CEE DP 101 Access, Choice And Participation In Higher Education

The Centre for the Economics of Education is an independent research centre funded by the Department for Children, Schools and Families. The views expressed in this work are those of the author and do not reflect the views of the DCSF. All errors and omissions remain the authors. Executive Summary Commuting or re-location costs could be an in important influence on students " university choices and might even deter some from going to university. The barriers presented by these costs may be high for lower-income students, and students for whom there are cultural incentives to remain in or close to the parental home. If this is the case, then the geographical accessibility of universities has an important bearing on differences in higher education choices for different income and ethnic groups, and, in turn, on their earnings and life chances. Existing evidence has shown that university places are not evenly spatially distributed in Britain. Research has also found that " non-traditional " students – those from backgrounds in which higher-education participation is emerging – cite the location of institutions as a factor affecting their decision to go in to higher education. However, it is easy to make the mistake of attributing behaviour to ethnicity, gender or income when these behaviours are really due to other differences, like academic achievement, or home location which will have strong bearing on if and where students go to university. In fact, there is no large scale, systematic evidence for the UK that shows that proximity to a university really matters for higher education participation or choice amongst universities, or that it matters more for specific ethnic or income groups. Our research looks at these questions using administrative data on the population of school leavers and university entrants in England. These data allow us to link the choices of students from different ethnic and income backgrounds to distances between home and university, whilst accounting for schooling, neighbourhood and other background characteristics. Our key findings are: Universities are not evenly distributed around the country but 90% of locations have three institutions and 4000 first degree places within 100km. Non-white ethnic groups and low-income students actually live closer to their nearest three higher education institutions and closer to their nearest three high-quality research institutions than their white and high-income counterparts. These facts suggest that disparities in geographical access are unlikely to be a source of disadvantage to ethnic …