ABSTRACT
The UK higher education sector has rarely enjoyed policy stability, but the first 16 years of the twenty-first century have seen a series of important upheavals marking the latter stages of the 50-year evolution from a planned elite system to a mass market, as well as a shift from a public good to a private investment. This chapter talks about the sustained policy efforts during this period to create 'fairer' and 'wider' access to higher education institutions and, with a particular focus on elite universities where the social inequalities remain starkest. It discusses the history of policy development and examines national administrative data concerning applications and admissions by various proxies for socio-economic status, and explores the role of ethnicity and entry qualifications. One of the lesser-known observations made under the auspices of the Dearing Review is that young people with similar qualification profiles progress to higher education at approximately similar rates, regardless of their socio-economic status.
