Access to Higher Education- race, resources and social exclusion

Access to higher education is widely seen as a matter of importance. The form that the issue of access takes varies widely. In current debates in the US, race-sensitive admissions - "affirmative action" -are in the forefront. In South Africa, race is also paramount, but so is poverty. In some European countries, attention is focussed on access by ethnic minorities, while in others the concern is with class. In the United Kingdom there has been celebration of improved access by gender, but a growing concern about exclusion by socioeconomic group. My argument in this paper is that, although these widely varied contexts are certainly important, there are also underlying similarities. My point of departure is an aspect of William G Bowen and Derek Bok's study of race sensitive admission policies as they have been applied in selective colleges and universities in the US. Bowen and Bok argue that a major impediment to African Americans' realization of potential to succeed in higher education is a lack of "inherited intellectual capital", defined as "the educational attainment of parents and grandparents". I generalize this concept through comparing the situation in the US with the emerging debate around social exclusion in higher education in the United Kingdom, and the very difficult issues facing universities in contemporary South Africa. My key point, which is an expansion of Bowen and Bok's case for the importance of intellectual capital, is that access to higher education is greatly affected by the assets available to prospective students. I understand assets to include both wealth (property, savings and income) and the social capital that is represented by the quality of the home environment, parents' educational level and the quality of schooling. These different kinds of assets are interconnected in ways that are often specific to local circumstances. In the US, the quality of schooling is directly linked to wealth through property taxes, and property values are linked to race through long-standing ways in which property markets are managed. In South Africa, the distribution of social capital is still overwhelmingly determined by the legacy of keystone apartheid legislation such as the Group Areas Act and the Population Registration Act -aspirant university students will often come from families with little by way of savings or income, will live in one or two room houses and will attend schools with no electricity or textbooks, will sit in classes with more than 50 pupils and will be taught by barely qualified teachers.