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Abstract
Measuring access to higher education for underrepresented groups is a relevant yet challenging task. The article shows that while social inclusion is recognised as a priority, policymakers, academics, and institutional leaders struggle to define, operationalise, and measure it. This makes answering the question of what constitutes a socially inclusive higher education institution quite difficult. While the answer to this question may be context‐specific, there is a clear need for a set of commonly defined indicators that allow higher education institutions to measure their progress throughout time and in relation to others. The article synthesises insights from policy, practise, and scientific research to identify which indicators are the most promising for assessing the access of under‐representative students to higher education. By discussing indicator relevance, validity and feasibility, the article contributes to the quest for internationally comparable social inclusion indicators of underrepresented student groups.
Highlights
After the screen‐ ing, 267 references moved to the full‐text review, and we excluded items that met any of the following crite‐ ria: (1) They did not deal with access to higher education, (2) had the wrong study design, (3) were not at higher education level, (4) were not written in English, (5) the full text was not available for review or (6) were not scientific publications
Due to the lack of consensus on internationally com‐ parable social inclusion indicators (Kottmann et al, 2019) and to limit the scope of this article, we settle for a mini‐ mal definition as the systematised concept of social inclu‐ sion: access to higher education for underrepresented groups
This article examined how underrepresented groups can be operationalised in practice, learning from a project carried out by U‐Multirank on identifying indicators for underrepresented students and preliminary insights from a systematic literature work
Summary
The inclusion of underrepresented groups in higher education is on supra‐national and national policy agendas around the world (Claeys‐Kulik et al, 2019). Research has shown that there are many differ‐ ent definitions and, as such, no unified understanding of what social inclusion means and who underrepre‐ sented groups or non‐traditional students are (Chung et al, 2014; Kottmann et al, 2019) This makes answer‐ ing the question of what constitutes a socially inclusive HEI a rather complex task. U‐Multirank aims to expand its coverage to new and highly relevant issues in higher education, such as social inclusion For this purpose, exploratory analyses of policy documents and large‐scale projects on social inclusion (e.g., rankings, international surveys) were conducted, and the identified indicators were discussed with a group of international experts and stakeholders to assess their relevance, validity, and fea‐ sibility for comparing the performance of HEIs. In addi‐ tion to expert and stakeholder insights on access indi‐ cators, we include preliminary findings from a broader ongoing systematic literature review on social inclusion in higher education
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