Minimum entry bar for English HE ‘would level down opportunity’

I'm not aware that anyone has suggested that we shouldn't stop people taking a car on the road simply because they had no access to a vehicle during driving lessons.

No one is suggesting that the right of individual Universities to chose who they want to admit should be restricted by Government. However, there is nothing to stop a Government, on behalf of taxpayers, saying they will not fund that student. Yesterday's slew of Policy Announcements clearly indicates the direction of travel in the Government's thinking on HE, which is more funding for level 4 and 5 and less for the traditional level 6 graduate degree. Universities, you have lost the battle on continuous publically funded growth. Get with the New World of HE. The wind has finally changed direction.

The opportunities for kids from "disadvantaged backgrounds" are not lost due to university admission on academic merit but in early childhood, and later in primary and secondary education already. Anyone with a DDD or equivalent should not be at a university irrespective of brackground; with or without a loan. Better invest in FE and provide decent apprenticeships for academically less-gifted kids, and provide flexible solutions for late bloomers and adult learners too. More fundamentally, the current system is unfair to these kids, selling a pipe dream of "equal opportunity" and the like, implying that it is only down to them alone whether they make it in life or not (because they can go to uni). Let us be honest first. The system is riged and stacked against these kids even before they are born, which has nothing to do with them individually of course. It is the lottery of life and whether you are born into the right family and circumstances, which mostly determin your life chances still (study after study has shown this). They start the race limping but are being told they can win the race if they work hard enough, against kids who were given a head start without a broken leg and a favourable jury. Address the structural issue of inequalty first before you turn university into a repair institution for societal pathologies or worse, a smokescreen to hide them behind the slogan of "equal opportunity", opportunties that do not really exist for most.

^Very good comment. Absolutely agree. Universities cannot fix inequalities caused earlier in life. It turns universities into a joke and those poor students into nightclub bouncers and baristas with worthless degrees. We need to move from 50 per cent of people who go to university in a cohort down to 20 per cent like other countries. The teaching quality has massively gone down across all subject areas in the last 10 years because the students otherwise simply can't keep up. It's a creeping deflation of the value of universities that has been going on for years and is about to push them over the cliff edge. The bubble will burst. Government incentives and careerist managerial-type university leadership are to blame.