David Willetts, the Minister for Universities and Science,
reiterated last week that the Coalition is committed to widening
access to university. That was not the controversial part of his
speech, for who is against it? Almost everyone accepts that all
youngsters should have an equally good chance of going to
university, and that it would be very undesirable if
universities became the preserve of a sort of hereditary caste,
where the only children who gained admission were those whose
parents went to university. The controversy centres on how to
achieve “wider access”. One proposal, advocated by Prof Les
Ebdon, the director of the Office of Fair Access (Offa), is to
force universities to discriminate in favour of under-
represented groups. They would have to admit them regardless of
whether their A-level grades were too low. That policy will have
one inevitable corollary: universities will have to reject
applicants whose results indicate greater academic ability, on
the grounds that they don’t come from one of