — and this isn’t always because of better educational credentials. Increasing the numbers of poorer students at university does little for social mobility if this isn’t flowing through to the top employers.

In some respects graduate recruiters are ahead of the higher education sector when considering these issues.  Many report to us that they recognise the business case for diversity as an end in itself.   They want their employees to reflect the diversity of their clients, who themselves are demanding that businesses take seriously the challenge of social mobility. And many firms recognise a group of people from a broad range of backgrounds are likely to make better decisions than a homogeneous group.    Importantly, the focus for the professions has widened from considering diversity only in terms of gender and ethnicity (crucial though they are) to considering socio-economics too.

Recent years have seen considerable commitment and innovation as well. The law firm Clifford Chance, for example, has been trialling school- and university- blind selection, where interviewers don’t know which school or university a student attended.  They report a significant increase in the success of less privileged applicants as a result. The interesting thing here, of course, is that this approach actually takes context out of the equation. The selection panel can’t take into account that a young person attended one of the worst performing schools in the country but made it to Oxford, any more they can that another applicant attended the same school as the managing partner.

But it’s not all rosy.  Some of the ways in which the most competitive graduate recruitment works can act as a brake on mobility. A concrete example is around many employers’ continuing  reliance on A level grades as a way of first cutting the applicant pool.  So, it doesn’t matter if a young person from an inner city comprehensive has defied the odds and been admitted to a Russell Group university with a lower offer of an A and two Bs; he or she still gets sorted out in the initial sift because of a blanket policy of only taking through three A grade applicants to the next round.  In other words, the contextual recruitment decision of the university three years before is being confounded by what happens when the young person reaches the job market.

There is also a lack of data. So, the policy described above is not adopted on the basis of any sound evidence, but simply because the employers need some way of filtering a huge pool of brilliantly qualified students.  And while HESA and UCAS data allow us to see how many low income‎ students apply to top universities, and how many get in, we don’t know the same for most professions or employers. That means we don’t know at what stage they fall down: is it that they don’t apply, don’t make the first cut, perform badly in assessment tests, or do worse at interview? We can make educated guesses at the answers. But if we had more hard figures in this space we could do more to help those young people and inform programmes such as Pathways Plus.

The Sutton Trust is working with the charity upReach‎ to begin to pick away at this issue, looking at how well young people from different backgrounds do in the professions.  Are students from poorer homes or lower performing schools more likely to drop out of top jobs?  Or do they go on to thrive in their first few years in the workplace? What contextual factors should employers take into account when looking at candidates and what data sources should be used?

There are of course no straightforward answers. Fairness is subjective – and at what stage a young person should be considered independent of their parents, their school background and their socio-economic circumstances is a moot point. But at least with data and tracking we can start to bring some objectivity into the debate, which has led to progress in the higher education sector over the last decade.  And even though academia and business can sometimes seem poles apart, we should do more to bring together university admissions staff with graduate recruiters.   They’ve got lots to talk about.