Segregation: who is to blame?

Universities have been told to wake up to the 'ghettoisation' of ethnic minority students. Sarah Cassidy and Lucy Hodges report

Should Britain's leading universities be forced to admit more black and ethnic minority students? Trevor Phillips (right), head of the Commission for Racial Equality, certainly thinks so.

At a conference in London last week, he called for a change in the law to ensure that universities with the worst records for admitting students from ethnic minority backgrounds are compelled to mend their ways. Claiming that some universities still refused to take the issue seriously, Phillips said that every university should have a strict target for the number of students from ethnic minorities it admitted.

Those with the worst records should be named and shamed, in the same way that Ofsted does with schools, he said.

"We need to set an ideal about what an institution should look like," he told the conference, organised by the Black and Minority Ethnic Education Steering Group. "And if you are so far away from it you need a good kicking. We should do what we do with schools which go into special measures - make you do certain things so you get to the place where you are meant to be."

Such talk is controversial, not to say inflammatory. Universities are autonomous institutions and resent being pushed around by government, especially if they fear it could mean lowering their entry requirements. Phillips, who is adamant that he doesn't want universities to manipulate their admissions artificially, is clearly trying to make the university world conscious of an issue that exercises him greatly - the segregation of ethnic minority students into certain institutions. Fifty-three universities have fewer than five per cent ethnic minority students while 20 have more than 40 per cent.

Figures from the Higher Education Statistics Agency show that black and ethnic minority students are concentrated in the new universities (the former polytechnics) with the exception of the Chinese who are most likely to study at a pre-1992 university. Fifty universities have fewer than five black Caribbean students and, in 122 institutions of higher education generally, students from black Caribbean backgrounds make up less than 1 per cent of the student body.

Universities with high ethnic minority concentrations include London Metropolitan, Middlesex and the University of East London. The institution with the highest concentration of all is the School of Pharmacy, University of London, with 92.2 per cent, bearing out the claim that South East Asians flock to study pharmacy.

Another institution that takes a large number of ethnic minority students (64.1 per cent) is Queen Mary, part of the University of London, which, like the School of Pharmacy, is not a former polytechnic.

The picture is complicated, then. But the concern of Phillips and others is that many ethnic minority students are not aiming high enough, either because they are ignorant of the range of institutions they could apply to or because they opt for a place close to home that their friends attend. The result is that they are denied opportunities to fulfil their potential and to mix with other cultures.

Phillips singled out Oxford and Cambridge for particular criticism, arguing: "The proportion of those admitted from ethnic minorities is out of line with those who apply and who are qualified. There is something not right about that."

Oxford University defended its record and said that with 12,000 candidates, all predicted to get three A grades, competing for 3,000 places, it was inevitable that well-qualified applicants of all ethnic backgrounds would be rejected. "We oppose any kind of discrimination and keep our procedures under constant review," said a spokeswoman.

"Applicants to Oxford are admitted on the basis of merit alone and we would resist any attempt for us to use positive discrimination. We do not just look at applicants' A-levels. We are looking for the very best performers in a range of other tests and at interview."

Phillips's comments, however, struck a chord with his audience. Uduak Archibong, professor in diversity at Bradford University, which has a greater than 50 per cent ethnic minority student population, said that Bradford had targets and met them. "We publish our statistics. I think all universities should do that. It should not just be one of those targets that you set because you have been asked to."

At last week's conference a report was published arguing that funding bodies and universities were being complacent about the problems. Delegates decided to set up a new national organisation called the Black and Minority Ethnic Education Network to ensure that all universities recruited their share of ethnic minority students.

Speakers complained that policymakers view all minority ethnic groups as the same and so refuse to recognise that students from African-Caribbean, Pakistani and Bangladeshi backgrounds go to university in much smaller numbers than other groups and are concentrated in particular courses.

Helen Connor, joint author of a government report that was published two years ago, said that she was disappointed that the problems she identified then had still not been acted upon. That report showed, for example, that minority ethnic students were clustered in big city universities, in London, Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester and were under-represented in certain subjects, the physical sciences, humanities and education. When they graduated they suffered higher unemployment than their white counterparts.

But John Selby, acting director for widening participation at the Higher Education Funding Council (Hefce) who also spoke at the conference, said that there is no evidence of systematic bias in the admissions process once you have taken account of subject choice and qualifications, according to Hefce research.

"There is some evidence possibly in admissions to law courses," he said. "And there is some evidence from a different study that there may be an issue in medicine. There is some possible evidence for students of Pakistani background generally being under-represented but, in all cases, the numbers are quite small and the evidence is not strong enough to say anything is going on. We're working to get better data."

Should Hefce develop a performance indicator for ethnic minority student numbers as it does for the percentage of entrants each university takes from state schools and from different social classes? This might help to put pressure on those universities with low percentages to raise their game. Selby thinks not. That's because Hefce has found no under-representation of ethnic minorities in pre-1992 universities.

"There isn't a global problem," he says. "If you look globally at black minority ethnic groups, they are represented in the pre-1992 universities in the numbers that you would expect. We're not talking about a phenomenon like social class or state schools. It's terribly important in this area that you get your evidence right."

Vice chancellors were wary about Phillips's comments on targets.

Professor Steve Smith, vice chancellor of Exeter University and chairman of the 94 Group of the "small and beautiful" universities, says that his university is putting a lot of time and money into getting black and ethnic minority students to come to Exeter.

As one of the whitest universities in Britain (97 per cent white), Exeter could be said to reflect the region in which it is situated. And as a university that is a favourite with independent schools, it may be off-putting to black people from the inner city. The reality, though, may be more prosaic: the number of black and ethnic minority teenagers staying on at school at 16 is not as high as it should be and those going to university prefer for reasons of cost and comfort to stay close to home.

John Craven, vice chancellor of Portsmouth University, points out that any quota introduced for ethnic minorities would have to be geographically sensitive for precisely the reason that many students want to stay at home. "Otherwise a uniform national quota would be very easy to fill in one place and almost impossible to fill in another," he says.

For these and other reasons, Bahram Bekhradnia, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, argues that it would be "madness" to have targets unless you have done your analysis properly. The leading universities are giving quite a lot of attention to the issue, according to Bekhradnia. "I don't think these are fair criticisms," he says.

l.hodges@independent.co.uk