Abstract
The role of staff involved with undergraduate admissions and recruitment has changed since the turn towards marketisation in higher education. This article focuses on the system in England following both a sharp rise in student fees and an associated tendency for the public university agenda and related social priorities, such as widening participation, to come up against more private and commercial priorities, such as business engagement, league table performance and internationalisation. Drawing on evidence from detailed interviews with admissions personnel, both academic and non-academic, across three disciplines within one higher prestige university, we revisit the notion of selectivity and the practice of selection. Tensions are revealed between two opposing approaches: a more traditional model of university admissions, as based on local knowledge and sensitivity towards underrepresented groups, and a purportedly merit-driven model, as driven by perceived market position. We explore the intricate and often unexpected ways in which staff reconcile their professed beliefs with their professional practices, and the complex identity work needed to renegotiate personal values in light of shifting institutional needs. Findings are offered as a microcosm for broader trends in the higher education sector.
Highlights
The research reported in this article emerges from a project called BContemporary Admissions Practices in UK Higher Education^
Most participants freely made connections between their personal histories, their professional identities and the way in which they execute their current role. The nature of those connections differed from participant to participant, and at all three sites, disagreement arose about the relative importance of widening participation, the mechanisms by which fairness in admissions is best achieved, and the usefulness or otherwise of preferential measures for non-traditional applicants
As with most of our interviewees, Graham is quick to articulate a link between his personal backstory and his current professional role: I’m first generation to university from my family and so was acutely conscious of the advantages that a university education offered / and as I came into the profession I became aware of the ways in which often well-meaning and well-intentioned colleagues from more privileged backgrounds just really didn’t understand the kinds of exclusions that they were operating / not intentional / but I remember once pointing out that if you set large reading lists over the summer you were kind of assuming that your students didn’t need to work full-time / and for students from certain backgrounds that just wasn’t viable
Summary
The research reported in this article emerges from a project called BContemporary Admissions Practices in UK Higher Education^. It operates on the premise that the way in which selective undergraduate programmes choose between applicants may offer a useful lens through which to visualise some of the sector-wide changes in higher education policy. As discourses of university as a public good are replaced by the language of the market (Brown and Carasso 2013; Collini 2017), institutional priorities evolve (Giroux 2002). Access, widening participation and outreach activity remain central to strategic operations, partly because they help to legitimate the market turn (Rustin 2016). Agendas more directly aligned with key performance indicators, income-generation activity and league table metrics (Hazelkorn 2015) vie for institutional attention. By conducting in-depth interviews with admissions staff across three disciplines at one large university in England, we begin to build a picture of how ground-level professional identities are reshaped—and processes contested—in policy landscapes that position universities very differently within society
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