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Manifesto idea #30: Sonia Sodha (@soniasodha)

  • 1 June 2018
  • By Sonia Sodha

This blog is part of the series featuring ideas contained in the new HEPI-Brightside report, Reaching the parts of society universities have missed: A manifesto for the new Director for Fair Access and ParticipationIt showcases the idea from Sonia Sodha, Chief Leader Writer at The Observer.


If we were really committed to improving access to top universities, we would bite the bullet and introduce class-based quotas. Progress on this front has been pathetically slow: yes, young people from disadvantaged backgrounds are going to universities in greater numbers than before, but they remain disproportionately shut out of the highest-ranking institutions.

Between 2010 and 2015, four-in-five students admitted to Oxford and Cambridge came from the top two social classes; only 6 per cent had parents in routine or semi-manual work. This matters: where you graduate from profoundly affects your lifetime earnings.

Enough is enough. It is time to recognise our top universities are more zero-sum than we have previously acknowledged. The Office for Students should reintroduce a cap on student numbers – there is some evidence the economic gains from increasing student numbers stalled back in the mid-2000s – and introduce hard quotas for students from working- class backgrounds for each university.

This would help break down the unfair and stubborn middle- class lock on privilege. It would also force more middle-class students down a vocational route – surely the only way we are ever going to get parity of esteem between post-18 vocational and academic qualifications.

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