Slay In Your Lane: The Black Girl Bible. Yomi Adegoke
is deserving of a pat on the back. But it’s notable that while black British youths are more likely to go to university than their white British peers,22 they are also much less likely to attend the UK’s most selective universities. This is not an indictment of the universities that aren’t ranked at the top of the league tables, nor is it an endorsement of the frankly elitist system that sees some universities undervalued. Further education is just that: the furthering of education, and wherever that happens it should be valued. But it’s important to interrogate why the under-representation of black people in these institutions occurs, especially when statistics show that there are more young men from black backgrounds in prison in the UK than there are undergraduate black male students attending Russell Group universities.23 Black Britons of Caribbean heritage make up 1.1 per cent of all 15- to 29-year-olds in England and Wales and made up 1.5 per cent of all British students attending UK universities in 2012–13.24 Yet just 0.5 per cent of UK students at Russell Group universities are from Black Caribbean backgrounds,25 and there is little understanding of why this is the case.
One given reason is grades: black students are less likely to achieve the required results for entry to highly selective universities, which could help account for their lower rates of application.26 The stumbling blocks that affect black students in school are outlined in the previous chapter, and help contextualise why this often happens. But the more pressing issue that many gloss over is that even when they do achieve the same results,27 black applicants are less likely to be offered places than their white peers. In 2016, despite record numbers of applications and better predicted A-level grades (and the fact that UCAS predicted 73 per cent of black applications should have been successful),28 only 70 per cent of black applicants received offers of places, compared to 78 per cent of white applicants.
In the same year, Oxford University’s offer rate for black students fell to its lowest level since 2013, with just one in six being offered places, compared to one in four white students. In 2016 again, just 95 black students were offered Oxbridge places – 45 by Oxford and 50 by Cambridge. The 50 black students offered a place at Cambridge were chosen from just 220 applications, but the rate of offers to black students was far lower than that of white students: 22.2 per cent of black students who applied to Cambridge were offered a place, compared with 34.5 per cent of white students. Similarly, at Oxford University the offer rate for black students was just 16.7 per cent, while 26.3 per cent of white students were offered a place. The lack of black students at these institutions often leads to confusion, shock and at times outright disbelief from those both in and outside the uni on the rare occasions when they encounter them. Afua was on the receiving end of this many times during her student years:
‘When I would go to the shops in Oxford and local people worked there, they would often try to be friendly, asking, “Are you a student?” and I’d be like, yes, and they’d say, “Brookes?” and I’d be like, no, Oxford, and they’d be like, yeah, “Oxford Brookes.” It was just, why do you care anyway? It was local people. Sometimes when I went to Oxford student things, people would assume that I was from Brookes and not Oxford. I never really felt comfortable going to the Oxford Union and I think that this was part of the reason why. I was conscious that there was this other university that had many black people nearby. It was just a very common, frequent, casual interaction with local people and students, clubs and bars where that would happen. Sometimes I would show my student card for a discount or something and they would be like, “Oxford University?” in surprise. It was just the classic microaggression, often not meant to be offensive, and it makes you feel you have to explain yourself, where a white student would never have to explain themselves.’
Outside of Oxbridge, the success rate of black students applying to other highly selective universities – such as Russell Group institutions – also remains an issue, despite a sharp rise in applications from qualified students and the apparent ‘commitment to diversity’ we continue to hear about from just about every institution. In 2016, 61 per cent of black applicants were awarded places in these selective universities – an improvement on the year before. But according to UCAS’s predictions, 64 per cent could have done so. Professor Vikki Boliver, a lecturer in sociology at Durham University who has carried out research on applications and acceptances of different ethnic groups at Russell Group universities, said this may also occur because BAME students’ grades are more likely to be under-predicted. If this were true, she said, it would give backing to the argument for a post-qualifications application system for universities, with ‘judgements based on fact, rather than predictions’.
She also suggested that name-blind applications could be the remedy for the current prevalent unconscious bias:
‘Leaving people’s names off UCAS forms would be an experiment to see if people are being influenced by names … If we don’t have very clear procedures when selecting people for jobs or places on courses that mitigate against those stereotypes, there may be the danger that we unconsciously fall back on them … We may feel that certain people will “fit in” better.’29
The Universities of Exeter, Huddersfield, Liverpool and Winchester are currently piloting a system in which the names of applicants are hidden during admissions, in order to stop potential discrimination based on assumptions about students’ names. But this is a mere drop in a tsunami of prejudice, bias and stereotyping in higher education.
The Russell Group responded to these findings with the argument that minority applicants have lower offer rates than their white peers with the same A-level results because they are less likely to have studied the specific A-level subjects required for entry to their chosen courses.30 They also cited research31 that suggests offer rates are lower because ethnic minorities are more likely to apply to heavily oversubscribed degree subjects such as medicine or law, perhaps as a result of the parental steering we discussed earlier. An in-house analysis of the data by UCAS also corroborated this, stating that a significant part of the reason for ethnic disparities in offer rates at Russell Group universities was down to subject choice.32 Neither UCAS nor the Russell Group, however, have published detailed statistics to support their arguments.
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Education, education, education
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We may be under-represented in the Russell Group and other selective institutions but, interestingly, black students are over-represented and white and Asian students under-represented in other higher-education establishments. In these other institutions, there is a 14.3 per cent under-representation of Asian students and a 3.1 per cent under-representation of white students, compared to a 56.4 per cent over-representation of black students across the student body, at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.
This over-representation of black students is especially apparent at newer, post-1992 universities, and institutions with highly diverse student bodies. While some universities are almost completely white (in 2014, Ulster only had a 3 per cent non-white student body),33 at others minority students make up almost three-quarters of the student body with a corresponding under-representation of Asian and white students. Anecdotally, some think this imbalance may be due to a lack of information regarding university choices within the black community. Alexis Oladipo, founder of healthy food range Gym Bites, explains that for her, going to university was more about getting a degree, and not where it was from:
‘I wanted to go to Kingston and Hertfordshire; Kingston because all of my friends were going there, and then Hertfordshire because there was a course that was interesting. Hertfordshire was my first choice, Kingston my second. I didn’t get into Kingston and then for Hertfordshire, my grades weren’t good enough so they transferred me to a foundation course, so that’s why I had to go to clearing to get into Roehampton.
‘Initially before choosing, my school helped with basic stuff – personal statements and the rest of it – but nothing substantial. Then [with] my mum, it was just a case of going to uni so, “sort yourself out” and all that kind of stuff. I just kind of got on with it really. I didn’t have a great desire to go to university, I just knew that it was something [that]