This particular college, but the way the university, indeed nationally, I think there's a wide consensus that the benefits economic,
social and cultural postgraduate study is substantial,
but a real lack of understanding on who it is that is going on in this country to postgraduate study and why.
And that hinders the development of very sensible policies. It's clear, anecdotally, that there are social, gender, race and disability inequalities,
and UK post-graduate numbers appear to have plateaued and in some subject areas are even in decline.
And very limited funding means it is highly likely that students from less privileged backgrounds will be priced out.
There is concern, therefore,
that postgraduate education may well be the new frontier for the perpetuation of privilege that will not only have an impact on social mobility,
but also on the diversity of our post-graduate community and our future academics, researchers and on the outputs from that research.
So here to discuss those issues, we have a very skilled and experienced team.
Today's presentation will be by Professor Paul Wakeling from the University of York,
and Paul is currently the head of department at the University of York,
and he runs the master's module on research methods in education, supervising both undergraduate and postgraduate students.
He's a sociologist of education with particular interest in higher education and particularly as access to postgraduate study and social inequalities.
His work has included analysis of the relationship between social class and postgraduate study,
evaluation of initiatives to widen postgraduate participation,
investigations of the association between student finance and participation and of institutional hierarchies and stratification.
He joined the Department of Education at the University of York after 2000 in 2008,
after a previous career in Higher Education Administration, who were very much looking forward to your presentation.
And after that, we'll have a response from to respond as well.
I'll introduce as we get to that point. So for the flaws you're suffering from, very much so.
Good evening, everybody. Thank you very much to Simon and Joanne for inviting me to talk this evening.
Absolutely delighted to see you all.
And it's great to see that so many people have given up their time to talk about what I think is a really important issue.
So first of all, I wanted to say happy birthday to the Department of Education,
and I just know this is the 100th anniversary and we have only about 50 something so good for it.
And I'm I'm kind of coming full circle a bit I can coming back to Oxford to speak about these issues because
I think it was my frustration at not being able to get a place to study at Oxford as a postgraduate,
although having a place, but not being able to afford to come.
That really got me interested in these issues in the first place,
and I think some of those concerns that I had at the time and frustration that I had at the time really lingered.
But I think also instituted this in more detail.
There are lots of things that I didn't say that he thought about in relation to other people's situation.
When we think of acts as the coast needs to be really important.
So I was hoping to be a student at Newfield, which I thought was great to have your own police.
Of course, here we are going to coach is going to be the name of my favourite football Lester.
But also I graduate only college as well. And this is not the place really for it in this seminar.
But I think if I was that, the education minister would probably have to be the dictator of the country to get this sort of thing to you.
Oxford would be a graduate of the university, so that was something that I going to talk about.
I say being is one of the details that could give you some some background and try to kind of bring you up to speed quickly on the research.
So I will be skipping through. Those are quite the place, maybe when they keep me in line with the calling me thinking about the growth that was Nic
was talking about in postgraduate to study the connexion between postgraduate education,
social mobility services within the Muslim world.
What we know about inequalities of access and what we might, how we what use this knowledge to think about what we might do for us in practise.
I'll probably skip past the question of why we should care. So that's for a different time.
I'm kind of assuming I'm preaching to the choir of it here, and I won't talk too much about.
Contextual indicators of measurement, because I know you've got an absolute expert on that, if we keep all of it coming to give you the next seminar.
So that's maybe something we can pick up on questions and discussion.
Let's start off then by thinking about the bigger picture for postgraduate qualifications.
And one thing we know is about the global expansion of higher education.
And so you've written on these questions. Here we have student numbers in the UK, and the dark green is undergraduate numbers,
which is why we've decided to take us back to the 19th century phenomenal growth that we've seen.
But what many people have not noticed is this huge growth in postgraduate numbers, which has really been really very sharp, especially post 99.
So we start to see with this sort a second and 1990s 1992 for the take off in undergraduate numbers.
At that point, we get getting this list of in postgraduate numbers as well.
So that was at the beginning of the period. Here 1960, only about seven percent of students in university were postgraduate.
It's now almost a fifth of college graduates.
And of course, at University of Oxford, it's a much higher number.
We also know that it pays to be thought to have a postgraduate qualification, and this hasn't always been the case, but latterly it certainly is.
And what we have here is data from the OECD,
which shows the advantage of having a first degree and having a postgraduate against somebody who's not got either of those qualifications.
So somebody has got a secondary education.
If we assume that earnings are an index of 100, then somebody with the the fashionable mustard colour would be getting.
That figure varies from country to country, but everywhere you are, it pays to have a first degree.
And everywhere you are, it pays to have a postgraduate degree, and the amount of that benefit varies again from country to country.
So I think it's the highest in the states and the lowest in Sweden for many in Sweden, for a yes.
But it's there and these these figures have been updated. It's very similar.
But I think somebody else's slide that we to be able to because of the same sort of picture and we know very specific cultural references.
It's not going to be the new entrants. Not many people would recognise me and say so if we look at the latest data on the
longitudinal educational practises based on tax data for linked to graduate records,
and we can see that in different subjects, you get a different earnings premium.
So actually, it's pretty good news if you are doing education.
So this is maybe something to go in the publicity material for the German and my powers.
You get a substantial earnings premium for being a postgraduate, but if you're a historian, maybe not some of your very strong convictions.
So maybe somebody like that. But certainly there is generally that advantage and that I think has raised a number of concerns.
So there are different commentators that talk about access in general that have pointed to issues in these areas.
So Alan Milburn no longer the social mobility tsar, but he's talked about post-graduate education being a social mobility timebomb,
a really dramatic language, the new frontier for social mobility,
according to the Self-insure, said, What are we doing on improving access to undergraduate level,
but simply kicking the can down the road with passing that inequality bill to the next level?
So real concern about about that possibility.
And that's something that my colleague Daniel Lawson and I have looked at using data from the Labour Force Survey.
And what we try to do here was look at the changes over time from a snapshot of the working age population
in the proportion of people that had postgraduate qualifications based on their social class of origin.
So what we've got with the different coloured bars is your social class about ecology,
starting with professional managerial and working down to routine occupations which are generally lower pay and work conditions.
And you can see that people who went to university some time ago there really aren't many social class differences if you've got a first degree.
It's just statistical noise that the differences between people and as we come forward in time to the newest generation,
you can see those bars start to tip over.
And in fact, when we get to this final youngest set of students graduates here, there are clear, statistically significant differences.
And so what we're seeing is as the population of graduates expands, so the inequalities in postgraduate education seem to expand.
And in another talk, I would go to some of the sociological theory why that might be the case.
But we certainly see that in the studies that have been done about access to graduate degrees at the point of, you know, when you're kind of 25 or so.
So the Bobbins committee looked at this found there weren't really many inequalities when you've got a first degree.
There was a social scientist called Ernest Wood in the 1970s did a very large study, similar sorts of computer ages.
But you jump forward to work. I did with colleague Julien Hampton Thomson, and we did start to find social class inequalities.
So we're seeing that message really coming through.
The paradox is this as sociologists, we tend to find that your background effects reduce in size and importance the further through education you get.
So the biggest social class inequalities are the early stages in very early education in GCSE in this country,
and they're smaller as you progressed forward because the educationally successful they like each other.
And you know, if you think about who your friends might be,
they often tend to be people who are maybe very different to you in some ways, but in lots of ways, you're all very similar.
And so it's a bit of a paradox here.
You always seeing kind of modernisation of these effects because I always say the tightening of the inequality,
the postgraduate level, which is tied into.
People have looked at this in America and they found a similar pattern.
So all the cities see very different kinds of inequality, for example.
And later research is contradicting this and particularly recently from INSEAD, a torch is talked about U-shaped inequality.
So actually, inequality is getting worse at graduate level.
So this pattern of declining coefficients decline, declining background effects and then kind of ramping back up again in the post-graduate career.
And they should look it again with newer data and said, Oh, well, actually, no,
if you've got a doctoral degree that kind of levels the playing field again.
But for women, this is perverse openness because it's a level playing field,
but it means there's very little difference in salaries across the way, across education levels.
So it's amongst many in America where education makes more.
Explanation of her salary, and it's something else to bear in mind is that often the data we have about access to post-Katrina study is
focussed on that immediate transition from finishing first degree go straight on to your next qualification.
And that's only a minority of those graduates. Most people leave graduate, go do something else and come back.
But what we see in the data that we have available is not actually the inequality the smallest.
That immediate point of transition to what's going on was quite surprised when I first saw that finding.
But it does make sense when you think about it and so straight after your degree.
These are the different background groups that we see. So, for example, going on to a short master's degree,
almost no difference there between people from the most advantaged and the least developed neighbourhoods.
And you can see by the end, like nine years after graduation, there's a clear difference in progression rate.
So I would have expected at the point when you first graduate, given that you've not got a job,
I would have thought that would be where your financial aid would make the difference.
So maybe this is telling us that people are differentially returning to graduate
education based on not getting what they might want in the labour market,
having to just look great to get where they want to be.
So summarising that brief whizz through the background context, then we see very substantial growth in high school diploma since 1990.
We've seen that connexion between having a postgraduate publication and income tightening over time and it increasing.
But some mixed evidence about, well, precisely what is going on.
OK, so let's zoom in now and think about what inequality we might see in access to high school in to city at the point of entry.
Secondly, looking later in career was completely 18 or younger.
Well, it's a very complex picture where there's a number of things we need to take into account.
One is field of study. We all know what we were just looking at historian's expense when we announced different earnings.
We know there's really different patterns in the kind of high school I was getting into, but do so in an education department.
Lots of people going through see far fewer people go on to do a Ph.D. course in maths physical sciences.
Lots of people go to a Ph.D. that go on to a master's degree, but it's raging.
So we need to take that into account. If you make something like 99 percent of medical graduates go into medicine,
and so they're not going to do their own special sort of postgraduate school.
So we've got these differences in the composition of different kinds of postgraduate course,
whether it's a PGCE, whether it's a Ph.D., whether it's a master's or something else.
We have really significant differences in institutional patterns.
So graduate students are not probably the same across colleges in Oxford.
They're graduate students are not distributed randomly across the same in the same pattern rather as they are first degree level.
We've got very different concentrations. So, for example, I think the largest Ph.D. institution is Cambridge.
OK. And then students have got different intentions and motivations for doing a postgraduate course.
So if there's some people that claim they want to be an academic, this is that we've got to go.
We have to probably get a master's in the field.
For some people, they've got to be a professional destination in mind, which might be law in my teaching and my social work.
And some people are out into their career and then using the highest rated courses, continued professional development,
basketball, part time and there are plenty people who are just biding time didn't know what else to do.
Gordon hang around for another year and so on, so nobody will tell you that that's them.
But lots of people know somebody who's likely to be OK.
So having taken that complexity into account? Have a look at some of the old patterns again.
So if we look at gender here, we've got up until about five years ago,
the gender of people getting a first degree and the red line is women and the blue line is men.
And so about the point when I finish my first degree.
We've been married, a very small majority of them for you.
And that's expunged and majority's expanded considerably. So this is something that's often talked about in the national press and so on that.
We've been dominated for at least numerically at undergraduate level,
but if we look at what happens at master's level, we see a very different pattern.
So here is that same point, man in a large majority of people and women considered to be underrepresented
compared to that representation representation of first degree graduates.
And that quickly converges. And now we've got a kind of endless fluctuation of having to go on over time.
So we've seen sort of the catch up putting that level again.
We start up with that similar pattern to what we see a master's level and start to see a convergence.
But he plateaus out. And I think if we took this forward, we might see converging a little bit more.
But essentially, we still got that male majority that is pretty level and so of fixed subjectivity part of that, but not all of it.
So putting those together, you can see that women's representation at the postgraduate level has increased,
but he's not caught up to his level at first degree level, and it doesn't seem to be a pattern of convergence happening.
So it's not like, you know, we can usually say, Well, come over here, and eventually we'll get to the point where we would call caught off.
That doesn't seem to be happening.
If we look within individual subjects, we can look at total progression into a tool masters and progression into a Ph.D.
And so if you look at what we see is that actually for most disciplines,
if we look at immediately finishing a first degree and going on to a postgraduate degree.
Men are more likely to do that than women and women are in the majority of French ready level because there's more women in first degree level.
But the rates show you that the most subjects men seem to have an advantage.
And the standouts that don't fit the Panopto mathematical and computing sciences, and I think it is engineering student one Yeah.
So engineering those two subjects that we hear a lot about in terms of gender inequality are the only ones where
women have a higher rate of progression because that's a much smaller number of women that we're talk talking about.
And we can we can maybe chat about what the reasons for that might be later on.
And similarly, when we look at PhDs, so we've got a slightly different path here again.
So engineering again comes out looking fairly, fairly equal, but elsewhere, it's broadly the same of to go on.
And that's the case in many subjects where women are in the majority as well.
So which hides this kind of gender inequality, it seems to be happening.
And then you've got subjects where there is a large majority of men, but there's still a much higher likelihood that men are going to go on to.
Again, this is immediately. Ethnicity, the picture is very complicated,
but there are some clear things that clear signals where we should have really
quite significant concern and think so if we look at mass this progression.
It's a really mixed picture. So we've got some groups which are higher than the kind of white British majority group and some lover.
So I mean,
we've got clear differences within broad ethnic categories between these and these are not always very useful way to understanding what's happening.
So looking at mass, this study, for example, black African students have got the sort of second or third highest rates of
progression than the black Caribbean students have got the lowest rate of progression.
So different things happening there and in looking at going to PhD,
which is particularly concerning because this this is the pool of future academics.
We can see that except for the British born Chinese group, the unknowns,
then every other group has got a lower rate of progression to DHT than the white group.
And for many of these groups, it's it's really shocking, really.
And I think this is something that I think you have to do to keep on the research
councils about whether this is not something that's what you carry forward.
But if you look at the allocation of student chips, if you look at application data, I think that is a concern.
Right, so I said I was going to skip through this very quickly, moving on to social class differences.
Now this is if somebody came to me with this chart in a thesis, I'd say that made that data because it's just too pretty.
So is it just these kind of steps that go all the way down?
And so what this is showing here is progression to a master's degree by the degree classification you've got to by your social class of all regions.
And we can see some good news in that. I mean, I think we hope that people with the highest qualifying had the highest rate of progression.
So those were the first class of whatever group that far more likely to go on to.
Those are two to one and so on down the achievement rates.
But of course, then within each grade, there's a clear social class gradient as well.
So it's the case that if you go to a two one and you're from a professional managerial background,
you're only slightly less likely to go on with somebody for routine social class background.
You got a first. And similar sorts of patterns, if we're looking at and taught a degree, an institution,
and I think this is one of the key things I think for the rocks with is the is the kind of institutional aspects of this.
You can see that going to a different sort of first degree institution affects your
likelihood of or is associated with your likelihood of going on to the Tour Ivy grade.
So those in the Russell Group and the old 09:43, which doesn't exist anymore,
have a much higher rate of aggression than those from these other mission groups oppose 92 universities.
And that's so the institution seems to be doing more work for the social class here.
So we've got to kind of sorting going on, which perhaps if we look at it in detail, is not like the old tripartite system.
If we look at research degrees and [INAUDIBLE] have picked up Oxbridge as a separate group,
it's maybe a little bit more positive news in terms of social class.
Although this way this this group here, which is graduates from a routine social class background.
So social class seven at Oxford or Cambridge, that's a very big bar,
represented a very small group of people that take two of them out and they would probably drop down or something.
So we shouldn't get too excited by that. But if we look at diversity, for example, that just looks like noise in the patterns there.
So what's doing quite a bit of the work here is the institution that you've gone to.
Now the problem there is we've got people going on to a Ph.D. from these institutions.
But this is where the disadvantaged students are. So if we're looking for those people who you know, this applies to ethnicity as well,
we look into those people who are underrepresented, they're much less likely to be here.
This is where they are, and they're not making that transition into the Ph.D. study.
And a colleague and I know pastor at Newcastle University looked at this qualitatively,
so we did a study of an interview study of people who were doing PhDs in a Russell Group University Philosophy
University who's 92 University and an ancient university which was in the south of England and was formed before 13:00.
So let me go to two places under $20.
And what we found that was really interesting patterns of people moving through the state.
So the interesting thing I think from my point of view was that when we look at people's access to educational opportunity,
we often talk about the cultivated and the concerted cultivation of the middle classes and people who
are very aware of opportunities and are very much being strategic in securing those opportunities,
either for themselves or for their children. And what we found when we spoke to these students was something slightly different.
And when we spoke to this group, Reverend Russell Group universities all about who were coming from it was a dream university to Oxbridge.
They were being very strategic. They understood how the system worked.
They devoted work to find out, use their contacts, carefully explicit school funding.
But when we spoke to students at the Post 92 universities and at the Oxbridge University,
we found that they weren't strategic whatsoever and that in many cases the opportunity just appeared.
It would literally be the tap on the shoulder. Hey, we've got these funding. We think you'd be good.
Why don't you apply for it? So very similar patterns, but very different outcomes,
mainly related to the resources that were available to research students in the different institutions.
So, you know, we had students who were complaining that the facilities just weren't suitable for them to even complete their research.
And students here who had not really thought about it, but then there was a kind of set of opportunities were put in front of them,
which allowed them to make a real success of it, even sometimes having coasted repeatedly in the 68 state.
Since we're in the Department of Education, a quick word about the PGCE, which is a postgraduate qualification,
this is something that you can already get funded through the student loans company. And here we see the usual social class inequalities.
I'll be talking about flipped over. So actually, the most advantaged students are the least likely to do.
So if PGCE. And this because of me when I first saw this fine day, but actually when I thought about it, it made complete sense.
So if you're the child of a barista and becoming a schoolteacher is downward mobility, if what we factor was,
you know, the sort of thing my dad would have said to me about being a teacher is, that's a great job for.
He sat down most of the day the holidays at the pensions are good and you inside so you can replace a completely different way of thinking about it.
And this is something we know. This is a longstanding trend, actually.
When people look at this back to the early expansion of compulsory schooling, we see these sorts of problems in the teaching profession.
And I believe there is a similar pattern still amongst Oxford graduates in that box of
dollars from disadvantaged backgrounds are more likely to go into teaching than families.
Okay, so that was rather strange through some of the evidence.
Not because I wanted to leave a bit of time to talk about questions of policy and practise,
and this is something that we might pick up on the discussion. So I think mostly the policy attention in this area has come from undergraduate fees.
Undergraduate fees went up to nine thousand and somebody realised that, Oh dear,
this is going to perhaps cause a problem if people are debt averse and want to get on to be to do postgraduate qualifications.
We're going to see a hit on the postgraduate participation and a whole sense of think tanks, including more and lobby groups.
In the end, U.S. Universities UK, the Institute of Public Policy Research Centre Forum, which is a Liberal Democrat think tank,
usually paused there for laughter, all written about the lack of funding at high school level.
So there's a whole series of reports that came out about that not being funding for postgraduate.
And this has led to some policy action in England.
And then I was where that started with something I was involved in in 2014 through Education Funding Council,
which was the postgraduate support scheme, and that was a pilot project to set up a whole range of activities in different universities,
one of which was Oxford to look at ways we might provide scholarships to high school students to
differently and really give the area a bit of love because it's generally quite neglected in policy terms.
And so some of those were providing scholarships for students from disadvantaged backgrounds by various different measures.
Oxford scaling was a good one, very generous,
but I think it struggled because the application deadline was so close to the announcement of the whole thing.
It's just very difficult to get much publicity out about it.
So there's a full report on that which you can have a look at if you're interested.
And then that was followed up the following year by the second phase of postgraduate support scheme,
which was the repurposed and access opportunity for the school now.
So there was a second set of bursaries that the government made available, and then they stopped doing that and turned it into postgraduate funding.
And that was then budget is 10000 for 10000. So 10000 scholarships of £10000,
which are distributed to English universities to give out to students from disadvantaged backgrounds who would pay the higher fee.
And that then was followed fairly quickly by the announcement of a master's loan policy for England.
And those loans are spread in different guises to the rest of the whole nation.
So you can now in any of the home nations, get a loan, the amount creeping up, but it's basically about £10000 is repayable.
Usually concurrently with the first degree is income contingent.
There's no means test and so on. So we now have some data about the effect of these loans,
and it's not very often we get a sociologist giving the good news, so we're going to make the most of this.
But it does appear that the loan policy has made a positive difference in terms of widening participation on socioeconomic grounds,
but also with some of the good news as well.
What we've got here is the first year that we have the introduction of the most of loans, which I think was the second big area of higher fees.
And I mean, you don't need a degree of statistics to. Work out what's going there.
We've got in a fairly flat line of people progressing from a first degree to a masters.
The loans come in. I'm not going to write so many more people going on to do a masters than they were before the policy was in place.
But the number of people drawing down the loans was much higher than the growth.
So that's what economists would call deadweight.
We're funding off to people with a loan with subsidised loans for people who would have otherwise paid,
but the benefit is that we get an increase in participation from college groups.
And so here we have looking at those social class differences again, pre and post masters.
And we've just taken a snapshot here of two different years that you can see that for every social class with the participation rate was expanded.
But the difference is here, there's still differences except for this group, but they are very much shallower differences than they were here.
So this is the very early results from this. We ended any kind of modelling or they were just doing a snapshot.
Compare one thing to the other.
And it does seem to suggest that the loan policies have helped, and we can also see some good news in terms of ethnicity.
So the increasing rate of participation across different groups has been highest for those from black and Asian backgrounds.
And similarly, if we're looking at that immediate progression, we can see the and the women are starting to catch up after their own policy.
So the odds ratio, what's the the relative odds of men and women going on has gotten narrower.
It's got more like it's more likely that women are going to go on than it was relative to men a force at the beginning of the period.
So lots more for us to do on this research, but is suggesting that the loans policy is having a positive effect.
And finally, again, this is so beautiful that I who's coming to speak to you next time she has this wonderful
way of categorising English universities into essentially five clusters of Oxbridge.
It is its own cluster of education, the blue line here that is a much smaller group with some of the noise.
But again, here we see the positive picture of the post-1982 institutions,
which is this group starting from about three and a half percent and ending at more than double that.
And after the introduction of the loan policy. So we seeing more benefits in the post to universities move progression than in the older universities.
But we need to get within that good news.
We need to temper that. We're thinking about the effect of loans, living costs and so on.
And so the loan is for ten thousand pounds that won't, in most cases, fund you for a year's Masters today.
And so I was ironically at the LSC last week to listen to a talk on a new book called The Glass Ceiling, which you might have heard of.
Think of it as in the newspapers, and it's all about inequality and within different professions and directly behind me with two economic students.
Both, I think they were both British and one was tied to the other that he was deciding whether he was going to study an imperial, say, UCLA or Yale.
But you know, the fees of one of 32000 interviewed over 27000 on campus.
I might look good if I don't get ten thousand from the government. So for some people, they're looking at a very high fee.
Some of those fees are very high for mothers that ten thousand pounds got to cover everything.
And so I have a look around at the Oxford website to see what the fees are and what are the things you notice open that if you go to and well,
the fact that most of these but we once when we were on honeymoon,
he treated us after we went to Milan, and they've got these fashion shops where you can't actually go in,
they have a bounce on the door to let you in. But there were no prices whatsoever.
And if I see a shop that's got no place to expand already, though, it's too expensive for me.
And that's my boy with the Oxford website and one of the fees, that's the first question I would be asking as a potential student.
How much is this going to cost? Is hard work to find out what the fees are?
I think what you get there and the answer might be quite high.
And there's been some troubling cases recently of some students that have been talking about these sorts of issues.
And please, I mean, the damage Michel in case actually went all the way to the High Court, I think.
And that was about the university's test, about living costs.
And you know, there's something absurd,
like the university was saying how much you were expected to spend on socks in the year and if you couldn't show your bank account already, you got.
Monique, you weren't going to get in on that, and that's been overturned, but similarly not quite the same point,
but a recent article by Solomon SFU again about these critical of the fees and the cost.
So one thing that me and my colleagues when we're looking at this of thinking is we think there's a case for a postgraduate figure.
Of course, that would be quite a controversial policy. But I think if the fees go to the $10000 to 10000,
which is seemed to go above that and all of that wonderful story that we receive that risks just reverting back again.
But at the same time, we're subsidising the people who would have already been able to go.
OK, so I want to now just think briefly about measurement because I know that if you're thinking about these questions,
OK, so this is one of the really tricky things. And and the question might be, will what can we take from the graduate level?
We've got a whole range of measures, some of which are fairly simple to to take for undergraduate level to school level,
which might include ethnicity, one, gender mainstreaming and disability.
But there's a whole other range of measures which are either conceptually more tricky to transpose or which are practically harder to work with.
And one of the real issues that we have is that a lot of the time neo smiling because we believe the best critiques of this kind of idea.
And so one of the measures we often use is low participation neighbourhoods and isn't actually a good measure.
I think that's really quite good. It gives us a good indication of what's happening to the aggregate level.
But once you start to drill down and look at an individual, it's not a good measure.
And actually, here we've got we've just moved house, actually.
But this is where we used to live very recently, which was just kind of here in York, and that was down as I think quintile two.
So it's the second lowest and progression into an university, and that's a good characterisation of this whole area.
That's right. But for Wall Street, which is here terrible and for our household down to professor who's a teacher,
you know, we are not a low participation neighbourhood. That makes me feel very uncomfortable to say that that's the case.
This is where I argue about just about here and this is quintile four.
So this is the second highest progression rate. Absolutely true about this area.
Our house? Definitely not. So 16, I was as I was the child of a single parent, unemployed and nobody in the family been gone.
I would never say never mind going to university. So characterising me then with that neighbourhood measure was terrible.
And if you then think about using those measures to think about postgraduates, then which address that we going to use it gets very, very complicated.
If we can find what somebody's address was when they were 16. Well, that might be some use.
But if we're using their address now in residence, it could be mom and dad's house.
It could be dates shared with the living. Student areas tend to be very different to other sorts of areas.
So it's really tricky.
And we've also got the problem that some of the measures of disadvantage change and most postgraduates are older than undergraduates,
and we might say that their background position is mutable. It changes, unlike other things.
Well, I mean, I guess most of the demographic characteristics that we use are in some way immutable, but some are much more useful than others.
And at what point do we stop looking at parental background and start looking at somebody's own background and wondering on these?
But as a hypothetical, we could think of different examples of people who have got different trajectories,
who come from different places and have ended up in different places.
And we might would probably disagree about which one is disadvantaged where depending on the measure we use,
we would get very different results so we could have somebody who we would probably say, OK, well, that's a that's a widening participation person.
I guess that sort of sense of occupation that quite young as we get older.
So we've got somebody who's come from a fairly advantaged home.
But I mean, let home some time ago, perhaps, or are actually living back at home now, he's a boomerang.
But what you know, at what point do we stop saying, OK, now we're still going back.
We're still expecting the parents to pay what they're expecting. But I think that's really quite tricky.
Another thing that we need. To think about when we think about policies, the up close nature of admissions, so what happens in the admissions process?
And there's a really nice study by June cross out in the states,
which looks at Ivy League admissions panels and tries to work out what's going on in the selection process.
And what she shows is that each of these panels, whatever what subject to what institution, they're absolutely committed to diversity.
But the criteria that they use favours a certain sort of polished applicant.
This may seem very familiar to this university and that moves a lot of people out prior to the serious consideration.
They don't get through the first years and the real example that stands in mind that really sticks out is the archaeology panel,
where they say, Well, if somebody has got the experience in Europe, this is great.
You know, this is just one person, one vote, OK, but who in America has the money to go and spend the summer in Europe digging in Arabia?
Some people do. Some people don't. And those people will be very different.
So some people are getting whittled down to that stage. And I think there's a whole set of things we might think about that.
And what I would really want to suggest with this university is the first degree institution,
as something we think about is not a criteria criteria that to put that there is a legitimate one.
We need to work out why our students aren't so undergraduates.
It's pretty easy. Most of them are in school and post-graduate, so some of them are in your undergraduate lectures.
But most of the potential graduates are not there, just in the general population,
most of whom are not really interested in doing a high school degree.
He makes targeting and understanding the population of all day, and I'm going to skip over this very complicated site.
The essential message I'm trying to give here is that we need to think about the process of access separately in two stages.
So there's a point in getting to want to be a postgraduate, and then there's the point of having it off getting and getting to be a postgraduate.
So how you might get into this bit, how you might become somebody who aspires to all the boys with high standards that it gets made an offer.
We can look at all sorts of different initiatives around that and use some some of the measures that I've suggested we throw out.
We might still want to use because it's almost like puberty when we get into people actually enrolling.
That's when that's when you get serious, and that's when we need to use very accurate measures, when it's high stakes.
We need to use as accurate financial measures. So as a practical suggestion, obviously.
I would say monitor a whole range of things, some of which I've talked about and some very easy things to collect.
Not perfect by any means, but easy to get someone who is where somebody their first degree heat moment.
That moment I'd go to university. Where is the home postcode recognising that it's got families?
And if you can get it socioeconomic class. But when it comes to the decision, it's about positive actually, which might be in terms of being tested,
which might be in terms of specifically targeting underrepresented groups with legal positive action.
Okay. So to conclude, I think hopefully showing you the bad news that inequalities do continue at postgraduate level that different in many ways,
but they're still there. I think we've seen that there's a very complex context in some ways.
But my worry here is that we can get what they call in business paralysis by analysis.
So because it's a complex issue and I've been in these committees where it gets talked
round around and we need to collect more data and think about this more carefully.
So it is complex, but we can, I think, spend too much time thinking it.
We don't want to throw out the good by trying to achieve the best and as a kind of concluding point,
very pleased to say that I think Oxford has really got the means to lead in this area.
So. But that is is the sort of financial means to do so much of that is the intellectual stature and reach to be able to really push this agenda.
But there has to be the will and that's what you say next.
But this is obvious. Yes, that that might be the case. Thank you.
Suggestions. OK.
Well, we now move on to the section where we get a response from two of those leaders within the university who are working on this access agenda.
And the first of those is Dr. Paul Martin, who is associate professor of politics and a tutorial fellow in politics at Woodham College.
But in relation to this event today, he's the associate head of Division for Education in the Social Sciences Division.
So Paul, would you like to come up and give us your. And perhaps if you can let it in?
Certainly. I think he wants to try to be stimulating.
I want three things to say. I'll try to be very brief. First of all, I just want to welcome any presentation, any discussion in this university.
All access and outreach, looking at social disadvantage and the effects of individual social location,
the pay some attention to measures of individual social location rather than collectives.
That is an unusual thing for us to do. I think we often get that wrong.
And I think it was a warning sign. Secondly, I thought this this is fabulously useful and interesting.
I think we're at the stage where there are things going on in the wider university that
this can actually lead directly into the TV world have seen the first couple of slides.
Nuffield is kind of a bad guy, but that is also running.
I think this summer for the first time research internships,
which are designed to drive outreach into installed research into research focus to
increase that insight into postgraduate research does tend to be quite expensive.
That's actually quite a big commitment on that part. I think it's it's a it's a really impressive thing for me to want to do.
It's also something which I was having conversations the other day is it is difficult for them to know how to go about it.
There are so many possible ways in which they can go out and identify potential target
groups for a relatively small number of really wonderful research internships.
I do think this is some of the way forward that there are similar initiatives in the medical sciences and physical sciences,
and medical sciences is to be applauded as someone the other day using the term pre doctoral fellowship,
which I think is fantastic, is a really good way of kind of articulating exactly what we should be trying to do with that kind of thing.
And I think relatedly, we're probably thinking we need to think about a nuanced way in response to your question about,
you know, how fast someone gets along the road before we start paying attention to their social background.
I think those of us in social sciences and humanities probably all know people
whose academic progress is progression into academic careers in particular,
who has been aided or held back by not exactly social class,
but by access to family resources who have the capacity to travel, the capacity to take a year or two.
Not earning very much to have a capacity to pay for a master's degree or doctoral study.
There are lots of ways in which in which the injection of family resources might be thought to have,
at least anecdotally, a big impact on people's academic trajectories.
It's really pleasing. Another nice facts about the field is that they are now these blind to thinking, and I've seen admissions.
We probably do need to think, particularly to the academic track, about about making that.
Well, once spread. So I the two really welcome positive things.
I gather that the majority of the 30000 people, so I was thinking, Gosh, this is great.
This is such a good conversation. And I was thinking, how how do we go into departments and talk to them about this?
Because this is all domestic? This is a national question.
We think about British national social structure. We all know that not entirely, voluntarily, necessarily.
I think all British universities have become more global. This will definitely ease and he thinks of that of itself as such.
If you look at our graduate students, about two thirds of all graduate students are not UK domiciled.
And that varies quite a lot between different parts of the university. I guess I'm here at the social sciences person, so I'm stoked for that.
Last year we did. I mean, Jane was my, but I did a review of our postgraduate school population.
We found that only a fifth of our total graduate students were British.
The ones who weren't British, they didn't.
They won't vote for anyone in particular in terms of the represented 126 distinct nationalities in that group,
just the so-called prospective students in the sciences. For the universities, only students from the came across a Democratic Republic of Congo,
from the Dominican Republic and East Timor, Samoa, Algeria and so on and so forth in that project.
We also turned up only about 45 percent of the academics in the social sciences division of research.
But you can. That I think would have been true even a couple of decades ago.
And so that's was my openness comes with this. It's not it's not that anything disagree with things.
This is fantastic. I spoke about how to articulate this as a as a national strategy for national inclusion to get
to a population of academics who themselves will be seen as a bit of local English witness.
Not everyone is as interesting as I am and in the sort of sexual demographics approach.
So yeah, and that was the people.
For instance, there's people have to pick it up and run with it. So it looks like a really specific example and I'll finish.
I was thinking about a controversial degree,
the mainstream public policy offered by the Catholic School of Government as a newish degrees about six years old,
designed from the beginning to have a global impact on global problems to improve global governance.
We might think that from this perspective of 2019, the idea of improving global governance seems quite confounded.
I think it's in part because of the importance of that question. The about three percent of the students on the course are fully funded.
The fees are very high, but for just the moment that we fund it. So I want to make the point that the social contract is a country with 13 students.
In 2017, six of them were British.
I just going to bet breaks, there's no interference. So if this question, which is really important,
results down to the thought that the mop should think really hard about how well those six people
represented the totality of the British sexual distribution has one person for gender in this?
I think that's great.
There's a question which this linguistic function that we don't have an answer to about not just which people in the UK actually being taken,
but which people from around the world. The question, I suppose.
He's previously vs. Guatemala.
I don't have an answer to that, but that seems to be particularly important in this institution to get people to buy into the mission.
We need to be thinking as a global institution about kind of global responsibility as well as as well as our national responses.
Thank you.
This is really interesting comments there and yet particularly relevant to me, I have a commissioner for the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission.
We had 20 million pounds worth of UK government money each year to bring students
from the developing Commonwealth to the UK to study university and two years ago
were given the explicit remake by the UK government funded to make sure their
scholarships were only given to students who came from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Now that presents a real challenge when you're bringing 40 students from Malawi.
How do you identify which of those are from disadvantaged backgrounds?
Who might say that actually coming from Malawi itself represents coming from a disadvantage back couldn't be stronger?
Well, this is compounded. The complexity of this is compounded by the fact that we have been strong,
good evidence that impacts those students who often come from advantaged backgrounds who,
when they return to their home country, have the greatest impact on development. So there are some real challenges.
I think here in the realm of disadvantage plays in, you know,
the value of a student in whatever process it is we have identified from postgraduate education.
And the other thing I really enjoyed about what you said was, you know,
the fact that there is such enthusiasm about this conversation here this you just get
the moment and you can feel a real buzz around the whole issue of postgraduate access.
And I know that there's a great deal going on in the MPLS division. So it's a pleasure to welcome Professor Mike Bonsu,
who is associate head of division for education in the MPLS Division and the Fellow and Future
Biological Sciences and Professor of Mathematical Biology in the Department of Zoology.
Mike, thank you for all. Those are fantastic talkers of lots of things in my head.
I'm sorry. I'm losing my voice right now. So if you can't keep trying to shout, you can hear me.
I'm so one of the things I thought I'd do is give a little bit more of a pragmatic, prosaic view of science.
You know what we've been doing since I picked up some of the things from one of your recent papers on funding facilities and support?
So I thought I'd just talk about how in the science division, we sort of approach them.
So from the facilities,
I so ties into the sort complexities of access to be talked about in terms of institutional patterns and not being not randomly distributed.
And clearly, that's due to the sort of research intensification in certain institutions as others.
And here, obviously not here in Oxford, we do fantastically well.
That science division leads the world and many of those discipline in interdisciplinary multidisciplinary areas.
So I think that has to provide the necessary infrastructure from facilities
for my talk about peak postgraduate research training because we take a lot,
we don't take very many Thomas Jefferson to the science division.
But from that perspective, having that sort of infrastructure in place really provides us with that stuff that facilities
enough to train a cohort the cohorts of kids and students from a funding perspective.
You know, we've done some good news for him, Eliza said.
She would do very well.
We hold three doctoral training programmes, which transforms something like 100 postgraduate research students a year become very successful.
Most recently on CBT, calls have been able to change something like over the next five years.
250 she was not provides funding for us to be able to support those students without the necessity for those sorts of loans that we're talking about,
but it really belies the fact and hides the fact of many shortcomings.
So, for instance, in fields across all Ph.D. programmes for every single box that application, we probably get two and a half from outside of us.
So we do very well, not view and say, OK, that's great.
We're getting lots of students in from outside the world look to to apply to these sorts of degree programmes,
but also understand the lives of many different things. So why is that the case?
Is that why is why is it that we are attracting attracting many students?
But then if we look to see how they translate, you talked about this, how you translate from.
So what do you hope to get some of the people getting to postgraduate nurse's office to take your postgraduate will research?
We see a substantial change in the outcome. So for every single Oxford application up, there's a couple of cups in person who's given an offer.
Thirty one point two outside candidates are getting an offer,
so clearly there's a focus on us taking home-grown students over who are accepting those sorts of offers for whatever reason that the doctor drives.
And obviously, that sort of hides of our perceptions about what's at what Oxford is being able to reach out and in these access programmes.
So one of the things that Nicholas is doing this is not novel, but we are running a graduate programme this year,
graduate unique types of access programme for a six week, four six week period over the summer.
To give students from disadvantaged backgrounds,
she really decided what she reads to encourage them to think about Oxford as a place to apply, to do their postgraduate studies.
But we're not sure why that's not new because lots of other places do not have enough,
though council have been running these sorts of some steamships for some internship for many years,
and it's just been able to think about how we access that and buy into that to be
able to to to allow students from disadvantaged backgrounds and whatever that means.
And of course, this sort of thinking more about some of the student experience.
You touched on this a little bit about that, looking at the admissions process as well.
So it feels in 2017 2018 applications, we've got somewhere around five,
five and a half thousand applications that translated into about hundred offers, which translated into about a thousand or thereabouts.
People taking up that but taking up their places, bringing that so that those sorts of statistics and I'm just going to also highlight one.
There wasn't really four to three. Well, that was very strange.
There's very little difference between gender, but a thing that had the most impact on the difference.
There were applications from students to enter into the science division from ethnic backgrounds.
So forty seven percent of applications came from candidates who declared ethnic backgrounds.
That translated into 38 offers, 38 percent of offers and 35 percent of people accepted.
So there's clearly attrition in our in our admissions process. There's clearly attrition of candidates through the shoot up to that experience.
And again, we're obviously having this conversation to actually think about that carefully.
But think about some of the things a lot of people said was essentially about thinking about social mobility and global responsibility.
So we didn't know within our division we take three.
We can we can class students into three or four groups of students, EU students and overseas students looking like even overseas is different.
But essentially, those those overseas candidates make a huge application to the science and thinking
about how we how we promote that and reach out in terms of global responsibility.
Global mobility, I think, is really important given the political climate for about 20 minutes enough to demonstrate.
Thank you. Very.