ABSTRACT
Sir Lionel Robbins, in his review of higher education (HE) in 1963 (Robbins 1963) rightly pointed out that expansion of HE was both necessary, from an economic perspective, and just. At the time he wrote his seminal report, around one in twenty of each generation were fortunate enough to enter university. Since then, massification of higher education would appear to have been successful. The numbers entering higher education have increased dramatically in England over the last half century (Figure 3.1.1), with 43 per cent of each generation now receiving a university education. The Higher Education Initial Participation Rate (HEIPR) is calculated for individuals aged 17-30 and can be found at www.dcsf.gov.uk/rsgateway/ DB/SFR/s000716/SFR10_2007v1.pdf. Much of our focus is on the initial participation rate amongst those aged 18 and 19, which in 2005/06 stood at 21.3 per cent and 9.7 per cent respectively (see Table 2 of this link). Some groups in particular have also increased their participation relative to ‘traditional’ students (defining traditional as male, white and middle class). As we have seen, in particular, women now outnumber men in HE and clearly in those terms there has been noticeable progress in widening participation to previously under-represented groups. Yet the underlying concerns of Robbins, and later Lord Dearing (1997), about providing access to university for less advantaged students, remain a major policy issue (DfES 2003, 2006). In this section, we set out a quantitative analysis of who is participating in HE in England, and the extent to which there has been a successful widening of participation to ‘non-traditional’ groups of students. Newly linked administrative data enable us to consider the entire
population of state school children, including those who do not participate in HE, analysing their educational achievements from age 11 right through to potential university participation at age 18/19.
