In the United Kingdom (UK), the poor and underprivileged students are still quite far away from making their presence felt at top universities in the UK. Although these elite universities have taken considerable steps to reduce this disparity, the result hasn’t changed much.
Talking about statistics, it was seen that only 4% of the students coming from underprivileged backgrounds made it to the top universities. A quarter of the total students came from richer backgrounds. The difference was and it still is huge.
Top Universities in the UK only for rich?
In the last five years, top universities in the UK like Oxford and Cambridge have increased their spend by more than 65% ($85 million) to make higher education accessible to less advantaged sections but all in vain. Similarly, in this time period, the increase in the 29 top universities in the UK has been just a little over 0.2%.
There is no elite university in the whole country that has reported an increment of more than 1% in the last five years. Almost 66% of the universities even fail to achieve the benchmark set by the Higher Education Statistics.
Margaret Hall, one of Oxford’s constituents launched a foundation program in 2016, only for underprivileged students. 2 years later, Oxford University itself implemented the program but out of all the students enrolled in the program, only 3% of them go on to get a higher education degree.
However, this doesn’t mean that there is no scope of improvement. For example, the London School of Business, one of the top universities in the UK has shown a steep rise in underprivileged students’ admissions.
Despite all this time and spend, no clear cut route has been devised out to tackle the problem. The issue is that this problem is not just restricted to the UK or Europe, but to the whole world. However, these colleges and universities need to figure out ways to reduce the imbalance.
Featured image from Pixabay.
