- Good universities will have to admit more poorly qualified
students from disadvantaged backgrounds if they want to charge higher fees,
and there are at least nine ways they can go about it, a Government committee
said yesterday.
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- It acknowledged that A-level grades were the best guide
to academic success and that there was no evidence of any university discriminating
against applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds. Young people from such
backgrounds were under-represented because they failed to achieve the necessary
grades. Only 23 per cent of those from manual backgrounds gained two or
more A-levels by the age of 18 compared with 47 per cent from non-manual
backgrounds.
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- However, Prof Steven Schwartz, the vice-chancellor of
Brunel and the committee's chairman, said universities were not admitting
enough "non-traditional" students and were insufficiently aware
of the "educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body".
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- The most obvious solution was to ask applicants from
lower social classes and low-achieving schools for lower A-level grades,
as about half of universities already did.
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- That recognised the obstacles such applicants had overcome
and took account of the fact that "merit is measured not only by where
one stands, but by how far one had to go to get there".
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- Universities had to ensure that students admitted with
lower marks would be able to complete their courses without academic standards
being further lowered.
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- Other ways - none of them problem-free - of admitting
more disadvantaged students included taking their "position in class"
into account, guaranteeing places to a top percentage in every school or
college, setting applicants an American-style scholastic ability test,
interviewing applicants, favouring those who would be the first in their
family to go to university, and finding objective ways of judging how well
organised applicants were, how well they worked independently, how motivated
they were to learn and how interested they were in the subject they planned
to study.
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- Prof Schwartz said the committee had deliberately come
up with more questions than answers because it wanted to know what the
public thought would lead to a fair and equitable admissions system.
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- Alan Johnson, the higher education minister, said universities
seeking Government permission to charge higher fees from 2006 would have
to prove that applicants from poorer backgrounds were "not disadvantaged
but encouraged and enabled" to enter.
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- © Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2003.
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