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Reconceptualising fair access to highly academically selective universities, Higher Education

Boliver, V.; Banerjee, P.; Gorard, S.; Powell, M.

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Authors

P. Banerjee

M. Powell



Abstract

The higher education regulators for England have set challenging new widening access targets requiring universities to rethink “ how merit is judged in admissions” (OfS 2018: 8). 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 must 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. Here, we critically discuss the theoretical underpinnings of these two competing perspectives on fair access and review the existing empirical evidence base created as part of our ESRC-study of widening participation, for the first time. 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. This is until/unless the level of selection between higher education institutions within the higher education system is reduced or eliminated.

Citation

Boliver, V., Banerjee, P., Gorard, S., & Powell, M. (2022). Reconceptualising fair access to highly academically selective universities, Higher Education. Higher Education, 84(1), 85-100. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-021-00755-y

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Aug 18, 2021
Online Publication Date Sep 6, 2021
Publication Date 2022-07
Deposit Date Aug 24, 2021
Publicly Available Date Sep 9, 2021
Journal Higher Education
Print ISSN 0018-1560
Electronic ISSN 1573-174X
Publisher Springer
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 84
Issue 1
Pages 85-100
DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-021-00755-y

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Advanced Online Version This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.




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