David Willetts, the Minister for Universities and Science, reiterated last week that the Coalition is committed to widening access to university. That was not the controversial part of his speech, for who is against it? Almost everyone accepts that all youngsters should have an equally good chance of going to university, and that it would be very undesirable if universities became the preserve of a sort of hereditary caste, where the only children who gained admission were those whose parents went to university.
The controversy centres on how to achieve “wider access”. One proposal, advocated by Prof Les Ebdon, the director of the Office of Fair Access (Offa), is to force universities to discriminate in favour of under-represented groups. They would have to admit them regardless of whether their A-level grades were too low. That policy will have one inevitable corollary: universities will have to reject applicants whose results indicate greater academic ability, on the grounds that they don’t come from one of the disadvantaged groups.
In an informal way, some universities already do this. But they don’t do it on a big enough scale, so that the number of students from deprived backgrounds given places at university is still too low for Mr Willetts. He insists that he is not in favour of quotas, but it is difficult to see how any policy which does not involve quotas can possibly have the effect he wants. At the moment, the requirement for getting into university is having good enough A-level grades. The under-represented groups – children from low-income families and from some ethnic minorities – fail to get through that barrier in the numbers that the Government wants. So what does Mr Willetts suggest? Lower the grades required from members of those groups, until 10 or 20 per cent (or whatever target the Government sets) of university intake comes from the disadvantaged groups.
That sounds like a quota system to me. And there are a number of serious problems with quotas. One is that they are unfair to the well-qualified candidates who are rejected in favour of the less-well-qualified. If meritocracy means anything, it must mean preferring those whose merit is greater over those whose merit is less. A quota system does the opposite – which means it cannot be compatible with meritocracy.
Defenders of quotas, including Mr Willetts, insist that university admissions officers can identify academic merit that has not been reflected in exams. As a general rule, this is false. There is now a great deal of evidence to show that an interview is likely to diminish the chances that a selection procedure ends up choosing the best candidate.
Interviewers assign too much weight to their personal sense of the individual in front of them. The impression that a student makes can be affected by factors entirely irrelevant to their academic potential – even the weather, or how long has elapsed since the interviewer last had food. Studies show that interviewers can produce contradictory evaluations of the same candidate on different occasions. Such inconsistent judgments cannot be a reliable predictor of anything, least of all academic potential.
Basing university entrance solely on a student’s exam grades does not suffer from that crippling defect, which is why it is a much more accurate way to predict how well any individual will perform at university. Admissions tutors may think they can somehow intuit “true” academic ability – but they can’t. A-levels are very far from perfect, but they are a lot better than relying on the arbitrary, inconsistent and sometimes plain dotty judgments of an interviewer.
So why are ministers such as Mr Willetts trying to replace performance in competitive exams as the criterion for university entrance with something else, such as an interview, to spot “true” academic potential? I have no idea – and nor, I’m afraid, does he. But it can’t be good for our universities.