Gary Younge: universities can’t drive social mobility alone

Universities will struggle to be an engine of social mobility “if the rest of the vehicle is broken”, journalist and academic Gary Younge has warned.

Speaking on the first day of Times Higher Education’s World Academic Summit, held at New York University, Professor Younge argued that without a broader societal commitment to equity, higher education will find it difficult to reach diversity goals. 

The professor of sociology at the University of Manchester said that higher education institutions were “constantly being asked to do more with less”, referencing the long-running holding of the tuition fee cap in England at £9,250.

“There has to be a societal commitment to greater equity, diversity and so on in order for universities to occupy that role,” he said. 

Professor Younge, a former editor-at-large of The Guardian, pointed out that when he went to university from a working-class background, he got a full grant, something that was “no longer true in Britain and was never the case in many places”.

“I think it is very difficult for higher education to be an engine of social mobility if the rest of the vehicle is broken,” he added.

“If you have wage stagnation, if you have general calcification on social mobility, that puts an awful lot of pressure on institutions alone to do the heavy lifting of things that health, [the US school system] K-12, social policy and a range of other things should be doing to get you to that point.”

Professor Younge said that although in the UK the number of people going into higher education grew massively from the late 1990s, social mobility “had gone backwards”, so there should be more of a focus on how higher education works with other sectors and “how it is integrated into a broad sense of how a society or country feels where it is going”.

He said that “one of the least integrated groups in most societies is the very rich”, given they are “raised very rich, then they go to university, meet lots of rich people and come out very rich”.

Professor Younge added that the case needs to be made that social mobility has a broader benefit for everyone, not just those who are able to go to university when they would not have done before, as they add something to a group of people who are “actually very poorly connected”.

Ananya Mukherjee, the vice-chancellor of Shiv Nadar University in India, agreed that a key force that propels social mobility is getting people from different backgrounds to build bonds and become friends, and therefore universities “have an opportunity to create such connectedness and social belonging to bring students together”.

“I don’t think we do enough of that,” she said. “We do tutoring and mentoring but it remains an individually targeted approach. To make that a cohesive group approach might take us a lot further if you can do it right.”

Speaking on the same panel discussion, Melissa Nobles, chancellor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said a major issue was that there were many more qualified applicants than there are places, adding: “There is a big tension between capacity and scale.”

She said ensuring students complete their studies was as important as admitting them in the first place, but they should still be given the message that it is going to be difficult. “If you are feeling that, you should be. If you are not, be worried,” she said. 

But Professor Nobles added that students should be told that it was not their fault for finding it hard and their well-being should be considered, marking a break from the old MIT culture whereby students in their first year were told to look to their right and left and “one of you will not graduate”.

tom.williams@timeshighereducation.com