We should look to Texas to balance equity and access to higher education in the future, writes Mike Ion
According to a report published by the Sutton Trust this year students who leave some of our highest-performing state comprehensive schools with the equivalent of at least three A grades at A level are a third less likely to go to one of the UK’s 30 most selective universities than their peers at independent schools.
So what can be done? One answer might be to adopt the approach taken by the state of Texas. In one of the boldest-ever college admissions experiments, the 75th Texas legislature passed HB 588, which guarantees high school seniors who graduate in the top 10 per cent of their class admission to any Texas public college or university. Signed into law in May 1997, HB 588 – popularly known as the ‘top 10 per cent law’ – sought not only to recover the drop in black and Hispanic representation at its flagship institutions following the judicial ban on affirmative action, but also to increase the number of high schools that sent students to the four-year public universities.
Has it worked? In 2008 a report carried out by researchers at Princeton University found that HB 588 ‘has triggered powerful mechanisms that, combined with the changing demography of the state and the automatic admission regime, have broadened access to the public flagships to high-achieving students from the entire state of Texas’. The report also found that by strengthening ties between the top universities and high schools with low college-going traditions the initiative had begun to improve high school climates and significantly raise the number of economically disadvantaged students attending university.
Could this work here in the UK? The Texas model is ‘limited’ to a distinct geographical area, but for a similar scheme to work here in the UK a future Labour government could require each of our top universities to link to schools in a particular region or locality, schools that do not have a track record of sending their most able students to our premier institutions. If any student at one of these schools meets the entry requirements he or she would be guaranteed a place. Far from abandoning the very idea of social mobility, Labour should seek to legislate for measures that will reduce the very real barriers that prevent young people from certain social backgrounds achieving their full potential.
This does not mean that personal progress should never be measured by the extent to which individuals escape their social background, but we must also accept that in order to overcome entrenched privilege and vested interests we must actively seek to open up society and end the present ‘closed shop’ that has, for too long, stifled meritocracy by supporting an aristocracy of the elite.
If the conservative state of Texas can embrace affirmative action then surely a progressive Labour government of the future can as well.
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Mike Ion is a candidate in the councillors’ section in the Progress strategy board elections 2012. You can find out more about all the candidates at the dedicated Progress strategy board election microsite