Reconceptualising Fair Access to Highly Academically Selective Universities

Autor/inn/en	Boliver, Vikki; Banerjee, Pallavi; Gorard, Stephen; Powell, Mandy
Titel	Reconceptualising Fair Access to Highly Academically Selective Universities
Quelle	In: Higher Education: The International Journal of Higher Education Research, 84 (2022) 1, S.85-100 (16 Seiten)Infoseite zur Zeitschrift PDF als Volltext Verfügbarkeit
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	0018-1560
DOI	10.1007/s10734-021-00755-y
Schlagwörter	Access to Education; Higher Education; Admission Criteria; Selective Admission; College Admission; Foreign Countries; Academic Achievement; Socioeconomic Background; Educational Change; United Kingdom (England) + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Education; Access; Bildung; Zugang; Bildungszugang; Hochschulbildung; Hochschulsystem; Hochschulwesen; Admission; Admission procedures; Zulassungsbedingung; Zulassungsverfahren; Zulassung; Bildungsselektion; Hochschulzugang; Hochschulzulassung; Ausland; Schulleistung; Sozioökonomische Lage; Bildungsreform
Abstract	The higher education regulator for England has set challenging new widening access targets requiring universities to rethink how merit is judged in admissions. Universities are being encouraged to move away from the traditional meritocratic equality of opportunity model of fair access, which holds that university places should go to the most highly qualified candidates irrespective of social background, in accordance with the principles of procedural fairness. Instead, they are being asked to move towards what we term the meritocratic equity of opportunity model, which holds that prospective students' qualifications should be judged in light of the socioeconomic circumstances in which these were obtained to enhance distributive fairness, a practice known in the UK as contextualised admissions. In this paper, we critically discuss the theoretical underpinnings of these two competing perspectives on fair access and review the existing empirical evidence base, drawing together for the first time insights from our ESRC and Nuffield Foundation funded studies of fair access to highly academically selective universities in England. We argue that reconceptualising fair access in terms of distributive fairness rather than procedural fairness offers a more socially just set of principles on which to allocate valuable but scarce places at the most academically selective universities in England, unless or until such time as the vertical stratification of higher education institutions is reduced or eliminated entirely. (As Provided).
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Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2024/1/01