Regional social mobility under threat as universities ignore local applicants for London admissions

A report by the Social Market Foundation (SMF), a cross-party think tank, has highlighted prominent geographical disparities within the university admissions process.

A primary focus of the SMF report, entitled ‘Leave to Achieve’, is the deteriorating relationship between many universities and their local areas, with the report highlighting how these inequalities have undermined efforts to promote social mobility.

The effect whereby universities focus on internal needs and desires, disregarding prospective students from the areas in which they are geographically located, is referred to as ‘town and gown’, and can create subsequent divisions between academic institutions and locals.

Universities are frequently opting for London applicants over their local counterparts, heightening this divisive effect.

A focus on student intake from the capital has meant that participation targets designed to enable mobility are instead inadvertently suppressing it

While this has had a beneficial impact on London, with the area substantially outperforming the rest of the UK in terms of progression onto higher education, it has eroded the path of university education as a means of enabling social mobility, particularly in regions where tertiary education is already limited, such as the North East.

Leave to Achieve has called on universities to reach widening participation targets by taking in more students from their local area.

A focus on student intake from the capital has meant that participation targets designed to enable mobility are instead inadvertently suppressing it.

In the report’s foreword, Sarah Smith MP wrote that the SMF’s research “asks difficult but necessary questions about how universities serve their local communities… [while offering] constructive, practical ideas for how they might do so more deliberately and more effectively”.

She concluded by broadening the responsibility for addressing admissions inequality to policymakers both within and outside the education sector, stating that “opportunity should not depend on luck or location”.

Access initiatives […] were praised within the report for attempting to rectify this issue, and for aiming to increase admission links within their respective geographic locations

The SMF’s report did note, however, that the “bypassing [of] local disadvantaged students”  is not a universal concern.

Access initiatives, such as those found at the Universities of Warwick, Middlesex, and Durham, were praised in the report for attempting to rectify this issue, and for aiming to increase admission links within their respective geographic locations.

However, as previously reported by The Boar, at Warwick, just over one in 10 students are from the West Midlands. 21 other elite universities also possess international student numbers greater than those from the institutions’ surrounding regions.

The ‘town and gown’ divergence is becoming more dramatic as universities become less connected to their local areas, further stifling social mobility within the UK’s most deprived regions.