Organisational Identity as a Barrier to Widening Access in Scottish Universities

Vikki Boliver,Mandy Powell,Tiago Moreira

doi:10.3390/socsci7090151

Abstract

Widening access policy has historically focused on tackling the socioeconomic barriers to university access faced by prospective students from under-represented groups, but increasingly policy makers are seeking to also address the barriers to wider access posed by undergraduate admissions policies. In this vein, the Scottish Government has recently called upon universities to set separate academic entry requirements for socioeconomically disadvantaged applicants which recognise that “the school attainment of disadvantaged learners often does not reflect their full potential” and which better reflect the minimum needed to succeed in higher education. In this paper, we draw on in-depth interviews with admissions personnel at eighteen Scottish universities to explore the scope for more progressive admissions policies of this kind in light of universities’ identities as organisations and in light of corresponding organisational strategies for position-taking in global and national higher education fields. We present a theoretical model and an empirical illustration of three hierarchically-ordered ideal types of organisational identity—globally competitive, nationally selective, and locally transformative—and show that the more dominant of these tend to constrain the development of more progressive admissions policies. This is because globally competitive and, to a lesser extent, nationally selective organisational identities are understood to require admission of the ‘brightest and best’, conceptualised as those with the highest levels of prior academic attainment who can be expected to succeed at university and beyond as a matter of course. We conclude that universities must recognise and redress the implicitly exclusionary nature of their organisational identities if genuine progress on widening access is to be made.

Highlights

Young people living in Scotland’s most affluent neighbourhoods are around three and a half times more likely to enter undergraduate university courses than their peers from Scotland’s most deprived communities (UCAS 2017), and are nearly five times as likely to enter a highly academically selective institution according to the last statistics to be released (UCAS 2015)
A major reason for this disparity is the corresponding disparity in school attainment, with young people from disadvantaged backgrounds much less likely than their more advantaged counterparts to be eligible for higher education (Commission on Widening Access 2015) and much less likely to achieve the high grades stipulated by the most academically selective universities (Boliver et al 2017)
In particular, on the critical and potentially limiting influence of organisational identity and of associated organisational strategies for position-taking in global and national higher education fields

Summary

Introduction

Young people living in Scotland’s most affluent neighbourhoods are around three and a half times more likely to enter undergraduate university courses than their peers from Scotland’s most deprived communities (UCAS 2017), and are nearly five times as likely to enter a highly academically selective institution according to the last statistics to be released (UCAS 2015). A major reason for this disparity is the corresponding disparity in school attainment, with young people from disadvantaged backgrounds much less likely than their more advantaged counterparts to be eligible for higher education (Commission on Widening Access 2015) and much less likely to achieve the high grades stipulated by the most academically selective universities (Boliver et al 2017). Widening access initiatives have typically focused on tackling this and other barriers to undergraduate university access rooted in the socioeconomic disadvantages faced by those from groups under-represented in higher education. Such initiatives have met with only limited success, with progress on widening access moving at a slow pace over the last decade, such that the socioeconomic gap in university. Sci. 2018, 7, 151 participation rates remains higher in Scotland than in England, due partly to a greater preponderance of highly academic selective universities in the Scottish context (Blackburn et al 2016)

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