Diversity With a British Accent

Chronicle of Higher Education
October 11, 2009
By Aisha Labi

Shamillah Najjuma is just 21, but even from her youthful perspective, she can pinpoint a crucial turning point in her life: When she was 14, she took part in a weeklong summer program at the University of Oxford, run by an education charity called ACDiversity. Visiting the elite institution was eye-opening for the Ugandan-born woman, who attended an inner-city high school in London where most of the students were nonwhite and from low-income families.
"It basically said to me, You can do whatever you want," recalls Ms. Najjuma, who has just begun her second year at the University of Warwick, in England, where she is majoring in sociology.
Although she was a good student, her early aspirations never included attending a university. Instead she thought of working as a hairdresser or landing a role on EastEnders, a soap opera set in working-class London. "I would not have come forth without that push," she says.
As in the United States, raising university attendance rates among underrepresented social and minority groups in Britain is a continuing challenge. The ethnic-minority population in Britain is around 10 percent and growing quickly, but much of the discussion of diversity issues in higher education is couched in terms of social class or family income.
In the years immediately following World War II, only about 5 percent of the British population attended a university. The expansion of the higher-education system in the 1960s and the conversion of former polytechnic institutions into universities by the 1990s made the experience more broadly democratic. Now some 40 percent of high-school graduates attend a university.
Early this decade, former Prime Minister Tony Blair set a target of 50-percent participation in higher education among the college-age population. Although the current government concedes that it will not reach that goal by 2010 as planned, widening participation has remained at the center of the government's higher-education agenda. Controversial legislation was enacted in 2004 that allowed universities to nearly triple their annual undergraduate tuition, to nearly $5,000 at the current exchange rate. That prompted the creation of a government office whose responsibility was to ensure that the higher rates did not deter low-income students.

Full Story: http://chronicle.com/article/Diversity-With-a-British/48727/