Race

We consider who would be affected by each of the proposed MERs, and then assess whether the introduction of a minimum eligibility requirement is likely to achieve the government’s stated aim of ensuring that ‘students undertaking degree study have attained the baseline skills required to engage with and benefit from the course’.

Areas with larger ethnic minority populations experienced greater reductions in emergency admissions during the first ten months of the Covid-19 pandemic.

We sought to determine whether areas with higher levels of socioeconomic deprivation or larger ethnic minority populations saw larger falls in emergency and planned admissions in England.

We investigate differences in the returns to undergraduate degrees by socio-economic background and ethnicity using the Department for Education’s Longitudinal Education Outcomes (LEO) data set.

The COVID-19 crisis has brought to the fore increasing concerns about inequalities not only between different population groups – such as the gap between the rich and poor, young and old, and different ethnic groups – but also between people living in different places. Even prior to the crisis though, there was a sense that the UK is not only a highly geographically unequal country, but also an increasingly geographically unequal one.

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected some sections of the population more than others, and there are growing concerns that the UK’s minority ethnic groups are being disproportionately affected.

All ethnic minority groups in England are now, on average, more likely to go to university than their White British peers. This is the case even amongst groups who were previously under-represented in higher education, such as those of Black Caribbean ethnic origin, a relatively recent change. These differences also vary by socio-economic background, and in some cases are very large indeed. For example, Chinese pupils in the lowest socio-economic quintile group are, on average, more than 10 percentage points more likely to go to university than White British pupils in the highest socio-economic quintile group. By contrast, White British pupils in the lowest socio-economic quintile group have participation rates that are more than 10 percentage points lower than those observed for any other ethnic group. These are amongst the findings of research undertaken by IFS researchers, funded by the Departments of Education and Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), and published by BIS.