Competing conceptions of fair admission and their implications for supporting students to fulfil their potential at university

Boliver, Vikki; Powell, Mandy

doi:10.1080/13603108.2022.2063429

Competing conceptions of fair admission and their implications for supporting students to fulfil their potential at university

Boliver, Vikki; Powell, Mandy

Authors

Professor Vikki Boliver vikki.boliver@durham.ac.uk
Professor

Mandy Powell

Abstract

This paper explores how fairness was conceptualised by those responsible for admission to highly selective undergraduate courses at 17 universities in England. Fairness was conceptualised principally with reference to the traditional meritocratic equality of opportunity paradigm, which holds that university places should go to the most highly qualified candidates irrespective of social background. There was sympathy for an alternative meritocratic equity of opportunity model of fairness, involving the assessment of prospective students’ qualifications in light of their socio-economic circumstances. However, our interviewees reported institutional resistance to reducing academic entry requirements for socio-economically disadvantaged students for fear of setting them up to fail, and acknowledged that existing pedagogical practices and academic support structures were inadequate for the task of supporting disadvantaged students entering with lower grades to fulfil their potential at university.

Citation

Boliver, V., & Powell, M. (2023). Competing conceptions of fair admission and their implications for supporting students to fulfil their potential at university. Perspectives: Policy and Practice in Higher Education, 27(1), 8-15. https://doi.org/10.1080/13603108.2022.2063429

Journal Article Type	Article
Online Publication Date	Apr 24, 2022
Publication Date	2023
Deposit Date	Jul 5, 2022
Publicly Available Date	Mar 10, 2023
Journal	Perspectives: Policy and Practice in Higher Education
Print ISSN	1360-3108
Electronic ISSN	1460-7018
Publisher	Association of University Administrators
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	27
Issue	1
Pages	8-15
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1080/13603108.2022.2063429

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This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.