THE GREAT UNIVERSITY FRAUD

WELCOME to the twilight zone of univ e r s i t y admissions.

We have read the spate of stories of how pupils predicted to get three As at A-level are being rejected in favour of those with far worse grades - all because the pupils with the best grades have been educated at private schools.

If you thought that was bad, the reality is getting worse. It has now emerged that it is not just privately educated pupils who are being rejected but grammar school pupils, too.

One applicant from Dr Challoner's High School in Amersham, and another from Stratford-on-Avon Grammar School have been rejected at Bristol - despite their predicted three As - because they are at grammar schools which have too good a track record of academic success.

Their university places have been kept for children from worse schools, with poorer qualifications.

Even heads of high-performing comprehensive schools are fearful that they will be stamped "too successful".

In doing that, universities are merely doing what the Government has urged.

In its White Paper on higher education, published in January, it stressed the need to "make certain that the opportunities that higher education brings are available to all those who have the potential to benefit from them, regardless of their background".

Now who on earth would disagree with that? Read on, however, and it soon becomes clear what those apparently bland words really mean: "admissions staff, both academic and administrative, (must be) properly trained so that they can recognise genuine potential as well as achievement."

AGAIN, that sounds fair. Of course universities should seek out students with genuine potential. The best admissions tutors have always done so.

But it is not that simple. When the quest to recognise " genuine potential as well as achievement" is enshrined in the way Government talks about higher education it is, in practice, denying places to students with three A grades.

Bristol has said it doesn't have a quota; quotas are bad.

It has, rather, a "target"; and targets are wonderful. As Pat Rayfield, head of the Widening Participation Unit at Bristurningtol, puts it: "If you had a quota, you might actually say we will only make offers to 20 per cent of independent school applicants. Our target is more flexible. We are saying this is the direction we would like to go in, but we are not going to artificially meet those targets."

Quota; target; it amounts to the same thing: denying places to students with the best qualifications.

And this is where it starts to get surreal. Bristol is quite open about what it is doing, even if it chooses to call its spade a gardening implement.

And in awarding places on the basis not of achievement but social class, it is doing precisely what the Government now asks of universities.

The White Paper revealed that Labour plans to tie university funding to social mix: "We will appoint a Higher Education Access Regulator, who will develop a framework for access agreements for each institution. Only institutions making satisfactory progress will be able to participate in the Graduate Contribution Scheme from 2006." What that means in plain English is that only those universities which achieve a "satisfactory" social mix will be allowed to take advantage of the new funds to be made available via top-up fees.

For the best universities, which are oversubscribed, that requires denying places to candidates not just from private schools but also from wealthy families, even if they have been to state school - however good their exam results - and giving those places to pupils from poor families, even if their results are weaker. It is clear, it is unambiguous and it is Government policy.

Except that it isn't, according to Tony Blair. At last week's Prime Minister's Question Time, Mr Blair was asked how he justified universities down the best qualified-students: "Simple. The point is that I wouldn't. And if they are doing that I think they are wrong. What is more, people should go to university based on their merit whatever their class background, and that is what should happen." So as far as the Prime Minister is concerned, his own Government's White Paper is wrong.

This is what is technically known as chaos.

While this type of discrimination is relatively new here, in the US, where it is known as "affirmative action" - it is longstanding. American universities routinely admit less qualified black and Hispanic students over better qualified whites and Asians. For all the good intent of such schemes, designed to give them a better start in life, the American experience indicates that they have an almost entirely destructive impact.

As one black academic, Thomas Sowell, has written: "Applying different standards to different groups saddles the 'beneficiaries' with a badge of inferiority that is impossible to shake. How can any black American prove that he would have been accepted at Harvard or Berkeley on his own merits? He can't. And that is part of the reason racial preferences must go."

It is ironic that, just as we are starting to make our entrance procedures discriminatory, the Americans are beginning to despair of theirs. The US Supreme Court is about to consider one such example, in Michigan, where a black medical student is 21 times more likely to be admitted than a white student with identical grades.

THERE is no difference in practice between Bristol's behaviour and American affirmative action programmes which make admission decisions based on skin colour. That is the logic of the Government's plans, despite the Prime Minister's Panglossian view of his own policy.

In America, such thinking has come close to destroying the very basis of academic standards. It is not yet too late to stop our own universities from being similarly infected. You do not solve the problems of educational opportunity by barring pupils who have been to good schools, of whatever sort. You do it by improving the bad schools that hold back so many British pupils.

Copyright 2003
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