Widening Access to Higher Education

The world’s first universities in modern day Pakistan, India and Morocco were spiritual centres dedicated to the teachings of Buddhism and Islam. Only those dedicated to a monastic life were admitted. By the 12th Century, a number of European universities (such as Bologna, Oxford and Paris) operated as guilds whereby contracts between esteemed scholars and itinerant students would be established and centralised. Higher education was still only for the few as religious and academic selection criteria were definitional.

This is where a number of elitist codes were created to set those with a higher education apart from others. Many of them exist today and carry a strong sociological in-grouping: academic titles and post nominals, university insignias on ties, fraternity rings, scholars’ gowns at graduation, university clubs and societies. Indeed, in some countries, higher education has been used as a status symbol: your university degrees mark out who you are. This goes back hundreds of years: the late 16th Century so-called “University wits” were  playwrights known to have studied at Oxford or Cambridge (the most famous being Christopher Marlowe). One of them, Robert Greene, was so appalled that Shakespeare had never been to university that he essentially claimed that he could not have possibly written so many plays. 

In my 2021 book, Education and Elitism, I argue that this type of higher education snobbery is far more developed in neoliberal economies such as the UK and USA, than in social democracies such as those in Nordic countries or continental Europe. This is possibly because the rapid increase in wealth created in Britian and the United States by the industrial revolution with its dark side of slavery and colonisation, threatened the identity of established, old-fashioned aristocracy who needed to seek out ways of codifying their heritage against that of industrial magnates. It is in the 19th century that universities start to be seen in a type of hierarchy, with the oldest ones (Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, etc) at the top.

One might argue that the world is changing. After all, highly successful and venerated icons such as Oprah Winfrey and Richard Branson never went to university and some of the most successful modern entrepreneurs such as Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, did not complete their higher education (although they all attended prestigious colleges).

But these are more the exceptions than the rule: it is well established that university graduates earn considerably more than high school graduates and live healthier and longer lives. Families are prepared to go to considerable lengths to ensure entry into a prestigious university: in India, the pressure to gain entrance to a technical school is so great that student suicide rates have become a massive national problem; parents and university admissions deans were prepared to cheat in order to give access to students whose parents would pay enough to get into Yale, Stanford and many more colleges in the 2019 college admissions bribery scandal; while in the USA, college debt has reached the dizzying figure of 1.7 trillion dollars, throwing a whole generation students into doldrums out of which they will take years to escape.

At the same time, as there is more pressure to enter a small list of universities, most of them concentrated in the UK and the USA, there is not enough access to quality higher education in Africa or Latin America. Quality higher education has become globalised, but by no means more accessible: financial and meritocratic barriers fortify the Ivory Tower from the majority.

This is why the entire process of university admissions needs to be rewired along with the school pipeline leading to it. Universities have to open their doors wider, be prepared to share the invaluable gift of quality education more generously and no longer view it as a  scarce resource that some can have and others cannot (the Brazilian philosopher and educator Paolo Freire long bemoaned the worrying analogy between the schooling system and modern capitalism, complaining that we had created a type of educative “banking system”).

And this is why the University of the People is such a crucially important social project. It’s an education revolution that is offering quality higher education to young people across the globe, many of them in parts of the world where access to higher learning is extremely difficult. With over 75 000 students, the University of the People is the fastest growing university in the world. It’s movements like these that will change the face of the educational landscape and get us all closer to United Nations’ sustainable development goal 4: quality education that “enables upward socioeconomic mobility and is a key to escaping poverty.”