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Understanding the Under-Attainment of Ethnic Minority Students in UK Higher Education: The Known Knowns and the Known Unknowns

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Dismantling Race in Higher Education

Abstract

In UK higher education, differences in academic attainment between White students and ethnic minority students are ubiquitous and have persisted for many years. For instance, it has been known for more than 20 years that the academic attainment of ethnic minority students at the first-degree level is poorer than that of White students. Roughly half of the disparity in attainment between White students and non-White students is attributable to differences in their entry qualifications. Nevertheless, the academic attainment of ethnic minority students remains poorer than that of White students even when the effects of their entry qualifications and other variables have been statistically controlled. An explanation put forward by Ogbu (Minority Education and Caste: The American System in Cross-Cultural Perspective, Academic Press, New York, 1978; Contemporary Education Review, 27: 168–190, 1983; Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 18: 312–334, 1987) based upon the experiences of people from different ethnic minorities in the US does not fit the UK situation. Any differences in the experience of higher education between White and ethnic minority students are not sufficiently large to explain the dramatic differences in their academic attainment. Researchers have yet to identify the factors that are responsible for the ethnic differences in attainment that remain when differences in entry qualifications have been taken into account.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In the UK , degrees that qualify students to practise medicine, dentistry or veterinary science are not classified. However, many of these students take intercalated or intermediate degrees after their second or third year of study, and these are classified in the usual manner. Richardson and Woodley (2003) found that these students were more likely to obtain good degrees and were more likely to obtain first-class honours than were students in any other subjects. Nevertheless, on the basis of a systematic review and meta-analysis of the research literature, Woolf et al. (2011) concluded that non-White students consistently performed less well than White students at all levels of UK medical education.

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Acknowledgements

This chapter includes material from the articles cited as Richardson (2012a), Richardson (2015) and Richardson et al. (2015).

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  1. Institute of Educational Technology, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

    John T. E. Richardson

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  1. John T. E. Richardson
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Correspondence to John T. E. Richardson .

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  1. University of Roehampton, London, UK

    Jason Arday

  2. Goldsmiths College, University of London, London, UK

    Heidi Safia Mirza

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Richardson, J.T.E. (2018). Understanding the Under-Attainment of Ethnic Minority Students in UK Higher Education: The Known Knowns and the Known Unknowns. In: Arday, J., Mirza, H. (eds) Dismantling Race in Higher Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60261-5_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60261-5_5

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