Young, White and Disadvantaged?

Speaking to The Independent today, the Universities Minister David Willetts announced it is time universities view white working-class male applicants in the same way they view applications from other disadvantaged socio-economic groups.

Willets calls for white working-class males to be advantaged when applying to uni

His comments come after figures released by UCAS show nearly 40,000 less prospective students have applied for university than this time in 2011.

Perhaps more concerning, the drop in applications is not equally distributed amongst men and women.

Willitts goes on to tell The Independent:

“There are now more women who enter university each year than there are men who submit a UCAS form.”

It was only in 2009 that for the first time more women than men were attending university.

Although celebrated at the time, there is now a growing fear that white working-class men are being excluded from higher education.

Willetts went on to say the University Access Watchdog “can look at a range of disadvantaged groups – social class and ethnicity, for instance – when it comes to access agreements, so I don’t see why they couldn’t look at white, working-class boys”.

Yet Willetts’ comments propose to solve an issue of wealth and gender discrimination through more discriminatory measures, by offering working-class white males an advantage in the application process.

It feels deeply patronising to suggest that working-class white males need some form of special dispensation to compete with their female and wealthier counterparts.

Through advantaging working-class white males, females of a wealthier social strata are immediately disadvantaged.

Those who do achieve good grades may feel their results are merely a product of being born into an ‘advantaged group,’ rather than achieving success through hard work.

The solution to solving gender and racial divides in our universities cannot simply be done through tilting the probability of getting into university in favour of a certain demographic.

Any sort of barrier that prevents a student worthy of gaining a university place from going to university should be removed, rather than reinforced through a set of discriminatory measures.

The drop in male working-class applicants to universities has variously been put down to; lack of interest, lack of intellect, and lack of money to fund studies.  These factors cannot be solved by these rudimentary steps.

Initially it is easy to point to the rise of tuition fees to £9000 per year, which certainly has deterred working-class students from applying to university.

Whether these factors do or do not play a part is essentially the crux of the issue.

The only way the lack of male applicants to university can be addressed is through establishing then addressing the underlying issues surrounding their applications.

Artificially imposed gender and economic parameters are nothing but gender bias and discriminatory, and should have no place in the selection process at our universities.