The great university fraud

Stephen Pollard is a senior fellow at the Centre for the New Europe, a Brussels-based think tank.

I DOUBT if Tom Charlick, head boy at Eltham College, or Mark Smith, a pupil at Bedford School, are aware of a case which is about to go before the US Supreme Court. They have other things on their mind.

Despite each gaining nine Astars at GCSE, four As at ASlevel and being predicted to get four As at A-level by their teachers - "essentially the perfect credentials", as Mark's headmaster put it - they have been rejected by Bristol University.

They are far from being the only would-be Bristolians in the same position.

The university's admissions tutors are rejecting many other candidates with essentially perfect credentials, and we now learn, operating secret "quotas" to reduce the number of privately educated pupils who gain admission.

Durham, like Bristol, is in the eye of the storm for putting a limit on the number of privately educated students it admits - regardless of the grades they have achieved - and allocating those places to students with lesser qualifications. In doing that, it is merely doing what it has been urged to do by the Government. 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?

It is so obvious, you might think, that it hardly needs spelling out.

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 the Government talks about higher education, it is in practice, denying places to students with three A grades - "achievement" - and giving them to candidates who may not even have one - "potenshould-tial". The remorseless logic of this approach is that universities end up not only discriminating against privately educated pupils, but against the products of state schools with a solid record of achievement - and that is what is beginning to happen now.

Bristol has said it does not 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 Bristol, 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 we start to enter the twilight zone. 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 asked of universities. The White Paper revealed Labour's plan to tie 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 on access 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 - however bad their results. It 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 turning down the best qualified students. He said: "Simple. The point is that I wouldn't. And if they are doing that I think they are wrong. What is more, people 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.

That is where the US Supreme Court comes in.

While this type of discrimination is relatively new here, in the US - where it is known as "affirmative action" - it is longstanding. There, it is based not on class but race, because of the (factually incorrect) reasoning that blacks are, by definition, poorer than whites. 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."

THAT may soon happen. The Supreme Court is about to consider one such programme, 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 af firmat ive- ac t ion pro --grammes 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 denying university places to the well qualified. There is only one solution which does not bring more problems in its wake than it solves: improving the state schools from which university students come.

Copyright 2003
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