Segregation, 2006 style

Figures on the ethnicity of students in higher education show a disturbing racial divide among universities. Polly Curtis reports

It's a crisp, sunny day in Bristol, but with January exams looming and essay deadlines imminent there's an eerie quiet in the air. Students trundle between Bristol University's historic buildings on a carpet of red leaves, hugging their books to their chests like hot-water bottles.

More than a hundred miles away, London Metropolitan University students marching through the concrete of Whitechapel High Street in Tower Hamlets carry the same quotient of text books and bear the same essay-induced furrowed brows, but are very different people. Over 60% of London Metropolitan's students belong to ethnic minorities, plucked from local boroughs. In Bristol, less than 7% of students are from ethnic minority communities.

The differences between the two institutions and the ethnicity of their students show a stark contrast, which figures obtained exclusively by Education Guardian reveal is replicated across the university sector. Bristol has about 14,000 British undergraduates but only 15 declare themselves to be of Bangladeshi background, 20 of black Caribbean descent, and 45 of Pakistani origin. At London Metropolitan there are 1,575 students of black Caribbean heritage - that's more than in the whole of the Russell Group of elite universities.

The figures on the ethnicity of students at higher education institutions for 2003-04, provided by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (Hesa), reveal a deeply worrying racial divide among British universities. There are 53 institutions with less than 5% ethnic minority students. About 20 institutions have more than 40%. Some 50 institutions have fewer than five black Caribbean students - and there are 123 institutions in which black Caribbean students make up less than 1% of the student body. Half of the Russell Group have fewer than 30 black Caribbean students each. Meanwhile, of the 11 institutions where white students are in the minority, seven are post-1992 urban universities.

The Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce) does not measure ethnic participation at institutions because, a spokesman says, the research suggests that there isn't a problem with ethnic diversity in universities. Research published last year by the Department for Education and Skills revealed that ethnic minority students accounted for 16% of the higher education undergraduate population in 2001, compared with 9% of the UK working population.

However, the Commission for Racial Equality is launching a project this year to investigate the apparent segregation between universities. Nick Johnson, director of policy and public sector for the CRE, who is leading the project, says there are warning bells that Britain is heading in the direction of the American system. "American universities reflect American society ... where you do have completely segregated communities," he says. "Our fear would be that that is happening here as well. If we are not careful we will drift into an American-style coexistence, where inequality is entrenched in society."

The picture on British campuses is complex. Overall, ethnic minorities are over-represented compared with the general population. There are, however, clear patterns of where ethnic minority students are going to university. Tariq Modood, a sociologist at Bristol University, first studied patterns of ethnicity in higher education when figures became available in 1990. He says: "We found three patterns about under-representation of ethnic minority students in universities: inequalities between ethnic minority groups; inequalities across subjects; and inequalities across sectors between new/old and universities with a massive concentration in London, the West Midlands and greater Manchester."

Those patterns still exist, he says. The Hesa figures show that students of Chinese and Indian descent are much more prevalent in universities than white students and far exceed those of Bangladeshi origin. There are far more black African students than black Caribbean. Both trends reflect achievement rates in schools. Ethnic minority students are more likely to study business, law, social work and pharmacy than their white peers and are much less likely to be found in arts subjects such as English and history. The institution with the greatest proportion of students from ethnic minorities - 92.2% - is the University of London's school of pharmacy. At the other end, the Royal Agricultural College, Gloucestershire, is 99.8% white. At Imperial College London, a science specialist college, 13.1% of its home undergraduates are of British Indian descent, but only 0.2% are black Caribbean - 15 in total.

Why do these patterns exist? Modood says: "The single biggest factor that explains the trend is A-level score, which is tied to social class and ethnicity. Then it's geography and why people live at home: because of cost, because their parents want them to, because they want the support of their parents."

But the people who really know are the students who have made these decisions. Avita, Sadia, Ruhee and Emma are second-year students sitting in London Met's new purpose-built law school mulling over their coursework deadlines. Avita's parents are Indian, Emma is white British and the others are of Pakistani origin; they neatly reflect the diversity of London's East End, where they all grew up and still live with their parents.

I ask them why they applied to London Metropolitan. Money and geography account for most of their reasoning - they couldn't afford to move away from home. "I applied all around London but this was closer to me," says Avita.

"This university gives everyone a chance," chips in Sadia. "My friend visited Oxford and I didn't like what she had to say. This university is much more welcoming."

They have two words for Oxford and Cambridge: "posh" and "snobs" - words they also think apply to other Russell Group universities such as the London School of Economics. "We do just assume that it's going to be like that at Oxford or Cambridge," says Ruhee. "We don't actually know." Away from the others, she says: "I didn't go to university away from London because it wouldn't really work with my family ... I need the support my family give me."

Another law student, Elizabeth, who came to London from Nigeria when she was a baby, says: "When I was applying my mum said if you go to a red-brick university the majority of people will be white and middle class. But you will have to deal with that."

There is a murky question about whether an element of discrimination is at play in university admissions. Three years ago, research by Modood and Mike Shiner, of the London School of Economics, caused shock waves across the sector when they revealed an unexplained gap between white and ethnic minority students in getting a place at university, and that that gap was wider in Russell Group institutions. It seemed to suggest widespread discrimination by elite universities against students of ethnic minorities based on the information on their Ucas forms.

Hefce promised, in a response to ministers, that it would examine those figures more closely. Three years later, at the end of last term, it published an analysis of the figures. Using a different statistical method, it came up with a very different conclusion: there was no widespread discrimination, but an unexplained gap in achievement rate of 2 percentage points for Pakistani students in getting a place at university compared with white students.

It revealed shocking figures in law, where there are significant differences in the achievement rate for all ethnic minority students apart from Chinese. Black African students are 13 percentage points less likely than their white peers to get a place at university.

Modood won't comment on Hefce's reassessment of his and Shiner's findings until they have done more number-crunching. The findings for law and Pakistani students prompted Hefce to call for Ucas forms to be made anonymous, so that admissions tutors don't have any indication of a student's ethnicity.

Within the Russell Group, Bristol University has been at the forefront of widening participation, trialling the controversial scheme of plucking students with potential from state schools to be included among its high independent school intake. It has ploughed significant funds into working with local communities to raise aspirations. Angela Mill, head of student recruitment, is proud of figures that show the intake of ethnic minority students is increasing significantly every year. "Overall it's positive, but I'm very aware it hides a multitude of issues," she says.

"Yes, there are barriers to ethnic minority students studying here. There are perception issues. If you go back to London Met, you walk into a university where any questions over whether you might be accepted are dissipated. Our very strong academic reputation can also make us feel remote. You can't make yourselves be something you're not. We could put a black student in every picture in the prospectuses and wheel out our black students for open days. I'd almost be lying."

Changing its image is clearly on Bristol's agenda. But the CRE controversially suggests it should be equally on London Met's agenda. "We'd want London Met to get more white students in. We wouldn't want to see London Met getting progressively homogeneous," says Johnson. He adds that they might consider a recommendation to tie funding to ethnic minority intake, but nothing as crude as quotas or extra funding per minority student. He describes an American model in which schools get less funding for every white student they take over and above the proportion of the local white population.

Patricia Broadfoot, Bristol's pro vice-chancellor, says the university is doing everything possible to tackle its "fuddy duddy, green-welly" image, but adds: "If the funding council said either we give you more money or penalise you according to recruitment of ethnic minorities, we would say what else can we do?" Her response is likely to echo throughout the sector.

Within the widening participation agenda, has the question of ethnicity been overlooked?

John Rushforth, director for widening participation at Hefce, says it is funding a pilot project in London to attract African- Caribbean boys into science and technology subjects, and another to set up a network of widening participation practitioners who work with ethnic minority communities. "Ethnic minority representation is an issue," he admits. "It's something we don't understand as well as we'd like, and there's more work to be done ... This is not something you can fix quickly."

The CRE is going to pay close attention to the student funding system and to whether fear of debt from tuition fees and over the coming year's top-up fees is further restricting some students' decisions about where to go to university.

Modood says: "If they [ethnic minority students] would prefer not to go to a Russell Group institution, fine. But if they don't want to because they believe they wouldn't fit in, or can't afford it, that's a problem."

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