UniversityGuide2015 620

White boys shun universities

White teenage boys are less likely to go to university than those from other ethnic groups - even if they have good enough grades to get in, according to government research.

A study into the higher education gender gap for the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills found that Asian and black African teenage boys go to university in much greater numbers.

"We find that young people from ethnic minority backgrounds are overwhelmingly more likely to enter HE compared to white people with the same prior attainment," the report said.

Researchers predicted the likelihood of being in HE by the age of 19 for different types of students. Those getting free school meals would be 3.5 percentage points less likely to go.

Students were more likely to go if they were black (18.0 percentage points), Asian (25.4 percentage points), or Chinese (22.7 percentage points).

When both class and gender were taken into account, white working-class men were eight and a half times less likely to go to university than black and Asian middle-class women, the report found.

It suggested that the rise in the number of women going to university had made "the performance of males look relatively dismal".

Since 1992, women have been in the majority at university. Last year, the proportion of young men studying for a degree fell from 37% in 1999 to 35%, while the figure rose from 41% in 1999 to 45% for women.

The study suggested that more girls go to university because they are more likely to do well in GCSEs and A-levels. But where both sexes have equal A-level results, they are equally likely to go.

Researchers said it was "perfectly possible that boys disengage with the educational system at a very early age, and perform very poorly at their GCSEs, precisely because they had decided a long time ago that they were going to drop out of school at the age of 16 and not go on to HE".

The report said: "Efforts to reduce the gender gap in HE participation should predominantly be aimed at increasing the relative attainment of young men prior to HE."

Bill Rammell, the higher education minister, said he was greatly concerned about boys being turned off education.

"Culture plays a very important role. Part of what we have to do is to look across society and look among the ethnic minority groups where there is a very strong attachment to education and try to learn from that."

Intervening earlier in children's school lives was important in tackling the divide, he said.

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