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January 8, 2006
Waking up to segregation
Britain’s complacent political masters will scold that instead of complaining about the absence of integration, the fact that minority students are getting there at all should be celebrated. More seriously, some thoughtful anti-racist activists could argue that for minorities on campus there is safety in numbers; and that, anyway, the real enemies are discrimination and class bias.
But the reality is more acute than the segregation in schools revealed recently by academics at Bristol University.
Segregation isn’t always the result of voluntary choices by students. But what is beyond doubt is that segregation is taking place in British universities. Its consequences are far-reaching for individuals and deadly for community relations. The social lever (education) that should make ethnic groups more equal and integrated is actually doing the opposite. What the French call the “social elevator” isn’t out of order; but it seems that no matter where African-Caribbean and Pakistani young people get in, it’s programmed to take them in one direction only — the basement.
Minority students of all kinds are more likely to be in higher education overall. But not all universities are equal. Those with the most money and facilities are disproportionately white. They also have the lowest dropout rates. Even after the UK’s Higher Education Statistics Agency corrects non-continuation performance for subject mix and other social factors, universities with higher minority intakes still do worse.
And where top-bracket universities have healthy-looking proportions of non-white students, closer inspection reveals a paradox. My own alma mater, Imperial College, can boast that more than one in eight of its home undergraduates are non-white; but for every student of African-Caribbean heritage there are more than 60 of Indian heritage.
Much of the mess lands in the universities’ laps ready cooked. Poor A-level results among some minority groups is the schools’ problem. What ministers like to call residential “concentration” means that minority kids are being siphoned off to the lowest-achieving classes in the poorest schools. And that should be the government’s responsibility.
Students and parents need to consider the effects of their choices, too. The temptation to go to a local university means that students may be missing out on one of the key benefits of university — meeting people unlike themselves.
This survey also gives a new meaning to institutional racism. Whether justified or not, in the average employer’s mind, a 2:2 from the holy trinity of Oxford, Cambridge or Imperial merely suggests an overactive sporting or social life. A similar degree from outside the top 20 spells an undistinguished academic record. We know who will get the job interview.
But universities should not imagine that this lets them off the hook. As the students in Polly Curtis’s report point out, it’s not that students don’t know enough about a university. Unfortunately one visit is often enough to convince many that the place is too white for them to be comfortable. Only visible reality will make the difference. That means higher education has to change itself first.
There are a couple of things that might help before we start thinking about quotas and other “special” measures. Some universities are working hard to reach out to schools in the poorest areas of the inner cities. But this may not be the only place to find promising minority candidates.
Second, universities as a whole should examine carefully why some minority young people avoid certain disciplines; if there are cultural or other factors that are turning a subject choice into a racial division, they may want to use cash incentives to make minority-friendly courses more worthwhile. Above all, we need to stop pretending that segregation isn’t happening, or else that it is just a passing phase. —Dawn/Guardian Service
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