ABSTRACT
Introduction In recent years, policy making in the UK higher education sector has been preoccupied with how the system can be expanded to address two broad imperatives. The first relates to the perceived national economic need for an increase in the supply of people with higher-level knowledge and skills. The second relates to the ‘social inclusion agenda’, promoted by the current Labour government, which seeks to widen participation in higher education by traditionally under-represented groups. Prior to the period of expansion in the 1980s and 1990s, higher education was primarily considered as a route for the minority academic elite. This population was relatively homogeneous as students were mainly aged 18-21, were male, white, from middle or upper social classes, entered university with good A level grades, and studied full-time (McNair, 1993). Although young people’s participation has increased to over 30 per cent, with take up by young women growing particularly strongly, there are still major concerns (as has been pointed out elsewhere in this book) that those from lower socio-economic groups and from certain ethnic backgrounds are still seriously under-represented. I suggest in this chapter that, ironically, the policy debate about widening participation has too often limited its focus to the proportion of young people taking up higher education. Whilst this concern is clearly important, it fails to highlight the massive growth in take up of higher education by mature students over the past 20 plus years.
