A Closer Look at Higher Education Minority Ethnic Students and ...

Little research has focused on ethnic groups in particular, and fewhave tried to separate the effect of an individual’s ethnicity to goon to higher education from other factors of influence. This ismainly because of the complexity of the relationships between thevarious influences, and also a lack of statistical evidence to use inany modelling. Net of attainment, ethnicity clearly has some effect(as seen in many studies), but it not likely to be the only effect andothers may be more significant to particular ethnic groups or subgroups.This was explored in a recent DfES sponsored researchstudy on demand for higher education, which looked at therelationship between a number of variables that influence youngpeople’s entry to degree study. 1 Making use of several YCScohorts (16-19 year olds) it showed that ‘ethnicity’ was not asignificant variable in explaining why they are likely to be indegree study at 19 years, though its relationship with othervariables (eg gender, family social class, regional effects) wasrecognised. ‘Ethnicity’ meant being White or non-White in thisanalysis. Interestingly though, it was found that two groups(young people of Indian and Chinese origin) did have increasedodds of entering degree level higher education by 19 years, allother things being equal. Care needs to be taken, though, ininterpreting this analysis, because some groups, mainly Black,take longer to enter HE, as shown in the previous chapter, and sotheir entry to HE would not be captured by the YCS. As far as weare aware, no other modelling work of this type has been done.3.1 Decisions about applying to HEMinority ethnic respondents in our survey of potential HEstudents (ie the sample of year 13 student at school and collegeswho had applied in 2002 or had not yet applied 2 ) gave morepositive reasons for their decision to apply to HE than Whitestudents did, particularly in relation to the impact of a universityqualification on their future jobs, career and earnings (see Table3.1). They also reported greater encouragement from family(though more said they had few family who had been touniversity) and were more likely to feel that it was ‘alwaysassumed I would go’, than White students. 3 Financial concernshad less of an influence (relative to these factors), and there waslittle difference between minority ethnic and White potential HEstudents, eg about debt concerns and uncertainties about cost.Minority ethnic students, though, were more uncertain about1 Gayle et al. (2003), op. cit. Note that this looked only at entry to degreestudy by 19 years of age, and not all entry to undergraduate study.2 This was not a representative sample of potential entrants butincluded White and minority ethnic students from a group of schoolsand colleges, see B.1 (Appendix B).3 These findings were all statistically significant or near to significance,at 99 per cent level.26Why the Difference?