Leading Article: Universities must woo working-class students

FOR DECADES, universities have paid lip-service to the need to attract more applicants from working-class backgrounds. But the proportion of students from the lower social classes has risen only marginally since the war. Any increase is due almost entirely to the success of the former polytechnics in attracting people whose parents never dreamed of higher education. Those from wealthy backgrounds are still 12 times more likely to go to university than those from poor households.

Now, a group of London academics suggest that working-class sixth-formers can be put off leading traditional universities by their elitist image. The students believe that they would feel out of place in an essentially middle-class environment. Traditional universities need to counter their snobbish image, and not just by talk but by action.

Peter Lampl, the millionaire philanthropist who is funding summer schools to encourage more working-class pupils to go to Oxbridge, is right to suggest that American universities have much to teach their British counterparts. Harvard, he points out, has an aggressive recruitment campaign to woo inner-city students: it employs 50 admissions officers, who act as evangelists for the university, compared with Oxford's two. British universities need to market themselves differently, to build links with inner-city schools, and to send out alumni to persuade working-class pupils that universities are not simply for Hooray Henries.

There is no evidence to support the London researchers' argument that the Government's introduction of loans is a further deterrent to poorer students. The old grants system did nothing to increase the proportion of the less privileged at university. Universities must look to their own strategies to transform working-class students' perceptions.