"Topple these barriers to our best universities" read a headline in the Observer last month. The piece then went on to bemoan the fact that the opportunities to be gained from higher education "remain heavily dependent on social background and schooling."
The problem, it pointed it out, is not that poorer children aren't going to university - the "massification" of higher education means that they are. It is that they aren't going to the best ones. Only one in five young people from "comprehensives and FE colleges" got into the top one third of universities in the UK this year. That compares with some 80% of those from private schools. Big gap.
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